Based Camp: What if Reincarnation Were Real?
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
183.59645
Summary
In this episode, we talk about reincarnation, ghosts, and the possibility that science has proven that people could remember their past lives, but no one has concretely proven ghosts exist. What would happen if science proved ghosts exist?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
hello malcolm hello simone so for our topic for this one it actually was something that was
00:00:08.420
inspired by an interview we did with another podcast do you remember the name of the podcast
00:00:12.900
by the way it was the podcast weird and worthwhile weird and worthwhile okay so i want to give them
00:00:17.980
a shout out if people want to check out that episode but at one point of it they asked us
00:00:22.940
they go okay so you know some people believe in reincarnation i got the impression that they did
00:00:28.040
they're like okay so assume reincarnation is true how does that change how you think of what you're
00:00:35.520
trying to maximize for the human species and i just went off at that point i think what they
00:00:42.320
expected is oh you tweak here and here in terms of how you're modifying like maximizing you know this
00:00:48.160
or that but no if i assume that reincarnation is real and i change something when we describe how
00:00:56.640
people have belief systems about the world we describe them as like a tree right when then
00:01:01.640
they have a lot of branching parts to them if reincarnation is true the core trunk of that tree
00:01:09.540
is completely changed which changes all of the sub branches for us
00:01:14.720
yeah i'm so surprised because nothing changes for me so far this is my default nothing is different i'm
00:01:21.080
not okay so we have just scientists have confirmed and this is something that scientists could confirm
00:01:27.140
that's a really cool thing about it scientists could tomorrow be like yes we have proven that people
00:01:31.820
could know things that they could only know if reincarnation happened right so so this is something
00:01:37.700
that could be concretely proven at some point right that means a number of other things first it means
00:01:45.380
that humans have a soul that's separate from their physical body this is not something that we believe
00:01:52.160
right if humans have a soul that's separate from their physical body that means that some other form of
00:02:00.340
reality exists or some other form of material exists and this material or form of reality is likely
00:02:09.920
more important than the reality that we perceive so let me explain what i mean by this mom because
00:02:16.620
you're looking dubious at me i'm still extremely dubious yeah nothing nothing is changing still for
00:02:21.060
me nothing's different okay so if it turns out that a person's memories for example and this is i think
00:02:26.640
what they mean when they they say reincarnation if you're just reincarnating a soul but nothing is is
00:02:31.400
carried between the two individuals but nothing is okay but that's not what we're talking about here
00:02:37.280
we're talking about the people who think they can remember past lives and stuff like that
00:02:41.140
because if this other form of reincarnation this is a form of reincarnation where you remember your
00:02:47.140
past life because i'm sorry only hippie to be people and my right but i'm saying suppose scientist
00:02:52.960
proves this because it is something you could prove okay okay and then then what in that everyone
00:02:56.940
is capable of remembering their past lives doesn't need to be everyone only needs to be one person
00:03:02.520
concretely proved if you prove just a single person what have you proven what you've proven
00:03:08.020
is that some aspect of some human's identity so it could turn out that not all humans have these souls
00:03:15.000
but it turns out that at least some humans have these souls or whatever you want to call them
00:03:19.160
some sort of like metaphysical imprint of their identity and this identity can travel between
00:03:26.060
individuals without like physical information transferring between those individuals right like the
00:03:31.880
dalai lama right and i mean you could argue that they've proven it i mean he picks out i don't
00:03:38.240
think that they've proven it at all key things i don't know i mean they would argue that they have
00:03:41.980
if the person they had scientists would be going there and researching it like you understand how
00:03:47.400
much this would change every aspect by their standards of evidence though i mean i think that
00:03:51.680
previous dalai lamas have said you're acting like esp research departments didn't used to exist
00:03:58.660
they still do there's still a lot of people researching this i'm just saying their standards
00:04:02.560
yes yes a little different dollars is there's people researching this no one has concretely
00:04:07.980
proven ghosts exist no one has concretely proven esp exists if they did and and simone you know my
00:04:14.980
youtube habits okay yeah i am not somebody who hasn't found this evidence because i'm not looking
00:04:20.640
yeah i know literally i think that the truth is out there but the truth is is not accepted per our
00:04:28.960
standards of truth literally about a quarter of all the information i consume is about cryptids or ghosts
00:04:35.640
or esp or so i'm out there consuming but none of the information none of the research into this that has
00:04:42.520
been done has been of a standard where i was convinced that it was accurate okay right it changed my
00:04:49.620
beliefs but i am very very open to having my beliefs changed on this subject if i felt that there was
00:04:54.400
compelling evidence okay but if that evidence was true like if it turned out that some aspect of an
00:04:59.100
individual could be transferred between individuals without like direct informational transfer between
00:05:03.180
those individuals in the material plane what that would mean is there is some aspect of of some
00:05:08.440
human's identity again it could be that not everyone has a soul in some human's identity that is extra
00:05:14.320
