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Evan Thompson, Gananath Obeyesekere, Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker, Karin Meyers, rebirth, Śāntideva
Karin Meyers’s work on the “damned topics” of Buddhist philosophy is most powerful on the topic of rebirth. Because that’s the place where there’s actually some reasonably powerful evidence for the “damned topic”. Where I think she goes too far with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic, which is “Against naturalizing Buddhism”. I think we need to naturalize – that is, to put in non-supernatural terms – one of Buddhism’s most important ideas, namely karma. And I think we need to do that even if the evidence convinces us that rebirth is real.
Let’s talk about that evidence. The University of Virginia medical school’s Division of Perceptual Studies, founded by Ian Stevenson and continued by Jim Tucker, has studied over 2500 cases where children claim to have memories which seem to follow the lives of documented people who lived before them. These cases are at least, as Stevenson noted in his first book title, suggestive that some elements of consciousness, at least memory, can transfer from one human life to another.
Now I haven’t had the time to examine Stevenson’s cases in meaningful detail. Evan Thompson – whose research to date has focused far more than mine on the nature of consciousness – has, and so I have tended to trust him when (in my debate with him) he quoted his Waking, Dreaming, Being on the topic:
Although Stevenson’s presentation of these cases often makes for compelling reading, all the evidence is anecdotal and derived from interviews where there is a large amount of room for false memory and after-the-fact reconstruction. The interviews weren’t conducted directly with the children when they first reported the memory, but only some time later, so there had been plenty of time for the child to assimilate information gotten from family members and to repeat it as if it were his or her experience. And sometimes the children weren’t interviewed at all; only family members were. Finally, it’s hard to know how to assess whether a memory report about a past life exceeds chance probability, and critics have pointed to a number of serious flaws in Stevenson’s statistical reasoning. For these reasons, I don’t find Stevenson’s evidence convincing, though it does seem possible in principle to investigate claims of past life memories using scientific methods (p. 290, with endnote references deleted).
Where Meyers’s “Against” piece is particularly interesting is noting how Tucker’s more recent research (discussed in his article in the volume Consciousness Unbound, published in 2021 after my exchange with Thompson above) attempts to respond to these criticisms. Citing that work, Meyers notes:
As for the charge that the cases are anecdotal, to be sure, the information is derived from interviews, but to deny this as a valid means of investigation is in effect to deny the possibility of investigating the phenomenon at all (as well as many other more conventional phenomena). As early as 2000, efforts were made to code the data and rate the strength of cases (precisely to rule out conventional explanations). As of 2021, 2200 of the cases have been digitized and coded according to 200 variables. In respect to the charge that there is a “large amount of room for false memory and after-the-fact reconstruction,” reinvestigation of cases demonstrated that they grew weaker instead of stronger over time, cases with no written records had the same percentage of accurate statements as those with contemporaneous notes on the child’s statements (though the latter had more statements), and the initial positive attitude of the parents about the case did not correlate to the strength of the case—all of which would be contrary to expectation if the strength of the cases was due to false memory and after the fact reconstruction. Since the advent of the internet and a higher profile for the research, it is easier to collect statements from the children before the previous personality has been identified, and to do controlled tests with photographs once the personality has been identified.
This response was enough to give me pause. So too a point Meyers mentioned to me in person: that many of these cases recall relatively mundane lives, of farmers and the like – as opposed to the far less believable accounts found in adult past-life regression therapies where people recall being something more glamorous like a war hero or a princess. I don’t think this is nearly enough to say with any confidence that rebirth is what’s causing these cases – we still don’t have a mechanism suggested of how that could happen, and how it would square with other evidence that has so far suggested consciousness is always tied to a single body. But I’m also finding it a lot harder to rule rebirth out as an explanation. Colour me at least somewhat agnostic – not a principled agnosticism, just not knowing what exactly to do with the evidence. (I looked online expecting to find refutations of these cases, and found a lot more ignoring of them than refuting.)
