The return of Fido

Recently we've dealt with such deep topics as quantum mechanics, the origins of the universe, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, not to mention controversial (and worrying) stuff like climate change and the current political situation.  So I'm sure what you're all thinking is: "yes, Gordon, but what about pet reincarnation?"

I know the subject is on at least one person's mind, because a couple of days ago a friend and former student sent me a Facebook reel showing an advertisement from "Master Reincarnationist" E. David Scott containing a 1-900 number you can call, where for the low-low-low price of $1.95 per minute you can "answer a few simple questions" and he will tell you who your pet used to be in a previous life.  The two dogs in the advertisement apparently were once George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte, and the cat was Annie Oakley.

Which is wicked cool.  But it does leave me with a few questions:

1. What the actual fuck?
2. How do you become a "Master Reincarnationist?"  Do you have to get a Bachelors Degree in Reincarnation first, then go to graduate school?
3. He can do all of this over the phone?  I mean, he doesn't actually have to be near the pet, and sense the mystical quantum field frequency vibrations of their aura, or something?  It's pretty impressive if he can do all that remotely.
4. It's likely that the call would take at least ten minutes, so that'd cost me about twenty bucks.  I have better uses for twenty bucks, and that includes using it to start a fire in my wood stove.  (Okay, that one wasn't a question.)
5. Don't you think it's statistically unlikely that your pet was once a famous person?  Just by the law of averages, it's much more likely they were once Chinese peasants.
6. Speaking of statistics, why do you think your pet was once a person at all?  Given that they're now a pet, the contention is that it's possible to have a human reincarnate as an non-human animal, so other transmutations are probably allowed as well.  Since insects outnumber all other animals put together, wouldn't it be much more likely that Fido and Mr. Fluffums, not to mention you and I, were once bugs?  Odd that you often hear the past-life crowd saying things like, "I was once Cleopatra" and you rarely ever hear them say, "Life really was boring, when I was a bug."
7. At the risk of repeating myself, what the actual fuck?

I have to admit to wondering, however, what E. David Scott would tell me about our three dogs.  We have Guinness, who is headstrong, smart, temperamental, and a really natty dresser:

He might have been Oscar Wilde.

Then there's Rosie, who has the demeanor of an upper-crust lady and the judge-y attitude to match.  She even has her own throne:

I think Rosie was clearly Queen Victoria, who was also Not Amused.

Last, we have Jethro:

God alone knows who or what Jethro was.  In this incarnation he's basically an animated plush toy, and is very sweet but has the IQ of a peach pit.  Maybe he's a reincarnated Tribble, I dunno.

Anyhow, after watching the reel, I decided to look into the topic further, and almost immediately regretted that decision.  Pet reincarnation is a huge deal.  Apparently a lot of people, like the owner of this site, think that pets reincarnate so they can become your subsequent pets, which just considering the numbers involved seems even less likely than their having been bugs, or even people.  This individual tells us she "receives telepathic information directly from pets," and says you can ask your pet while they're still alive to be reincarnated as another of your pets in the future if you want.

Of course, she warns, the pet could say no.  Think about that the next time you sneakily buy the cheaper brand of cat food or say to your dog, "I've already given you three biscuits, you can't have any more."  Your pet might be keeping tally on all that, and when it comes time to decide where they want to reincarnate next time, they'll choose a better venue.

Then there's this site, which contradicts the first two -- it says that pets don't reincarnate as humans (or vice versa).  Once a dog, always a dog, apparently.  "We're on our own unique soul journey," she tells us.  In her opinion, going from dog or cat to human would be "taking a step backward in their soul's evolution."  Which, if I compare how my dogs act to how a great many people act, I have to admit actually makes a lot of sense.

Oh, and for only $447, you can take her "Soul Level Animal Communication" online course, and learn how to telepathically communicate with animals, too.  Tempting offer, but I'm declining that one as well, since my dogs' thoughts are easy enough to discern.  Respectively:

1. Play with me!  Play with me!  Now!
2. I disapprove of your refusal to serve me a second dinner.  And also the fact that you are sitting in my chair.
3. *gentle static noise*

So there you have it.  Maybe your pet, too, can be Born Again.  Anyhow, I have to wrap this up, because Oscar, Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, and Fluffy McTribble want their breakfast.  Can't keep them waiting, or once they've gone on to the Great Beyond they may say bad things to the other Spirit Animals and my next dog will be the reincarnation of Attila the Hun or something.

