Their setup was a typical waterproof setup, placing signs in emergency rooms toptown on cabinets/lockers, trying to find out if there is something about the idea of "awareness" when people are on the stairs to death.
Unfortunately, so far there werent any results.
Another thing I read some time ago: Near Death Experiences seem to vary by culture - if this is true, then there is nothing "universal" down there, instead it proves that we are just concious animals for the short time we are living. If there is some type of "general/universal transcendency" to a "universal god", then why would esp. this "experience" differ by culture here on earth?
So, my personal assumptions is more and more that the universe itself with its basic components is just some type of simulation and we are not aware of it since its beyond our limits of perception and meassurability. And we humans are just one of many species which came into existence by some coincidence/accident.
Interesting but highly dubious, and the conclusions are way too premature. Even if we assume the children truly have memories of people that lived in the past, that does not necessarily mean they reincarnated. It may be a hash-collision-esque process where two distinct entities accidentally share some information they're not supposed to, rather than past entities being continued. It also doesn't serve as evidence that we live in a simulation as someone else suggested in their comment because hash-collision-like phenomena may exist in base reality too.
The trouble with this is that reincarnation is fully real BUT, the same ancient texts that detail it also state that you do not remember anything of your past lives. So this is a scam. No one ever claims to remember being an animal in a past life either. Ancient Indian culture has long been hijacked in the west for scams and other nonsense. Yoga. Meditation. Vegetarianism. Cults. It’s a shame.
> * I didn't come to this research with any sort of belief in reincarnation or anything. I was just curious. My co-authors and I do our best to be agnostic and faithful to data and what we observe...*
This is exactly the problem. You cannot do science without an hypothesis to test. “Just looking at the data” will give you shitloads of false results because - by chance - data almost never looks random. You’ll always find patterns that you can interpret. Just close your eyes and look at the patterns in the darkness. Or watch the clouds on a sunny day. Or star at your woodchip wallpapers. THERE ARE FACES!!!
Sounds fraudulent to me. How would a three year old know the words "World War II"? IDK, maybe his or her parents taught him or her about it, but that seems unlikely. I am not coming at this from a dogmatic atheist standpoint; I actually kind of suspect reincarnation is real, but this sounds made up.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I have had two experiences with my children that have deeply undermined my confidence in the simple physics interpretation of reality.
First one was when my 3 year old started crying inconsolably, asking for his mother (no, his real mother, not mommy) and his sister (he had no siblings at the time) this went on for a period of weeks where he was profoundly affected and morose. I eventually stopped trying to tell him he was mistaken and instead decided to just believe him, and deal with it as if it were true, and was able to talk him through acceptance and resolution.
As if that didn’t leave me sufficiently shook, my second child, when he was just starting to talk in simple words- no sentences- started talking in his sleep about things he presumably knew nothing about, with words he had presumably not heard before. When he started, I thought someone was in the kids room, because even his tone was mature. He talked mostly about mundane matters of contemporary life. This happened 4 times that I noticed over a span of about two months. His daytime speech progressed otherwise normally.
Probably unrelated, but he surprised us in his early third year by being able to read, fluently, basically anything at about a third grade level. We had not started to teach him to read, but it’s possible he could have picked up knowledge from us teaching his older brother. Still, it was very odd to have him announce incredulously “dad, I can read!” when I asked him how he knew the name “Nintendo advanced reviews” of a magazine he wanted me to buy for him.
I don’t have a clue what any of this means, but I also can’t credibly explain it.
Yes, shockingly. I assumed he was just recognising it from somewhere so I started pointing at different words on the magazine rack and he read -every single thing- I pointed at, sounding out words he did not know. We taught him none of this, although, as I said, he was in the room when we were teaching his brother.
I was pretty shook by the whole thing. I mean, he’s a smart kid, but we never noticed anything else that was ridiculously skilled like that. I mean, he did well in school and whatnot but not like some kind of prodigy or something.
There is a large research project called AWARE 1 and AWARE 2:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37423492/
Their setup was a typical waterproof setup, placing signs in emergency rooms toptown on cabinets/lockers, trying to find out if there is something about the idea of "awareness" when people are on the stairs to death.