material okay if that's true then that's the aspect of the human identity that is experiencing
00:05:22.620
one consciousness two our emotions like pain suffering everything like that right and if that's true
00:05:31.960
what that could mean is that pain and suffering or happiness you know when when we dismiss those things
00:05:39.380
right the reason i most commonly dismiss them is i believe that the reason that we feel them is just
00:05:44.700
serendipitously our ancestors who had those sociological predilections had more surviving offspring
00:05:49.640
this would imply that the reason we feel those things is something else it's something almost supernatural
00:05:57.140
no where is that implication that implication is nowhere it would still make perfect sense that those
00:06:02.160
signals are felt because it can ensure survival on a more effective go for that time you know it's a
00:06:08.660
it'll it'll it'll help you have a more successful round of play for that particular life so why would
00:06:14.580
you not feel those stimuli in a way that helps you avoid the things that will shorten your play and reduce
00:06:20.420
your effectiveness that even if you saw this your assumption would be that our souls evolved along with our
00:06:28.420
bodies and that they're like a tool that our bodies are using yeah either either they're some weird
00:06:36.180
emergent property or thing that has has formed as a product of the you know the way we we developed or
00:06:46.120
some weird quantum energy thing with other universes that we don't quite understand like the way that that
00:06:51.220
our biological matter interacts with other dimensions or something right like i whatever you know maybe
00:06:57.340
that's happening but that doesn't change the fact that we evolved to do what we did and it also doesn't
00:07:01.640
change functionally how we live our lives i mean first maybe not everyone has one of these things
00:07:06.260
that transfers to maybe you transfer into a goat so what are you going to do about that or maybe you
00:07:11.240
transfer into someone who doesn't have the same resources that they did before and of course the
00:07:15.960
memory transfer is imperfect in so far as i can tell the vast majority of cases so a lot of it doesn't
00:07:22.840
matter like if you if you do transfer from one life to the next you're probably going to then
00:07:27.700
maintain the same objective function but also you can't like plan for that it's not you can i mean
00:07:32.560
i guess theoretically you could try to in one life accumulate a lot of wealth and then leave a cash
00:07:38.100
that is hidden like a you know buried treasure and then go get that cash to have a head start on your
00:07:42.940
next life and build cumulative advantage i'm surprised that people who believe in reincarnation
00:07:47.000
haven't been doing that like yeah if you believed you had multiple lives wouldn't you yeah but what if
00:07:51.640
you're you know what if the vast majority of time because you know many versions of
00:07:54.300
reincarnation involve being born into well maybe you'll end up a cow maybe you'll end up a worm
00:07:58.560
maybe you'll end up you know so there's all these generations who knows like how many generations how
00:08:02.080
many rolls of the dice it takes for you to get into a human body and then how many rolls of the dice
00:08:06.380
did it take you to get into a human body that is even empowered to be able to travel somewhere to get
00:08:11.740
to the cash i mean we are in the top one this is what i love about your thesis is it actually makes
00:08:18.880
sense and it does allow you to not change much of your world perspective well you wouldn't you have to
00:08:23.720
think practically about what it means really interesting i don't know if you grasped of the
00:08:28.340
full implications of this theory that you've crafted well it doesn't matter does it because
00:08:32.680
functionally not much changes so it's just you know it does matter because you're assuming that
00:08:37.620
the soul works in a very specific way so what and it's not the way anyone i have ever heard
00:08:45.540
like you just dropped this really big idea that i have literally never heard in my entire life
00:08:51.240
i mean i'm sure that somebody has probably thought of it before but essentially what you are assuming
00:08:56.240
is that the soul is like a mechanistic entity so by that what i mean is it exists in the same way that
00:09:06.100
material things exist but we just haven't discovered the properties through which it exists yet
00:09:12.180
well no no i mean i'm not saying i'm i'm i'm interpreting the soul through a materialistic lens
00:09:17.200
because i am a pragmatist so i care about what materialistically the implications of the soul are
00:09:23.040
point i was getting to was was the interesting part of what you you said is that evolution picked up
00:09:32.340
this other type of material you know we'll call it like the soul or something like that
00:09:37.320
that may have existed in some sort of primordial form before evolution got to it it would make sense
00:09:43.620
right like maybe imagine that like you have you know you develop at one point an antenna
00:09:47.880
and it's going to pick up some weird radio signals that were already there like at one point my i don't
00:09:53.700
know how this happened but my wired earbuds picked up walkie-talkie signal from construction workers
00:09:59.860
down the street like it is entirely possible to have one thing be able to pick up on another thing
00:10:05.640
due to but you're not even really postulating that it accidentally picked it up what you're postulating
00:10:11.520
is that evolution grabbed it and used it because through using it it was able to increase the number
00:10:19.380
of surviving meat puppets that existed that would make sense but that's not necessary it could be that
00:10:25.520
they just pick up you know that human biology maybe maybe all animal biology sufficiently advanced
00:10:33.520
biological systems pick up this ethereal component yeah or some yeah well or no not even it doesn't
00:10:39.560
have to be ethereal it could be just like there's another you know weird wavelength of another
00:10:44.560
