Reincarnation

There are certain children who are reported to remember past lives. I don't feel equipped to evaluate the question whether such children really exist or whether the reports are accurately described. You can find descriptions of them in Ian Stevenson's work and also in Robert Almeder's book on empirical evidence for the afterlife.

I have in mind cases such as a child seeming to remember being another person, that person not being known by by the child or her family. The things the child seems to remember then turn out ot be true (there really was a person names x, who did y , etc).

Now it seems to me that such cases provide prima facie support for reincarnation. If these "seeming to remember" experiences occur, they provide some support for the thesis that persons sometimes exist prior to their current embodied existence.

Not everyone agrees though. Thus Steven Hales argues that regardless of how well supported, empirically, the particular cases are, it is still not rational to believe they support reincarnation.

The reason given is that we know of no mechanism by which it is possible for a person to continue to exist after death or exist prior to current life. Currently popular materialist theories of mind rule out the very idea of persons existing in some other incarnation.

I don't think this objection is telling because (1) there are good philosophical reasons to object to materialism, appart from appeal to reincarnation type cases (2) It seems that mind body dualism is a theory, and as such is able to make sense of how it is a person can exist prior to or after their current life.

It might be objected that dualism is not a scientific theory, but neither is materialism. The most that can be said is that materialism is suggested by some current scientific research. The empirical data is compatible with dualism, materialism or even idealism.

Cases of the reincarnation type would count as evidence even if we agreed with Hume regarding miracles. Reincarnation, if it occurs, would violate no law of nature.

Materialism lies coiled in the heart of dualism

Fichte draws a distinction between idealism and "dogmatism." The dogmatist holds that we should begin with assumption of mind independent matter and try to account for everything else in terms of that. The idealist starts with consciousness. According to Fichte, these are the two possible starting points. you start with yourself, or you start with material objects. But what of dualism?

Dualism is an unstable position. It constitutes an attempt to fit the real mind in an assumed world of objective material things. Some dualists are content to simply allow the existence of nonphysical mental properties. More robust dualists consider the mind to be a thing, a substance that exists alongside material objects. Whichever variety of dualism you choose, the underlying assumption is that one can think of the mind using the same sort of ontological categories that y ou use when considering material things. To be sure, mental properties are not physical properties. Minds are not physical things. But they are still properties and things and in these innocent sounding words there lies loads of assumptions.

In Being and Time Heidegger recognized these assumptions in his critique of Descartes. Descartes was mislead, Heidegger argues, because he took as his paradigm for existence material things and, realizing that the mind is among these, categorized the mind as another kind of thing, a thing exists alongside run of the mill material objects. But to do this is to miss out on the fact that the mind is not just another kind of thing that is externally related to the physical universe. In Heidegger's terminology the mind is essentially characterized by "Being-in-the-world." We might drop the indiosyncratic language and say instead, the mind is necessarily intentional.

But to say just this and then go on our way is not enough. When we think deeply about intentionality, we come to see that its not just a special mental property. Intentionality is an internal relationship between mind and world, consciousness and its objects. To understand what i am doing now, typing this blog post, I need to bring in things in the world. my fingers, the keyboard, the computer screen. Even if my current typing is in a dream, it is still the case that my dream world is part of my mental state, part of my consciousness. To try to seperate these, to try to replace the esential intentional connection with something causal to pass over the phenmena at hand. To think of intentionality as a property my mind has is to already distort it, since intentionality is an internal relationship to the world. It is Heideggers "Being-In." If we call it a property at all its a property had not by mind alone but by mind and world. It is a way of expressing a primordial essential linkage. If one comes to think of intentionality in this way, as a property not of mind alone but of mind/world, one has already taken the leap and become an idealist!

So a dualist has a choice. She can come to grips with the essential intentionality of consciousness and move away from dualist towards idealism. Or she can view the mind as things like material things with weird properties. The second alternative is what grounds the mind body problem and explains the strong temptation some people feel towards materialism. One needs to find a way of fiting this weird mind thing into an already assumed universe of externally related physical objects. One comes to think of the mind as a sort of appendage to the body, like those thought baloons that cartoon characters sometimes have. So conceived the dialectical preasure to minimize or remove the mind, to make it epiphenomenal or identical to material processes, is enormous.

Even a subtle thinker like Thomas Nagle has this difficulty. Nagle shows an unusual sensitivity to the reality of subjectivity. And yet one feels that for Nagle subjectivity is still just one thing, one added element that has to be somehow meshed in with mind independent objective reality.

What is required is a radical shift of perspective. Instead of asking how the mind fits into the physical world, we should ask how it is that the physical world comes to have any existence for a mind.

Back to Kant!