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16th February 2008, 11:57 AM | #1 |
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Reincarnation as a trivial scientific fact
In the thread Demography of Japan - Evidence of Reincarnation I showed that the demographic evolution of Japan constitutes strong evidence for demographic saturation and therefore also for reincarnation. Because of the poor quality of most posts in that thread I start here a new one.
Population of Japan in million and percentage of its current population (source): 2000 126.9 _99.3% | 2003 127.7 _99.9% | 2006 127.8 100.0%Whereas the population of Japan e.g. increased from 1970 to 1975 by 8.2 million, the increase from 2003 to 2008 is only 0.1 million. Japan is the best example to test the saturation-thesis because migration is very low, and migration is the most important factor confounding demographic saturation. In a saturated population, the number of births is limited by the number of deaths, because all souls are alive and no child can be born without a soul. Isn't it a pity that such a simple, fundamental and far-reaching insight as the empirical reality of souls is ignored, and this only because of the quasi-religious prejudices of the currently prevailing reductionist materialism? The effects of saturation will become even stronger in the coming years, and not only in the case of human population and fertility, but also in the food production. If for example the worldwide pig population is already saturated, then an increase in the number of pigs in the developing countries is only possible at the expense of bigs in the developed countries. Such a decrease in the developed countries has already become reality in the case of honey bees. No species can grow beyond a saturation of 100% (in the short term). Also the spread of diseases such as diabetes can result from a shortage of corresponding psychons (enzyme-souls). There have never been so many humans living all at the same time. In addition to that, the average body size of our species has also been increasing in recent times (a body of 100 kg needs obviously more enzymes than a body of 50 kg). Never in human evolution so many enzymes have been needed in order to perform all the many biochemical tasks of the corresponding world population. It is easy to ridicule the notion that enzymes can only efficiently work if they are animated by psychons (souls) having learned their tasks over millions of years of biological evolution. But from the point of view of pure reason (Kant) the hypothesis that dead particles are able to perform such complicated tasks as e.g. DNA wrapping and replication is simply untenable. Cheers, Wolfgang |
16th February 2008, 12:02 PM | #2 |
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16th February 2008, 12:06 PM | #3 |
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I'm curious about something, if you don;t mind my asking. I seem to recall that life expectancy today is greater than in previous ages.
That would suggest to me that diseases killed people even faster back in those days than today. So, when there were plenty of surplus psychons to go around, there was more disease, on a per capita basis. How does that fit in with the theory of diseases being caused by psychon shortage? |
16th February 2008, 12:07 PM | #4 |
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16th February 2008, 12:52 PM | #5 |
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Well, this is "wogoga".
http://groups.google.com/group/talk....51111710c31874 Really nifty video at the bottom. |
16th February 2008, 01:31 PM | #6 |
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17th February 2008, 12:11 AM | #7 |
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17th February 2008, 06:27 AM | #8 |
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This almost works......... as a simplified analogous fable about over-population, complete with animal protagonists.
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17th February 2008, 08:54 AM | #9 |
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I'm curious to understand something:
Does the total bio-mass of the planet remain fairly stable? Or is it growing, as it must have from the early days of life on Earth? Is there an upper-limit on the bio-mass? Or is the entire planet gradually becoming more organic? If there is a stasis, then the Hindu type reincarnation of souls makes a better case then the Bhuddist type reincarnation. More pigs means less squirrels, because the squirrel souls have evolved into pig-ville. Eventually, it will be all humans; eating other humans? The fully evolved state of affairs? |
17th February 2008, 11:16 AM | #10 |
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So is the number of souls limited by "race", by geographic location, or globally? The OP claims all three. They can't all be correct.
How are the new born children of "mixed race" or who's parents move to another country or leave the planet assigned their souls? Just asking questions. |
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17th February 2008, 02:37 PM | #11 |
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This might be the all-time worst web-site to be asking theological questions.
If it wasn't, I ask this one: Why does God limp? |
17th February 2008, 03:12 PM | #12 |
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Wrong. It happens all the time. For example, I was born without a soul. It certainly has its advantages, the least of which is that it's far less baggage to carry around, and I get to live without the burden of original sin. Plus it helps me avoid detection whenever there's a dementor attack.
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17th February 2008, 03:14 PM | #13 |
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Psychon-deficit diseases
Psychon shortage is only a problem in what we can call psychon-deficit diseases. And only future research can show how widespread such diseases actually are. In many degenerative diseases such a psychon deficit could be involved. A sine-qua-non prerequisite for classifying a disease as a psychon-deficit disease is an increase in the relative incidence of the disease with increasing population figures. If it is actually true that "the first historical account of muscular dystrophy appeared in 1830, when Sir Charles Bell wrote an essay about an illness that caused progressive weakness in boys", then it stands to reason to consider muscular dystrophy a psychon-deficit disease. The biochemistry of muscles resp. the work of the involved enzymes (proteins) is astonishingly complex. The fact that the corresponding "conditions are inherited, and the different muscular dystrophies follow various inheritance patterns" is consistent with the psychon thesis, because to different alleles of a given gene locus can correspond different psychon variants (i.e. related psychon species). If e.g. allele-x psychons of a given enzyme (gene locus) are already saturated (i.e. they all are already incarnated resp. working somewhere), but the human population with two copies of this allele-x (homozygosity) is still increasing in number, then a shortage of working enzymes (for the corresponding gene locus) in this population is an unavoidable outcome, leading to health problems in at least some members of this population. A person, having only one such allele-x copy and as the second copy an allele-y, does not risk such psychon-deficit problems, if the allele-y psychon-population is not yet saturated, because there are still free allele-y psychons around, being able to do the work. Cheers, Wolfgang Isn't it strange that people believing in all the many animals (epicycles) of the current particle zoo of orthodox physics (e.g. neutrinos, quarks, gravitons, gluons) invoke Occam's razor against the wonderfully simple and elegant psychon concept, having explicative power from biochemistry to one of the oldest philosophical problems, the body-mind problem? |
17th February 2008, 03:21 PM | #14 |
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I just won a side bet that wogoga's next post would include colored text.