  

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The strange story of Omm Sety

Dorothy Louise Eady was born on the 16th of January in 1904 in a suburb of London, the only child of a tailor and his wife.  She seemed to be a perfectly ordinary little girl until she was three years old, when she took a tumble down a set of stairs and developed a highly peculiar set of symptoms that was to change the trajectory of her life.

She developed foreign accent syndrome -- a real, although rare, condition where stroke or head trauma causes an individual's speech patterns to change, giving their voice a superficially "foreign" accent.  (Significantly, they don't suddenly gain proficiency in another language, despite what's sometimes claimed.)  Weirder still, when she started school, she began demonstrating a knowledge of ancient Egypt that is, at the very least, unusual for a child her age.  She got in trouble for comparing Christianity to the Egyptian pantheon, and was finally expelled when she flat-out refused to sing a hymn about the Exodus calling on God to "curse the swart Egyptians."  She frequented a local Roman Catholic church, until a chat with the priest revealed that she was doing so because the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic mass "reminded her of the old religion," at which point the priest suggested she probably should entertain her reminiscences elsewhere.

These setbacks didn't discourage her in the least.  A visit to the British Museum as a teenager sent her into raptures; when she saw a photograph of the temple of the Pharaoh Seti I, she said, "There is my home!  But where are the trees?  Where are the gardens?"

Interestingly, most people seemed to tolerate her odd claims, and in fact she studied Egyptian history and hieroglyphics under E. A. Wallis Budge, one of the foremost Egyptologists of the early twentieth century.  Eventually -- perhaps inevitably -- she moved to Egypt, describing it as "coming home."  During this entire period she was plagued by dreams, sleepwalking, and nightmares, including a vision of an entity that called itself "Hor-Ra" and claimed to be the spirit of Seti I.  This spirit proceeded to narrate to her a tale, which Eady wrote down in hieroglyphics, telling of her previous life.

Eady, Hor-Ra said, had once been a priestess of humble origins named Bentreshyt, who had fallen in love with Seti.  Despite her vow of chastity, she had sex with Seti and got pregnant.  Knowing that once her transgression was found out, it was likely she'd be executed -- and in the process, disgrace the pharaoh -- she chose to commit suicide.

Alongside her claims of having been reincarnated, however, Eady did real, honest-to-goodness archaeological and historical work, assisting such brilliant scholars as Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry, earning their respect and also the respect of her friends and neighbors.  She was celebrated for her tolerance, keeping to her own practice of rituals celebrating Ra and Horus and Osiris and the rest, but also fasting during Ramadan and celebrating Christmas and Easter with the Christians.

Whatever you think of her story, Dorothy is kind of hard to dislike, frankly.

Dorothy Eady, ca. 1928 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Some pieces of her story do, oddly enough, seem to have some verifiable basis in fact.  She pointed out a spot near the Temple of Seti where she said there'd been a garden in which she'd first met the pharaoh, and later excavation revealed the foundations of a garden that matched her descriptions.  She was brought into a newly-opened room in the temple in complete darkness, and asked to describe the paintings on the walls -- which she did accurately enough to freak out the people present.

Eady -- by then usually known by her adopted name of Omm Sety -- died on the 21st of April, 1981 in Abydos, never wavering from her claims that she was a reincarnated Egyptian priestess.  So what are we to make of her story?

One thing that strikes me is that although her persistence in devoting herself to Egyptian studies was certainly uncommon for a woman of her time, she does not seem to have been in it for fame, money, or self-aggrandizement.  She was unassuming personally, and had no particular interest in making more in the way of income than she needed to be reasonably comfortable.  In fact, Jonathan Cott, in his book about Eady's life called The Search for Omm Sety, quotes William Simpson, professor of Egyptology at Yale, as saying that "a great many people in Egypt took advantage of her because she more or less traded her knowledge of ancient Egypt by writing or helping people out by doing drafting for them for a pittance."

And it also seems certain that she really believed what she was saying.  Unlike a lot of people who make similar claims, she doesn't have the look of a con artist.  Even Carl Sagan, surely a skeptic's skeptic if there ever was one, was impressed, saying she was "a lively, intelligent, dedicated woman who made real contributions to Egyptology.  This is true whether her belief in reincarnation is fact or fantasy...  However, we must keep in mind that there is no independent record, other than her own accounts, to verify what she claimed."