But let’s now get to the takeaway that I find most important and interesting in all of this – one entirely compatible with this agnosticism. I have worked a lot on developing a conception of karma that is naturalized. That is: karma – the idea that good actions lead us to better lives – in traditional Buddhist texts depends on rebirth, and perhaps other even more supernatural forms of causality. (This is not what the Sanskrit word “karma(n)” means, but it is what “karma” means when the term is used in English.)The concept of karma is at the heart of the thought of Śāntideva, the Buddhist thinker I’ve learned the most from; it’s very hard to think with Śāntideva and not have some conception of karma. And so I’ve spent a great deal of time on this blog over the years articulating a concept of karma that is understandable in natural-scientific terms, as eudaimonistic and psychological: briefly, that our morally good actions create good psychological habits that generally lead to happier and more satisfying lives than we would otherwise have. (I’ll soon be publishing a refereed chapter on this point in an edited volume on race, caste, and karma.)
And the key point I want to stress is: to think as Buddhists today we would still need a conception of karma that is naturalized in something like this way, even if Stevenson’s and Tucker’s research did prove the existence of rebirth!
Why? In the words of the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, traditional Buddhist rebirth is “ethicized”: a morally good past life leads to a materially better future life, and vice versa for bad. And crucially, the rebirth suggested by Stevenson’s and Tucker’s research is not ethicized! Nothing in their cases suggests that people’s moral conduct in previous lives had anything to do with the material conditions of their current ones. Indeed, Meyers told me, Tucker explicitly denies that there is any such ethicized element in these cases.
That is to say that the kind of rebirth suggested by Stevenson’s and Tucker’s research does not involve karma. Even if they’re right that this shows rebirth is really happening, that does not get you at all closer to the motivating power of karma in classical Buddhist texts – where you have reason to do good actions because they will ripen as better circumstances in a previous life.
And so, even if Stevenson and Tucker are right and rebirth happens the way they suggest it does, you still need a naturalized concept of karma to make an ethics like Śāntideva’s work. Our good and bad actions don’t give us better or worse circumstances in future lives; rather, what they do is form good and bad habits that make our lives better or worse in this one.
Indeed, I note Meyers claims that Stevenson’s and Tucker’s evidence is “strongly suggestive of some kind of transfer of memory and sometimes also phobias, preferences, interests, skills, and body morphology from the deceased to the child”. If psychological traits like “phobias, preferences, interests” do transfer from deceased to child, then that is one way karma could carry on across lives and make future lives better: that is, the good psychological habits that make our lives karmically better in this life, in a naturalized way, might in fact be the one way that karma does work across life to life and birth to birth. Those Aristotelian habits would be exactly what carries over.
And of course, in much Buddhist discourse it is not “us” that is reborn, but a new person who inherits our karma. I have never understood why improving the karma of someone who is not us, is not yet born, and we do not know ought to be especially motivating for us. We will of course have an attitude of good will to this furture person and will not want to do anything to harm them, but I don’t find this way of thinking especially motivating. This extra motivation only works if one thinks that it is oneself that wil be reborn and attain the karmic benefits—a kind of selfish motivation that goes against the whole intent of the Buddhist project.
So this one I actually think there’s a decent answer for. That is: no, the person in the next life isn’t really us – but neither is the person in the next moment. The person in my next life is as continuous with me as my teenage self is with my older self. So that insofar as I’m motivated by self-interested considerations at all (which do seem relevant to at least Theravāda, where you can do a lot more to liberate the particular set of causal flows associated with you than the sets associated with others), they can be for a future life as much as for the future of this life, even though neither one is really me.
I am very highly motivated to make things better for myself in my advancing old age. I have made plans for my future financial security, take medications to prevent deterioration due to illness, pay for long-term care insurance should I need it in the future, and so on. I do not feel the same kind of motivation to care for my future self after rebirth, however. I understand the logic of your argument, but it doesn’t compel or sustain the same degree of intensity of motivation. Also, psychologically, I can identify with my future self in this life as still “me,” however different that future self may be from my current self. I suppose traditional Buddhist philosophy would view my identification with that future older me as a philosophical error—but if it is an error (and their are reasons why I think it isn’t) it is a very persistent illusion.
Regarding intensity of motivation, I suspect that’s different in societies where karmic rebirth is taken for granted. If everyone around you is assuming that idea, it probably comes as naturally as not walking under a ladder.
“We still don’t have a mechanism suggested of how that could happen.” For me, that’s the real kicker, the deal-breaker, right there. Without a mechanism, the transfer of psychological traits from a deceased person to a newborn is magical thinking.
