I think if reincarnation was/is real it’d probably work regardless of time and creatures would be locked into their own categories. So like, humans could only reincarnate as other humans, for example.
When I say it’d work regardless of time, I mean like, if you died you could reincarnate as someone in the future or the past.
Kinda a silly discussion topic, but I thought it might be kinda interesting.
I don’t believe the following is real, but it’s what I imagine the most reasonable reincarnation system would be.
I think it’d look something like Nietzschean eternal recurrence. When you die, everything you were is returned to the universal store of stuff. Then, after an unimaginably long time, the universal stuff just happens to get arranged in such a way that something with that ‘youness’ exists again. Might take so long that the universe ‘dies’ and is ‘reborn’ in between.
Kinda fascinating to think about.
This reminds me of the Boltzmann Brain thought experiment.
It’s the idea is that over a sufficiently long time, random fluctuations in the universe (or something) could cause particles to spontaneously form a functioning brain, just for a moment. So what if you, right now, are that brain, with just the right connections to make you you and with more connections that make you feel like you have memories of a universe that never existed. What if you, reading this comment right now, are just a Boltzmann brain floating in space without realising that you never existed prior to this exact point in time?
It’s an interesting thought experiment, but I don’t think it’s real. But that’s also exactly how a Boltzmann brain would feel :)
That’s a very interesting way of it working. So, like, something happens in the universe where your essence can once again occupy it? That in a super fascinating way of looking at it I hadn’t thought of before. And it does kind of make sense, as a reasonable reincarnation system.