This, of course, is the sticking point; Sagan is certainly not saying he believes she was reincarnated, just that it can't be rigorously ruled out.  And, more importantly, that there may be no way to prove it one way or the other.  Certainly her knowledge seems uncanny, but it's important to remember that during the 1920s and 1930s there was a significant Egyptomania happening, especially following the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922.  Stories and photographs were circulating everywhere, and it'd be hard for an unbiased evaluator to tease apart what Eady learned through her studies or other media, and what she might allegedly be recalling through strange supernatural pathways.

As you would no doubt expect, the people who already believed in reincarnation use this as one of their favorite examples, while the doubters still doubt, attributing Eady's obsession with Egypt not to a buried memory of a past life but to a blend of genuine curiosity and scholarship with delusions brought on by an early head injury.  For myself, I might be convinced if her odd claim to knowledge had included understanding the Egyptian language prior to being taught it, or some other piece of verifiable information there's no way she could have obtained by ordinary means.  I have to admit, describing the paintings in a newly-excavated room in the dark comes close; but given that others had seen the paintings, and also the commonalities that exist between a lot of examples of New Kingdom-era art, it doesn't quite get there, evidence-wise.  She could have been told what the paintings looked like, or they may just have been shrewd guesses based on her extensive knowledge of Egyptian art and artifacts.

And it does strike me that this is yet another example of James Randi's objection to stories of reincarnation; that everyone in their previous life seems to have been a high priest or priestess or prince or princess or whatnot, and nobody -- as would seem, simply by the statistics of the situation, to be far more likely -- was a dirt-poor peasant in China or India, or someone who died as a child of diphtheria or measles or smallpox.

The fact remains, though, that Eady's case is an odd one.  It doesn't convince me, but it does leave me scratching my head a little. 

However, I'm not so fond of the idea of reincarnation in any case, so maybe it's for the best.  Life is no cakewalk, and especially given that you aren't given any choice who you're reincarnated as, I'd just as soon not press "reset" and start the whole thing over.  If I had to choose an afterlife, I'd go with Valhalla.  Sitting around the table quaffing mead (can you just drink mead?  Or do you have to quaff it?), having mock sword-fights with your friends, and generally raising hell just for the fun of it.

Certainly better than harps, hymns, and halos, which seems to be the only other thing on offer.

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Return to sender

Despite my daily perusal of the news and science sites for interesting topics, sometimes I miss stuff. It's inevitable, of course, but sometimes a story is so absolutely tailor-made for this blog that I can't believe that (1) I didn't see it, and (2) a reader didn't send me a link.

That was my reaction when I ran into, quite by accident, an article from Scientific American several years ago about a researcher in the Netherlands who did a psychological study of people who believe in reincarnation.  I've always found the whole reincarnation thing a bit mystifying, especially given that most of the people you talk to who claim past lives say they were Spartan warriors or Babylonian princesses when, just by the numbers, the vast majority of people should recall being Chinese peasants. Or, if you allow reincarnation from other life forms, being a bug.

But no.  "Boy, life sure was boring, when I was a bug" is something you rarely ever hear reincarnated people say.

The Wheel of Life [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stephen Shephard, The wheel of life, Trongsa dzong, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then, there are the people who -- like one person I know who I swear I'm not making up -- believe they are reincarnated from individuals who lived in places that don't, technically, exist.  This particular woman says in a past life she was a "gifted healer and wise woman from Atlantis."  She apparently remembers a lot of what she knew as an Atlantean person, which include pearls like "always strive to bring peace and love to those around you."

Which, honestly, I can't argue with, whether or not you're from Atlantis.

Apparently this study found that there are a great many other people who believe fervently that they were once someone else, somewhere else.  So Maarten Peters, a psychological researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, decided to see if he could figure out what was going on.

He asked for people who believed they could recall past lives to volunteer, and an equal number of people who did not believe in reincarnation, and gave them a test called the false fame paradigm.  This test gives subjects a list of unfamiliar names to memorize, and then the next day those names are mixed in with new names and the names of famous people.  The question was: which of the names presented belong to famous people?

