There's also the question of what the "I" would be which had the connection to the person who died, or more generally of which different kinds of "I" would turn out to have which connections to which persons who had died. Now, we don't really have the introspective skills or the information needed to do any particularly good job of breaking open these questions. However, ultimately, such questions would have to find their ground in the same continuum of principles that questions about what the nature and relevance would be of connections between the steps of a present life and details of a past one would also have to find their ground in.
One way to start there would be to ask, "what policy would I have ideally advised myself to follow, with respect to acting on information about past lives -- or even ordinary memories -- that might unreflectively have seemed to be 'mine', if I'd been 'one' or 'both' of a twin partly conjoined at the brain, or if I were to 'be' 'a' severe epilepsy patient who'd just had a surgery to sever 'my' corpus callosum, or indeed if I were one of two conjoined twins that had been joined at the brain but then surgically separated, or if I were to have transcranial magnetic stimulation suspending the operations of one or another of my mental faculties?"
And then, if you got anywhere with those questions, you might think through, say, the reports about the effects of heart transplants.
I expect that some of the important underlying entities in abstractions like 'I' or 'my past' are smaller context-dependent bits of behavioral tendencies and acquired knowledge and skills, plus little bits of learned information about the typical consequences of loosing or restraining such tendencies. And if I was designing a system of karma, one of my big concerns would be to come up with a way to even-handedly promote or inhibit the propagation or alteration of such little bits of tendency, according to their demonstrated (even if only presumably-inevitably contextual) fitness for whatever larger purpose I might have had in view. Reading between the lines of this universe and its apparent karma system, the corresponding hypothetical larger purpose seems to partly cash out in terms of its implications as something like, "don't waste too much attention trying to work out out how to build systems out of propensities that would be ultimately self-defeating and make the system non-functional if the system were larger", except a lot more Taoist than that formulation might make it sound like.
Maybe that's not speaking to your direct questions, but your questions are partly made out of some underlying questions that are interconnected. I hope I have managed to sketch how those questions are interconnected.
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branchandroot
Re: Reincarnation
Date: 2025-05-19 08:25 pm (UTC)One way to start there would be to ask, "what policy would I have ideally advised myself to follow, with respect to acting on information about past lives -- or even ordinary memories -- that might unreflectively have seemed to be 'mine', if I'd been 'one' or 'both' of a twin partly conjoined at the brain, or if I were to 'be' 'a' severe epilepsy patient who'd just had a surgery to sever 'my' corpus callosum, or indeed if I were one of two conjoined twins that had been joined at the brain but then surgically separated, or if I were to have transcranial magnetic stimulation suspending the operations of one or another of my mental faculties?"
And then, if you got anywhere with those questions, you might think through, say, the reports about the effects of heart transplants.
I expect that some of the important underlying entities in abstractions like 'I' or 'my past' are smaller context-dependent bits of behavioral tendencies and acquired knowledge and skills, plus little bits of learned information about the typical consequences of loosing or restraining such tendencies. And if I was designing a system of karma, one of my big concerns would be to come up with a way to even-handedly promote or inhibit the propagation or alteration of such little bits of tendency, according to their demonstrated (even if only presumably-inevitably contextual) fitness for whatever larger purpose I might have had in view. Reading between the lines of this universe and its apparent karma system, the corresponding hypothetical larger purpose seems to partly cash out in terms of its implications as something like, "don't waste too much attention trying to work out out how to build systems out of propensities that would be ultimately self-defeating and make the system non-functional if the system were larger", except a lot more Taoist than that formulation might make it sound like.
Maybe that's not speaking to your direct questions, but your questions are partly made out of some underlying questions that are interconnected. I hope I have managed to sketch how those questions are interconnected.