Perhaps the information is transmitted from life to life. we do not know the potential of consciousness to record information.
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Yes indeed. Tri-temporal realism was an attempt to answer how kamma has effects across lives. Those who rejected it developed the Bhavaṅga theory instead, or one’s similar to it.
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I have seen an interpretation that all former lives, i.e. past experienced rupa’s, past vedana’s, past sankhara’s, past vinnana’s and past sanna’s, any we ever experienced, are all together part of rupa-khandha, vedana khandha etc. So rupa khandha’s is not only rupa in this life but also any former rupa.
Any feeling we ever had in this life or former lives belongs to vedana khandha etc. Any we wil experience in the future will become part of vedana-khandha. Etc.
Khandha is in this view not limited to this present life.
So, this information of the past might be with us as a heap of information in the khandha’s.
Does that make sense?
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Personally, I use 4 terabyte USB external hard drive.
I use TimeShift to back up my /home directory and system files
If my system dies, I reinstall ( rebirth ), copy over my settings (karma) from TimeShift, and have my data ( past life memories ) accessible once I learn how to mount the external hard drive ( bhavanna ).
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You keep insisting on the idea that such permanent storage is permanent. I repeat here that such storage CAN NOT be permanent.
Look at your equation, ∞ + 1 = ∞. Let me hear your answer to the following questions:
- “+1” means “adding new data”, correct?
- Is that “+1” a conditional change?
- Due to ∞ + 1 = ∞, the ∞ can ONLY keep its identity BECAUSE it keeps doing “+1”, correct?
- Will the ∞ BE EVER ABLE STOP doing “+1”?
4.1. If No, that “+1” is the recipe for suffering because of conditional change.
4.2. If Yes, what happens when the ∞ STOP doing “+1”? It will transform into something else, correct?
4.2.1. If it transform into something else, that means it CAN NOT be permanent.
4.2.2. If it does not transform into something else, you have contradiction with your own equation. - If you say that “both are undefined” then we should not discuss on something not defined, correct? That means your question from the 1st post in NOT valid.
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This is going toooooo far… 
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Akashic records - Wikipedia
You might be looking for this concept? I don’t think it’s needed for Buddhism, but at least I save you the trouble of reinventing it.
Bhante @sujato idea of reconstructing the past from the present is similar to the hologram storage technology.
Where given a small part of the hologram, we can mathematically reconstruct the whole of it, practically, the quality drops.
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no it’s not, the state is still the same
no, even if it ceases adding new data it still is ∞, there’s no change there
it doesn’t transform into something else, even a Buddha still have infinite past lives, just because you stop it doesn’t mean it changes from infinite to finite
undefined here means limitless, you can’t measure it, it doesn’t mean it has no real existence
@Alaray This is wrong answer from you. “+1” is adding new data, this process is conditional. I am referring to the “+1” here.
@Alaray Again, this is wrong answer from you. Look again at the definition: “permanent storage that keeps adding new data”. If it does not add new data, it is now become as “permanent storage that does NOT adding any new data”. See any change? Change = NOT permanence.
I said it “transform into something else”, I did not say that “it changes from infinite to finite”. As long as it changes/transforms, that means it is NOT permanent.
@Alaray You used the word “undefined” with ambiguous/wrong meaning. When I say “undefined”, I mean “don’t/can’t define”. So, anything you fantasy/imagine about an “undefined” thing is just meaningless.
I repeat here, such a “permanent storage” that you fantasized/imagined with the characteristics of “keep adding new data” is purely out of wild imagination. IT DOES NOT EXIST.
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do you mean the data exists without storage ?
You can imagine/fantasize all you can about a “storage that store past lives data” but you will have a VERY HARD time to prove/convince any reasonable person that such a storage is “permanent”.
According to the Buddha’s teaching, impermanent is suffering (dukkha). Correct action is to drop such impermanent thing down.
Blockquote
This explanation only addresses mental continuity in terms of dispositions and does nothing to explain how the Buddha could recall specific details from 100,000 lives ago or many aeons ago.
The way I speculate sympathetically to understand stuff like past lives, dieties, etc in suttas is that if samadhi produces a strength of mind that see’s beyond the five skhandas, most of our imagination is constituted of the five skandhas …samadhi is “beyond imagination”… considering our imagination in some dream, we may have a particular perception"parrot", “tree” etc This is within the five skandhas and our sense of self. Then one step further our sense of self and object is constituted in the five skhandhas “I am seeing a tree” the sense of observer. Maybe our sense of this arises and passes as well just like trees and so on.