When he compared the results, an interesting pattern emerged.  The people who believed in reincarnation were, across the board, more likely to commit a source-monitoring error -- an error in judgment about the source of a memory.  They were far more likely than the control group to think that the unfamiliar names they had memorized the previous day belonged to famous people.  Evidently, they had a marked tendency to conflate their own (recent) memory of a name with (more distant) memories of hearing about celebrities in the news.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters said about his results.  "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

The implication is that the "memories" these people have about past lives are very likely to be an amalgam of memories of other things -- stories they've read, documentaries they've watched, perhaps even scenarios they'd created.  Whatever's going on, it's extremely unlikely that the memories these people claim to have come from a prior life.

Of course, there's a ton of anecdotal evidence for reincarnation, which in my mind doesn't carry a great deal of weight.  The whole thing has been the subject of more than one scholarly paper, including one in 2013 by David Cockburn, of St. David's University College (Wales), called "The Evidence for Reincarnation." In it, he cites claims like the following:

On March 15th, 1910, Alexandrina Samona, five-year-old daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Carmelo Samona, of Palermo, Sicily, died of meningitis to the great grief of her parents.  Within a year Mrs. Samona [gave] birth to twin girls.  One of these proved to bear an extraordinary physical resemblance to the first Alexandrina and was given the same name.  Alexandrina II resembled Alexandrina I not only in appearance but also in disposition and likes and dislikes.  Stevenson then lists a number of close physical similarities and of shared characteristic traits of behaviour.  For example: Both liked to put on adult stockings much too large for them and walk around the room in them.  Both enjoyed playfully altering people's names, such as changing Angelina into Angellanna or Angelona, or Caterina into Caterana.  Most striking of all, however, were the child's memory claims: 'When Alexandrina II was eight, her parents told her they planned to take her to visit Monreale and see the sights there.  At this Alexandrina II interjected: "But, Mother, I know Monreale, I have seen it already."  Mrs. Samona told the child she had never been to Monreale, but the child replied : "Oh, yes, I went there.  Do you not recollect that there was a great church with a very large statue of a man with his arms held open, on the roof?  And don't you remember that we went there with a lady who had horns and that we met some little red priests in the town?"  At this Mrs. Samona recollected that the last time she went to Monreale she had gone there with Alexandrina I some months before her death.  They had taken with them a lady friend who had come to Palermo for a medical consultation as she suffered from disfiguring excrescences on her forehead.  As they were going into the church, the Samonas' party had met a group of young Greek priests with blue robes decorated with red ornamentation.'

Even though Cockburn is willing to admit reincarnation as a possible explanation of such claims, he sounds a little dubious himself; toward the end of his paper, he writes, "[E]ven if we did think in terms of some underlying common element which explains the similarities between these individuals we would still need to show that the presence of the common element justifies the claim that we are dealing with a single person: to show, that is, what significance is to be attached to the presence of that element."  I would add that we also need to eliminate the possibility of outright lying on the part of the parents -- there has been more than one case where a parent has attempted to hoodwink the public with regards to some purportedly supernatural ability their child allegedly has.

So anyhow.  My sense is that the evidence for reincarnation is pretty slim, and that any claims of past lives are best explained by fallible memory, if not outright lying.  But I'm guessing no one will be surprised that I'm saying that.  In any case, I better wrap this up.  Lots to do today.  Considerably more, I would imagine, than I'd have to do if I was a bug, although that's pure speculation because I don't have much of a basis for comparison.

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Return to sender

Despite my daily perusal of the news and science sites for interesting topics, sometimes I miss stuff.  It's inevitable, of course, but sometimes a story is so absolutely tailor-made for this blog that I can't believe that (1) I didn't see it, and (2) a reader didn't send me a link.

That was my reaction when I ran into, quite by accident, an article from Scientific American nine years ago about a researcher in the Netherlands who did a psychological study of people who believe in reincarnation.  I've always found the whole reincarnation thing a bit mystifying, especially given that most of the people you talk to who claim past lives say they were Spartan warriors or Babylonian princesses when, just by the numbers, the vast majority of people should recall being Chinese peasants.  Or, if you allow reincarnation from other life forms, being a bug.

But no.  "Boy, life sure was boring, when I was a bug" is something you rarely ever hear reincarnated people say.

The Wheel of Life [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, there are some people who believe fervently that they were once someone else, somewhere else.  So Maarten Peters, a psychological researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, decided to see if he could figure out what was going on.

