Rebirth and Reason

Philosophers and thinkers feel the question what happen to us after death as the most difficult one to answer. Unfortunately, this question will never have a definite answer. The reason is no one returns from dead — if he comes back he is not — and tells us what happened.

Religions differ on this. In Western and Mid Easten like Christianity and Muslim, god will take over us.

In Asian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, it is the rebirth. 

It is unusual that we hear most of the stories of reincarnation from countries around Asia where people believe in reincarnation. This means belief is also a reason for these incidents. However, it looks strange that none of these stories refer to the persons who died in far-distant places like different countries. Most of the cases occur within a region. Sometimes it is the next or the same village or town. But they never talk about aliens from other planets or distant universes. Maybe we on earth live alone in the universe—a contradiction by itself.

Previous life stories we hear are mostly by children. Other than results of psychologists interviewing mainly children so far no scientific evidence proves rebirth or reincarnation.

In Deductive reasoning from a general statement, you reach a logical certain conclusion. In Inductive reasoning, we evaluate general propositions that are derived from specific examples. The conclusion, rebirth is true, by results of experiments doctors and psychologists did using a person who talks about his past life is not deductive reasoning. If this happens to one person, we cannot assume it for everyone. Even if we come to the conclusion most probably rebirth is a fact by inductive reasoning, we can’t assume rebirth is universal. The evidence of few persons talking about life before does not conclusively prove rebirth. Out of 6 billion-plus population only a couple of hundreds have talked about their past lives.

There are instances where some people could relate incidents with precise details how they died in the life before. These descriptions could be verified in some cases. I find it interesting that in most of these cases, the person has met with a violent death, mostly by accidents. These phenomena can be explained as some form of information emitted in the forceful incident mapped to another person. There may be hither to unknown phenomena that can transfer information from one person to another. This cannot be termed as rebirth or reincarnation.

You cannot attribute diversification of same family siblings to rebirth. Theories regarding genetics explains this and is evident in all advanced life forms.

Presume rebirth is true. Then the knowledge gained before life should be present in after life.

It follows knowledge will keep on accumulating in each life. A small child should have a lot of knowledge that he gained in the previous lives. This does not happen. Small children need to learn everything from scratch.

Rebirth wastes enormous amount of resources. Apart from very little, you can remember next life erase everything learned previously. So a person will have to learn again and again the same thing. In nature, everything has a meaning and meaningless things don't happen.

A being consists of cells in general. Death occurs when all cell-structures brakes up. These single cells can be termed as lower organisms. Higher organism can be defined as a collection of them with a central processor —the brain itself being such a collection. So colonies of lower organisms that act logically can be termed as a higher organism.

Very interesting conclusions emerge if rebirth is true to lower organisms as well as higher organisms.

If mind is essential for rebirth, then rebirth does not apply to lower organisms that do not have a mind. Only higher life that has high brain power is reborn. I don’t think even advocates of rebirth believe that rebirth applies to micro organisms.

If we try to define rebirth as each single cell having a one to one map of the previous being we run into the difficulty because within the lifetime of a being the cells itself dies and fresh ones are born. Further to that the total number of cells of a being will vary from time to time. When a person becomes fat, he will have more cells. When a child grows to an adult, the number of cells will increase. Because of these reasons one to one map of cells in rebirth cannot be accepted. So when a being is reborn, it should refer to the higher organisms with the central processor.

Current scientific evidence leads more and more towards the argument that mind, soul and brain are identical. If soul is not a separate entity from the brain rebirth will be copying of the brain to the new being. In rebirth what remains after death is the data of the central processor. We can say the central processor of the new being has the information of the old being.

Karma could be explained as a state of mind. Evolution programs genetically all beings living within a society to be good. Goodness is a mandatory quality of a society. We are genetically programmed to feel bad when we do terrible things. This is karma. These feelings will be embedded in our brain. It undertakes to refine us.

If deeds in this life reflect in the next how do you keep all the data of good and bad? The answer seems soul. In rebirth if we are to carry these feeling to the next life, we will need an enormous amount of data — person's brain will have a large amount of data stored in it —to be kept and passed to the other person.

Then we will need a mechanism to keep this data and transmit it. Someone needs to manage this data.

In my opinion, the concept of rebirth is not necessary for teachings of Buddha. Attaining nibbana in this life is Buddhism, this is the ultimate goal. The ones who pursue it are the Buddhists. Therefore, rebirth is irrelevant for Buddhism.