parallel universe it doesn't have to be ethereal outside of our reality okay yeah yeah that just
00:10:50.000
sounds a little too spiritual for me i'm feeling triggered malcolm i'm not safe with that kind of
00:10:53.960
word so if you don't mind you are a goof and i love it no no no i'm liking because this is different
00:11:00.980
to the conclusion i came to i immediately assumed that it must mean that there's actually weight to our
00:11:05.700
emotional states because our emotional well nice try right now when i ask who am i right i am to some
00:11:15.060
extent a combination of my brain like the neurochemical processes of my brain and my body and if there was
00:11:22.020
this other thing that is potentially even more me than the material part of me right then i would need
00:11:29.880
to assign special weight to it when i'm determining what has value in the universe no more than if you
00:11:35.640
had another pair of arms it's not like another pair of arms gets you know precedence on bait like
00:11:40.280
no i i think it'd be very different from another pair of arms so here's why i think it would be
00:11:44.840
different and i love videos where we disagree because i think they're probably much more interesting
00:11:48.200
to our audience we'll call this one like fight malcolm and simone what so so it would be like saying that
00:11:55.240
it turns out our brain isn't the center of cognitive processing because what it would mean
00:12:00.920
is that to some extent cognitive processing is happening in parallel not just within our brains
00:12:07.000
and i disagree i disagree because what what i'm getting the impression is that the soul essentially
00:12:14.440
is something like it's it's like a hard drive that is collecting that they're like a piece of paper
00:12:19.800
that is collecting grit that is somehow getting transferred from one entity so you would see it more as like
00:12:24.680
residue yeah it's just a real residue which can be picked up okay and that would also explain like
00:12:31.880
ghosts right so like it goes for a real two they could work with this conception of the soul sure and
00:12:37.960
that it's ethereal residue which transfers either can become stuck in a physical location or transfers
00:12:44.680
between bodies between generations and if that was true then it would largely be functioning in two ways
00:12:51.080
either the ethereal residue exists in a discrete format in which it's one person one soul you know
00:12:58.840
that these these things are in discrete units and like my one soul goes to a worm or something like
00:13:03.720
that potentially or maybe they only stay within species right but regardless my one soul then goes
00:13:08.280
to the next person right or they exist as more like a fluid that gets poured back into the ethereal realm
00:13:16.600
after a person dies ectoplasm if you will i'm getting so triggered by all this i can't so by that what i
00:13:22.040
mean is when i die my soul might become like 10 of 10 other people's identity instead of you know like
00:13:31.720
dropping like a fluid with like food coloring back into the ocean or something oh yeah well that can help
00:13:37.240
to explain why some people would remember their past whereas others wouldn't because most like most souls
00:13:43.560
get mixed up collectively to the point of abstraction whereas maybe others would get kind of like just
00:13:49.480
not get mixed up for some reason yeah so i just came up with a great thesis that can make a lot of
00:13:54.440
the the holes in the multiple lives things make more sense okay so one of the biggest problems with
00:14:00.200
people who believe in multiple lives is they're very likely to believe that they were really important
00:14:03.800
people in the past um no it's true you just you just hear this constantly and yeah my my my paternal
00:14:11.160
grandmother just thought that she was a particular type of native american she had extremely distinct
00:14:16.440
memories that she believed that she had so no not everyone i think a lot of people not everyone but a
00:14:20.840
lot of people i'd say that that more often than not they believe they were important people in some way
00:14:27.720
you know and on top of that not everyone believes not everyone has these experiences right this was a
00:14:34.840
universal experience that you had lived multiple lives then just everyone would be like oh yeah i
00:14:39.560
know that because i have that experience right so what if it turns out that actually not everyone
00:14:45.480
has a soul only important people have souls we're sort of like there's this theory you know there's
00:14:51.320
the theory that we are in a algorithmically like we our reality is a computer program yeah and some
00:14:58.680
people believe that there's an iteration of the theory that yes our reality is a computer program
00:15:03.400
but it's not a fully function like not everyone is fully programmed most people are just literal npcs
00:15:10.120
and there's maybe a hundred to ten thousand people in the world who are fully programmed it's similar to
00:15:15.080
that theory which is to say that not everyone has one of these souls just the important people who
00:15:20.920
change world history and so what that means is that would explain why people keep getting these
00:15:25.960
important souls because only important people have souls um we aren't important enough to get one of
00:15:32.120
these souls and it would also explain why so many people might have cleopatra reborn because her soul might
00:15:38.760
actually exist in portions within multiple people's bodies oh interesting yeah so that would explain why
00:15:46.760
multiple people might simultaneously be claiming to be the same people living multiple lives yeah
00:15:52.360
because there's no no reason why this kind of material would have to be like one-to-one transferred
00:15:59.880
yeah well and it may and it may be like okay so you would have a small amount in oh he's here
00:16:06.840
edward dutton is outside our house right now oh
00:16:09.240
oh well it was great talking with you malcolm but we have to go i actually really like this one
00:16:15.720
i'd like to continue it at some point all right i love you malcolm thanks for this