He asked for people who believed they could recall past lives to volunteer, and an equal number of people who did not believe in reincarnation, and gave them a test called the false fame paradigm.  This test gives subjects a list of unfamiliar names to memorize, and then the next day those names are mixed in with new names and the names of famous people.  The question was: which of the names presented belong to famous people?

When he compared the results, an interesting pattern emerged.  The people who believed in reincarnation were, across the board, more likely to commit a source-monitoring error -- an error in judgment about the source of a memory.  They were far more likely than the control group to think that the unfamiliar names they had memorized the previous day belonged to famous people.  Evidently, they had a marked tendency to conflate their own (recent) memory of a name with (more distant) memories of hearing about celebrities in the news.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters said about his results.  "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

The implication, of course, is that the "memories" these people have about past lives are very likely to be an amalgam of memories of other things -- stories they've read, documentaries they've watched, perhaps even scenarios they'd created.  Whatever's going on, it's extremely unlikely that the memories these people claim to have come from a prior life.

Of course, there's a ton of anecdotal evidence for reincarnation, which in my mind doesn't carry a great deal of weight.  The whole thing has been the subject of more than one scholarly paper, including one in 2013 by David Cockburn, of St. David's University College (Wales), called "The Evidence for Reincarnation."  In it, he cites claims like the following:

On March 15th, 1910, Alexandrina Samona, five-year-old daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Carmelo Samona, of Palermo, Sicily, died of meningitis to the great grief of her parents.  Within a year Mrs. Samona [gave] birth to twin girls.  One of these proved to bear an extraordinary physical resemblance to the first Alexandrina and was given the same name.  Alexandrina II resembled Alexandrina I not only in appearance but also in disposition and likes and dislikes.  Stevenson then lists a number of close physical similarities and of shared characteristic traits of behaviour.  For example: Both liked to put on adult stockings much too large for them and walk around the room in them.  Both enjoyed playfully altering people's names, such as changing Angelina into Angellanna or Angelona, or Caterina into Caterana.   Most striking of all, however, were the child's memory claims: 'When Alexandrina II was eight, her parents told her they planned to take her to visit Monreale and see the sights there. At this Alexandrina II interjected: "But, Mother, I know Monreale, I have seen it already." Mrs. Samona told the child she had never been to Monreale, but the child replied : "Oh, yes, I went there. Do you not recollect that there was a great church with a very large statue of a man with his arms held open, on the roof? And don't you remember that we went there with a lady who had horns and that we met some little red priests in the town?" At this Mrs. Samona recollected that the last time she went to Monreale she had gone there with Alexandrina I some months before her death.  They had taken with them a lady friend who had come to Palermo for a medical consultation as she suffered from disfiguring excrescences on her forehead.  As they were going into the church, the Samonas' party had met a group of young Greek priests with blue robes decorated with red ornamentation.' 

Even though Cockburn is willing to admit reincarnation as a possible explanation of such claims, he sounds a little dubious himself; toward the end of his paper, he writes, "[E]ven if we did think in terms of some underlying common element which explains the similarities between these individuals we would still need to show that the presence of the common element justifies the claim that we are dealing with a single person: to show, that is, what significance is to be attached to the presence of that element."  I would add that we also need to eliminate the possibility of outright lying on the part of the parents -- there has been more than one case where a parent has attempted to hoodwink the public with regards to some purportedly supernatural ability their child allegedly has.

So anyhow.  My sense is that the evidence for reincarnation is pretty slim, and that any claims of past lives are best explained by fallible memory, if not outright lying.  But I'm guessing no one will be surprised that I'm saying that.  In any case, I better wrap this up.  Lots to do today.  Considerably more, I would imagine, than I'd have to do if I was a bug, although that's pure speculation because I don't have much of a basis for comparison.

Come as you were

There's a Reincarnation Conference at the end of this month in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I can't go.

Of course, tickets are $225 a pop, and I suspect Carol would have words with me if I blew that kind of money on such a thing.  But still.  It features talks, workshops, and opportunities for hypnosis sessions in which you are guided through "past life regression."  There's a presentation by a psychic lawyer and an "acclaimed materialization medium."  Workshops include:

• People Stuck Who Need to Be Rescued
• How Earthbound Spirits, Ghosts, Demons and ETs Can Affect You and Your Clients and the Six Steps to Take to Release Them
• Why We Know Our Pets Live on with Us in the Next Realm
• What Happens to Babies Lost Before Birth by Miscarriages and Other Events
• Why We Know Jesus Taught Reincarnation
• Your Soul's Plan: Why You Chose This Life
• Heaven and Hell As They Really Are: What "the Dead" Are Telling Us

So I think we can all agree that it's gonna be good times.  I wonder how many of the participants in past life regressions will find out that they were Babylonian princesses?  You always seem to have Babylonian princesses, somehow.