Maybe in that process the mind experiences arising and passing of new configurations of five skhandas. “Past life experiences”
No need for a substance. Just a process.
Our normal way of looking at “past lives” would be in a self and object kinda way, “I experienced this” a self in a world, where this self moves through the world in some form of identity that persists over time (hence the need for you to ask the question "what is the object or substance this identity persists)
But this sort of imagining is within the five skhandhas that constitute a sense of self and identity and world.
There may be experiences of such feelings of identity and persistence through the world. We are used to having “one” but maybe there’s samadhi experiences where we either see the absence of that or they change, or there are multiple such experiences occurring. This is how I imagine the siddhis that are said to come with some of the enlightenments of the buddha’s disciples in the suttas
(I’m not that familiar with all the suttas hoping to read through over the next few years ) All the best
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I’ve already replied, sorry for spamming this answer, but another analogy just occurred to me!
Think of how we’re affected by the Roman Empire; how what was then conditions what is now. Part of that is rather diffuse and abstract, rather like “dispositions”; the nature of our legislative bodies, for example; or how western scholars tend to look at and frame decline of empires. Part of it is also very concrete, rather like “specific memories”: a farmer trips over a Roman statue in their field.
In neither of these cases, however, does the question “where are these things stored” make sense. A “storehouse” is a specific kind of concept invented by humans for our purposes; it’s not how nature works. Things aren’t “stored” in a place. There are conditions, and those conditions affect other conditions, and they change in different ways at different rates.
None of these things are permanent, and indeed it is the perception of permanence that distorts reality. The Roman statue in the field is, in all likelihood, white marble. And it would fit in with the ideal of “classical” beauty as pristine and pure white. Except, or course, that the Romans painted their statues, and they saw them as bright and colorful. What appears to have been permanent has, in fact, changed, and our perception of the past along with it.
Memory is the same. Whether it’s a “disposition” or a “memory” is not a fundamental difference; these things blur into and effect each other. In reality there’s only the conditions, and ideas like “memory” are just concepts we use to try to understand them.
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If you want to get really interesting using history as an analogy, look at the constellations. They’re found in 17,500 year old cave paintings in Europe and we still use them! Imagine the passive cultural depth used to preserve this information for nearly 17 millennium and so we don’t even know who invented the patterns we use today. These ancient observations of the stars have inspired to everything from art, religions, time, navigation techniques, and sciences.
So I don’t think it’s too crazy to imagine that past imprints on our consciouses can be traced back for who knows how long based on leap frogging from one life to the next back and back.
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…This 3 billion lettered code is copied to new cells before a cell dies, So the information is not lost after the death of the cell. These all unbelievably complex functions are performed by the DNA code at extremely high speed without you even noticing…
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That video is more religious apologetics than science
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Hi all, what a great platform this is, thank you to those responsible.
A few points:
First, I understood the buddha refused to answer the question of infinite versus finite and stated that views that endorsed infinity and views that endorsed finitude where both grounded on dispositions and conditioned by craving, so are wrong views. So to state that the Buddha could recall “infinite” past lives is false from the start (and by start i mean DN 1). I think the Buddha said that these lives where “without discernible beginning” which is very different from saying “infinite”
Second, you can’t “add 1” to infinity, infinity is not a number, it is a property of a collection of numbers, for example N the collection of ALL the natural numbers, if you already have all of them you cannot add one more, it is simply incoherent.
Third, while I know that the recollection of past lives is mentioned all over the Suttas I also recall several suttas that seem to criticize the whole idea of being able to know these things, one talks about the philosophers of the afterlife being like people going to a market they have never been to before and hoping that they can buy the item they want, another talks about Brahmins never actually directly experiencing Brahma and contrasting this to meditative attainments that the Buddha says we can experience here and now.
Fourth, It seems to me that the question has underlying metaphysical assumtions that are not really warranted, why does there need to be a “storage” of things, for example, maybe the liberated mind simply travels backwards in time, so the Buddha “recalled” the past lives by seeing them when they actually happened, not in some recording, or perhaps the past lives can be played back by executing a formula that has time symmetry and present data, the way you can find the positions of planets a thousand years ago not by remembering where they were but simply by taking where they are now and computing the celestial mechanics.
Love.
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Yes, but DNA is very interesting. It can carry data.
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According to Theosophy, it’s the Akashic records. 
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I know it’s already solved but because the thing/stream that can recall past lives dies out when one attains Nibbana, isn’t it inherently impermanent, it just “lasts” a little longer. Like, a process/energy that can be dipped into to recall past lives if the conditions are right and is fueled by desire/craving to come to rebirth, but it dies out–ergo, impermanent.
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