The subtitle of that cited book, Consciousness Unbound, gave me a hearty chuckle: “Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism”. The real liberation, in my view, goes in the other direction: liberating mind from the tyranny of magical thinking (at least in the realm of serious decision-making; in the realm of fantasy fiction and play, think magically all you want)!
To me the absence of a posited mechanism just means “unexplained” – and contrary to some of the woojier types, “unexplained’ doesn’t mean “incapable of explanation”, only “we haven’t found one yet”. Until some plausible mechanism is found, it’s reasonable to imagine that the best explanation is an explaining-away – and if I had to come down on one side or another of this, I’d probably still be on the explaining-away side. I’m just less confident of that than I used to be.
“Materialism” and “magical thinking” are both terms that need careful parsing. They both often turn out to be synonyms for “all that stuff I don’t like”.
I’m not familiar with reincarnation research, but the little I’ve read by clicking through to the sources linked in this post suggests that some of the people doing the research do have an ultimate explanation for their data: their explanation is that reality (i.e. the part of reality relevant to the question of reincarnation) doesn’t work the way scientific knowledge says that reality works.
Scientific knowledge says, basically, that individual memories (or more precisely their components) are stored by a physical mechanism, and when the physical mechanism that stores memories is destroyed, the memories are destroyed. Tucker, for example, denied that physical mechanism in a 2010 quote from the NY Times in the Wikipedia article on him, and he said instead that he is “convinced” that mind is “its own entity” separate from any physical mechanism. Tucker had an ultimate explanation in which he strongly believed, and it was that there is no physical mechanism (except when he contradicted this claim elsewhere and instead suggested an implausible physical mechanism?).
You said in the post, “I looked online expecting to find refutations of these cases, and found a lot more ignoring of them than refuting.” But remember economy of research, a term from C.S. Peirce elaborated on by Nicholas Rescher and others: given our severely finite intellectual resources in the face of everything that could be investigated, our research has to be cost-effective. How could you convince scientists that it is a good use of resources to spend those resources refuting the data of someone who rejects well-corroborated scientific fundamentals? Given Tucker’s position that mind is separate from known physical mechanisms or from any physical mechanism, I would expect him to be ignored by scientists simply because of economy of research.
Believing that mind is separate from any physical mechanism may not be magical thinking, but it is unscientific thinking. By “unscientific thinking”, I don’t mean “all that stuff I don’t like”, but I think that research motivated by that belief is not high priority due to economy of research.
Well, a significant part of the question is what counts as scientific fundamentals. After all, what we’ve thought of as fundamentals has changed a lot over time. Scientific methods – including openness to anomalies – are far more genuinely fundamental to science than any widely established result.
We have not, so far, seen any demonstrated examples of non-physical causality. Tucker’s research appears to suggest something to the contrary – that some non-physical causal mechanism might exist. Because such a result would be so far away from established scientific paradigms, I would expect that in the end further research would show such a claim false. But on the off chance that that research does leave the result intact, that there’s no way it can successfully be explained away – requiring the positing of a non-physical causal mechanism – the payoff of such research is huge. I don’t think Stevenson’s early evidence was necessarily enough to make such research worthwhile, but Tucker’s more recent results indicate to me that it is.
Paul Hoyningen-Huene, in his book Systematicity: The Nature of Science (Oxford UP, 2013) characterized the fundamental nature of science in a way that I’ve found helpful and that integrates both methods and results, so I don’t think that methods are more fundamental than results; both are part of the characterization of science. Hoyningen-Huene said that science has a higher degree of systematicity in various dimensions (and systematicity is characterized differently in each dimension), namely in: descriptions, explanations, predictions, the defense of knowledge claims, critical discourse, epistemic connectedness, an ideal of completeness, knowledge generation, and the representation of knowledge.
Reincarnation research, it seems to me from my cursory examination, seems to fall short on several of these dimensions. Therefore it would be low on the scale of scientific systematicity instead of completely deficient as the term “unscientific thinking” could suggest. By the way, of course, “religion” need not be an unscientific domain; work in religious studies could be high in scientific systematicity.
I can see how the payoff from parapsychology could be huge, but it’s not part of mainstream science (which is high in systematicity in all dimensions) because the barriers to success are so much more huge than the potential payoff, so most scientists would still judge parapsychology research to be uneconomical!