Wonderful interview by Ajahns Kovilo and Nisabho with this important contemporary intellectual on the importance of meditation, his practice, the Buddhist teachings, AI, and ways of mindfully meeting other challenges of modernity.
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Was glad to see this interview! Thanks for everyone who made it happen. 
Especially I found his advice to Buddhists to be pretty good… But main thing that caught my attention were his views on rebirth. I think Ven. @nisabhobhikkhu was asking something like ”how secularism can blind people to evidence of rebirth?” But Yuval Noah Harari didn’t really explore said theme but instead turned it around and kind of gave his own answer on why rebirth isn’t accepted in the scientific community. Which I found a bit unfortunate.
His main point was that the evidence for rebirth has to be more strong, mainly because it is a phenomena that people really want to believe. But isn’t this also the case with the current paradigm of ”you only live once”. Many people really want to believe it! I mean, as a Buddhist I would call the YOLO-view the most wishful of them all, I don’t think we are getting out of this mess that easily… Not to mention the pragmatic reasons to favor said view, like career prospects, esteem, scientific credentials etc. So to avoid double standards shouldn’t we also demand as strong evidence for the annihilationist view of one life, a view that most scientists are heavily biased to favor?
It would have made more sense for him to say that we need more evidence for rebirth because, well, that’s just how paradigm shift works. The anomalies need to pile up for the scientific revolution to happen and the scientists need time to figure out how to apply the new understanding. But instead he framed the assumption of rebirth as kind of dangerous wishful thinking that you have to be very careful of while not really applying the same carefulness to the annihilationist view held by the mainstream science.
He also says that science in its present form doesn’t know any mechanism that would allow rebirth to happen (though he also said it doesn’t negate it either). But do we even need to understand the full forces at work behind it? Why can’t we just look at the available evidence, which is already plenty and start from there?
Harari also adds that for us (or ”the science”) not understanding the mechanism of rebirth is basically linked to us not understanding consciousness. This is just my personal musing, but it seems to me that Harari wants the conventional science to come up with the perfect theory to explain rebirth before it can be accepted. But what if the mainstream science doesn’t currently have the right tools to take up the task of consciousness? What if (mostly anecdotal) research of rebirth, near death experiences, etc. will actually be the missing tool in the toolbox that will help understand what consciousness is all about? Why not use it more boldly and see what happens? To be fair, Harari doesn’t completely dismiss the research on rebirth, but I think he underestimates its potential to offer new understanding.
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Yes. His advice kinda holds here: dismissing the evidence is the easy thing. Taking it seriously is hard.
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