The Dazu Wheel of Reincarnation [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A recent poll indicated that one in five Americans believes in reincarnation.  One in ten claims actually to recall a past life. This is grist to the mill of Dr. Brian Weiss, a prominent psychologist who specializes in past life regression.  "I define [reincarnation] as when we die physically, a part of us goes on," Weiss said, "and that we have lessons to learn here.  And that if you haven't learned all of these lessons, then that soul, that consciousness, that spirit comes back into a baby's body."

Well, that all sounds just nifty.  But the difficulty, of course, is the usual one; there's no evidence whatsoever that this actually happens.  The human mind, as I've mentioned before, is a remarkably plastic, and scarily unreliable, processing device.  Experiments have conclusively shown that given enough emotional charge, an imagined scene can actually become a memory, and thereafter be "remembered" as if it had actually happened.  In a context where a subject was being hypnotized by a professional-looking individual with "Dr." in front of his/her name, and perhaps was even being given subtle suggestions of what to "recall," that impression, and its retention as a memory afterwards, would become even more powerful.

So what gets told to someone, how (s)he remembers it, and how that memory is conflated with what else has happened make all of these stories of people who remember past lives questionable at best.  (Here's a well-publicized one about a little boy who supposedly recalls events that happened to him in a past life in which he was a woman named Pam.)  Add to that the possibility of hoaxes and outright lies, and you can see why few skeptics accept what anecdotal evidence we have as convincing.

And then, there's just the statistical argument, that because there are more people alive today than at any time in the past, not all of us can be reincarnated.  Some believers solve this problem by allowing reincarnation from "lower animals."  In that case, it's funny how no one seems to remember being, say, a bug.  "Boy, life sure was boring, as a bug," is something I'd bet you rarely hear anyone say in a past life regression.

Not only does no one remember being a bug, few of them, it seems, were even just ordinary humans.  "The skeptical part of me about the past life thing is that, just statistically, the odds are that in my past life, I was a Chinese peasant, right?" says Dr. Stephen Prothero, a professor of theology at Boston University.  "But hardly anybody ever is a Chinese peasant.  Everybody is Cleopatra or Mark Antony or Jesus, you know?"

Even Dr. Weiss has to admit this is a problem.   "We're not going to be able to extract a blood sample and get DNA and say, 'Oh, I see you were alive in the 11th century,' no," he stated.  "It's people remembering it, so it's clinical proof."

So, once again, we have someone whose definition of "proof" differs considerably from mine.  And I'd be willing to say, "Well, what harm if these people believe that they were once Eleanor of Aquitaine?" except that the past life regressors and the rest of them are bilking the gullible out of large quantities of money.   On one level, perhaps people who are that credulous deserve bilking, but the compassionate side of my personality feels like it's just wrong to take advantage.

In any case, I rather regret that I'll have to miss this month's "Come As You Were" party.  It would have been fun.  I would have loved to see what they'd have made out of trying to do a past-life regression with me.  I think I'd have said... "I'm...  I'm flying through the air.  Free.  Wild.  I'm... well, fuck.  I just got splatted on a windshield."

So it's kind of a pity I can't go.  Oh, well, as the reincarnated are wont to say, there's always next time.

The Motive Fallacy and the reincarnation of Steve Jobs

The "Motive Fallacy" is the assumption that because someone has a motive to say something, that has a bearing on the truth value of what they've said.  The canonical example of the Motive Fallacy is the child who shows his mother a drawing he's made, and asks Mom what she thinks.

"It's beautiful, honey," she says.

"No, it's not," the little boy responds.  "You're just saying that because you're my mother."

The little boy assumes that because the mom has a motive to spare his feelings, she must be lying -- when in fact, the drawing could be either brilliant or terrible, and the mom's motive for saying it's good has no effect on that one way or the other.  She could be lying; she could be telling the truth.  It's impossible to tell.  And assuming that her motive gives you more information is a fallacy.