Unfortunately, so far there werent any results.
Another thing I read some time ago: Near Death Experiences seem to vary by culture - if this is true, then there is nothing "universal" down there, instead it proves that we are just concious animals for the short time we are living. If there is some type of "general/universal transcendency" to a "universal god", then why would esp. this "experience" differ by culture here on earth?
So, my personal assumptions is more and more that the universe itself with its basic components is just some type of simulation and we are not aware of it since its beyond our limits of perception and meassurability. And we humans are just one of many species which came into existence by some coincidence/accident.
Interesting but highly dubious, and the conclusions are way too premature. Even if we assume the children truly have memories of people that lived in the past, that does not necessarily mean they reincarnated. It may be a hash-collision-esque process where two distinct entities accidentally share some information they're not supposed to, rather than past entities being continued. It also doesn't serve as evidence that we live in a simulation as someone else suggested in their comment because hash-collision-like phenomena may exist in base reality too.
The trouble with this is that reincarnation is fully real BUT, the same ancient texts that detail it also state that you do not remember anything of your past lives. So this is a scam. No one ever claims to remember being an animal in a past life either. Ancient Indian culture has long been hijacked in the west for scams and other nonsense. Yoga. Meditation. Vegetarianism. Cults. It’s a shame.
Dripping with irony.
How simple life must be when you can fully outsource all your critical thinking.
> * I didn't come to this research with any sort of belief in reincarnation or anything. I was just curious. My co-authors and I do our best to be agnostic and faithful to data and what we observe...*
This is exactly the problem. You cannot do science without an hypothesis to test. “Just looking at the data” will give you shitloads of false results because - by chance - data almost never looks random. You’ll always find patterns that you can interpret. Just close your eyes and look at the patterns in the darkness. Or watch the clouds on a sunny day. Or star at your woodchip wallpapers. THERE ARE FACES!!!
It appears that God uses a Malloc that doesn’t zero its data.
Perhaps we are in a simulation after all.
Sounds fraudulent to me. How would a three year old know the words "World War II"? IDK, maybe his or her parents taught him or her about it, but that seems unlikely. I am not coming at this from a dogmatic atheist standpoint; I actually kind of suspect reincarnation is real, but this sounds made up.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I have had two experiences with my children that have deeply undermined my confidence in the simple physics interpretation of reality.
First one was when my 3 year old started crying inconsolably, asking for his mother (no, his real mother, not mommy) and his sister (he had no siblings at the time) this went on for a period of weeks where he was profoundly affected and morose. I eventually stopped trying to tell him he was mistaken and instead decided to just believe him, and deal with it as if it were true, and was able to talk him through acceptance and resolution.
As if that didn’t leave me sufficiently shook, my second child, when he was just starting to talk in simple words- no sentences- started talking in his sleep about things he presumably knew nothing about, with words he had presumably not heard before. When he started, I thought someone was in the kids room, because even his tone was mature. He talked mostly about mundane matters of contemporary life. This happened 4 times that I noticed over a span of about two months. His daytime speech progressed otherwise normally.
Probably unrelated, but he surprised us in his early third year by being able to read, fluently, basically anything at about a third grade level. We had not started to teach him to read, but it’s possible he could have picked up knowledge from us teaching his older brother. Still, it was very odd to have him announce incredulously “dad, I can read!” when I asked him how he knew the name “Nintendo advanced reviews” of a magazine he wanted me to buy for him.
I don’t have a clue what any of this means, but I also can’t credibly explain it.
You’re telling me your 3 year old could read the words “Nintendo advanced reviews”?
Yes, shockingly. I assumed he was just recognising it from somewhere so I started pointing at different words on the magazine rack and he read -every single thing- I pointed at, sounding out words he did not know. We taught him none of this, although, as I said, he was in the room when we were teaching his brother.
I was pretty shook by the whole thing. I mean, he’s a smart kid, but we never noticed anything else that was ridiculously skilled like that. I mean, he did well in school and whatnot but not like some kind of prodigy or something.