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.
Since the population of the universe is not stable, either there’s some leeway to make more or less souls (making it not a true reincarnation system) or time is not a consideration for reincarnation.
We then have to consider the number of souls in the system. Enough for everyone? Two? Just one soul?
Finally the mechanism for what you are reincarnated into next is either completely random, or it is guided by you or some other entity. I imagine if it’s guided by you, you get what you want, and if it’s guided by Them, They get what They want.
There is a 3rd explanation to the population count: we don’t have the entire set of souls here. Having a universe of souls where planets ebb and flow in population would cover that problem (although without something naturally reducing populations at some point, one would expect to run into the same problem as before as successful populations become more successful and increase in scale.)
Finally the mechanism for what you are reincarnated into next is either completely random, or it is guided by you or some other entity. I imagine if it’s guided by you, you get what you want, and if it’s guided by Them, They get what They want.
This part is particularly interesting to me. I wonder how that might work, since there are many ways of in the end getting what you want. Like someone can have a really rough childhood and a pretty good life as an adult, for example. Then there are people who get everything they want, and yet are miserable. I wonder how this would work out in a hypothetical system where “you get what you want.”
Well, you could get a huge list of people or things you could reincarnate into. Maybe the list is limited.
I’m imagining this as like an after-life equivalent of a player-select screen. xD
My guess would be some type of 4th dimensional movement. Consider the universe as we experience it as a 3rd dimensional face of a 4th dimensional polytope. If there was some wort of “soul essence” or whatever, it could exist as some sort of limited resource at a 4th dimensional level, flowing between different 3 dimensional faces in a manner impossible for us to track
I could see that, it’s hard for me to imagine, but I think that’s partially the point.
Imagine a 3d object passing through a 2d plane. From the perspective of the 2d plane, all that exists is a shape that undergoes transformations entirely at a whim with no discernable cause, even though from a 3d perspective, how the cross-section is determined is blatantly obvious.