I ran into a great example of the Motive Fallacy, not to mention a rather bizarre example of woo-woo, a couple of days ago.  The Wall Street Journal ran an article (here) describing how a group of Thai Buddhists have decided that Apple founder Steve Jobs has been reincarnated.

The whole thing apparently hit the news when Apple software engineer Tony Tseung contacted Phra Chaibul Dhammajayo, the abbot of the Dhammakaya Temple near Bangkok, to find out what happened to Jobs following his death.  So the abbot put his mind to it, and finally Tseung got his response last month.  To everyone's immense relief, it was good news.

"After Steve Jobs passed away, he was reincarnated as a divine being with a special knowledge and appreciation for science and the arts," Phra Chaibul said, in the first of a series of lectures that have been made available by the Dhammakaya Temple.  "Everything is high-tech, beautiful, and simple, exactly the way he likes it, and he is filled with great excitement and amazement."  He then went on to say that Jobs now has a full head of hair, sleeps on a floating hover-bed, and if he wants to eat, one of twenty servants immediately brings him what he would like, and if he thinks about his favorite song, it starts playing.

Well, that sounds happy enough.  I mean, my only question would be: how do you know all of this?  But so far, no one seems to be asking this.  All we have is the pronouncement, all too typical with religious leaders, that Phra Chaibul has direct and specific knowledge of something that is unavailable to the rest of us slobs.

What makes this situation more interesting is the response of Phra Payom Kallayano, a Thai religious authority.  He said that Phra Chaibul was only saying all of this as a publicity stunt, because he wanted to attract more followers to the Dhammakaya Temple, and thus more money.  Phra Chaibul, in other words, is only claiming that Steve Jobs was reincarnated because he has a motive to make that claim.

Really?  That's the only problem you see here?  Of course Phra Chaibul has a motive; the Dhammakaya Temple is one of the wealthiest in Thailand, and caters to well-educated, modern Buddhists, virtually all of whom use computers on a daily basis.  Integrating modern technology into religious beliefs is never a simple matter, and Phra Chaibul's statement that Steve Jobs has been reincarnated as a "powerful warrior-philosopher" must give some comfort to Buddhists who worry that today's electronic world bears little resemblance to Nirvana.

But stating that Phra Chaibul has a motive to make the claim is a pretty weak objection, and overlooks a much bigger difficulty, which is that there's not a shred of evidence that it's true.  Isn't it curious that no one in the temple seems to be saying, "Can you show me any proof that Steve Jobs is living in a floating glass house with twenty servants?"  Which would have been the first thing I'd have thought of.  It's what I always think when people make strange claims, even when those claims are part of a well-respected, organized religion.

Maybe the reason for this is that the Motive Fallacy points fingers at specific people, whereas the demand for evidence knocks the pins out from underneath the entire belief system.  If Phra Chaibul is making up the Steve Jobs story so that his temple will get donations, that says something about Phra Chaibul himself, but allows you to leave alone the belief in reincarnation and everything else it implies.  Once you say, "Show me your evidence that this has happened," you've changed the ground rules -- and placed a demand that can be applied to any other statement that the religion has made.  In fact, don't just show me hard evidence that Steve Jobs is living in bliss as a reincarnated warrior-philosopher; show me evidence that reincarnation happens at all.  We know you religious leaders have motives for saying what you do; however, that statement is irrelevant.  Give me some solid reason to believe that god, heaven, hell, and all the rest exist, other than pointing at a passage in a book and saying, "It says so right here."  I'm going to hold your claims to the same gold standard of evidence that I do every other claim about how the world works.

Prominent evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously said that science and religion were "non-overlapping magisteria" -- separate ways of understanding the world, whose methods (and thus standards for establishing truth) were different.  Science is primarily external, and verifiable; religion internal, and unverifiable.  While Gould was a great writer and a brilliant man, I've never thought this made the least bit of sense.  Science's stance -- that our understanding of how the universe behaves is discoverable, and can only be based upon hard evidence -- is really the only reliable protocol we have.  Saying that religious statements don't have to meet the same standard of evidence as scientific ones means that religious leaders can make any damnfool claims they want, and they can't be challenged to prove what they're saying.  But the weak, Motive Fallacy response that Phra Chaibul got after his bizarre public statement is an indication of how few people really want to go there.