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17th February 2008, 06:14 PM | #15 |
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17th February 2008, 06:43 PM | #16 |
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17th February 2008, 09:08 PM | #17 |
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17th February 2008, 09:09 PM | #18 |
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18th February 2008, 09:29 AM | #19 |
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18th February 2008, 10:34 AM | #20 |
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Wogoga, the Earth's population in 1820 was about 1,000,000,000 people, some of whom had MD. Today it's about 6,000,000,000 people. Why aren't there 1,000,000,000 healthy people today---sharing the original stockpile of anti-MS psychons---and 5,000,000,000 with muscular dystrophy?
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18th February 2008, 01:56 PM | #21 |
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That could well be the case. Maybe the main reason of the spreading of deserts (e.g. Sahara) after the last ice age is primarily caused be a lack of enough bio-mass. If the vegetation spreads to regions near the poles, then a shortage of needed psychons can be the result in regions near the equator, where survival conditions have become more difficult. Only 18'000 years ago, the location I sit now (Vaduz, Liechtenstein, Europe) was covered by hundreds of meters of ice. BTW, the always changing climate on Earth has been a main driving force of evolution in general, and the last glacial period of around 100,000 years a main driving force of our evolution in special. "The last glacial period was the most recent glacial period within the current ice age, occurring in the Pleistocene epoch. It began about 110,000 years ago and ended between 10,000 and 15,000 BP. During this period there were several changes between glacier advance and retreat." (Wikipedia) "Unlike the psychons of atoms and simple molecules, the more complex psychons of enzymes, cells and animals evolved over billions of years on earth. Because of the limits in space and other resources, only a limited number of every kind of psychons could evolve. This limitation is empirically relevant. Unlike the output of chemical production processes, the output of biotechnological production processes cannot always be increased just as one likes." (Empirical Relevance of Psychons) "The saturation thesis is relevant not only to humans but to all organisms. It can hardly be denied that many animal populations remain rather constant in size without Malthusian struggles for survival. There are also limits on animal breeding and plant cultivation. There is even a saturation for pathogens like bacteria and viruses. A pathogen of a local epidemic cannot be a threat to mankind, nor can genetically engineered pathogens." (The Demographic Saturation Theory) Probability theory can easily resolve such questions. "According to the saturation model, the endpoint of demographic transition is a fertility oscillating near direct-replacement fertility, resulting in a rather constant population. In reality, however, the effect of direct-replacement fertility after demographic transition can interfere with other effects. Despite being already saturated, populations of child-oriented countries or groups, having lower prevalence of contraception and abortion, can still increase at the expense of evolutionarily related less child-oriented countries or groups. The reason is simple: evolutionarily related countries or groups can be seen as subpopulations of a unit, having as a whole a maximum potential population. So if something hinders one subpopulation from replacing its deaths by births then another subpopulation can further grow at the expense of the first. The more evolutionarily-related subpopulations are, the easier they can grow at the expense of each other." (Classification in subpopulations and evolutionary relatedness) "The most important long-ranging factor confounding the demographic saturation model is migration." (The effect of migration on direct-replacement fertility) Cheers, Wolfgang |
18th February 2008, 08:08 PM | #22 |
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18th February 2008, 08:10 PM | #23 |
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18th February 2008, 09:05 PM | #24 |
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I just read through this thread, and damn is it good stuff. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. I hope that's not a symptom of oncoming psychon deficiency... |
18th February 2008, 10:23 PM | #25 |
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18th February 2008, 10:33 PM | #26 |
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Mein Gott!
Where do they come from? Has every third poster here got some batguano crazy idea of an alternate universe, supported only by ridiculous hypotheses fabricated out of thin air? Mods - yet another thread that belongs in Gen-Skep. There's no math, science, technology, or medicine in this theory. (The mere use of numbers does not a mathematics thread make.) Wolfgang, Are these your own creation or are they the creations of some guru/master/brahmin, somewhere. Certainly interesting, but purely as a work of fiction. Theory: Some Creative Writing 101 teacher somewhere has assigned his/her students to come "pull off an hysterically ridiculous fantasy" on a skeptics site. How else do we account for this, Eddy-P, MartinV, ... all surfacing (or re-surfacing) in the same fortnight? |
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18th February 2008, 10:49 PM | #27 |
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Hi Wolfgang,
Don't be disheartened by the laughing hyenas and dogs1, I'm with you all the way Up until the word 'therefore' Wherefore 'therefore'? __________________________________ 1 Don't be disheartened by the laughing hyenas and dogs, they're only images. Be disheartened by the way that so many people, on a sceptics forum, have no qualms taking the piss out of your unsubstantiated woo |
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18th February 2008, 11:49 PM | #28 |
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I joined these forums not long ago. I am beginning to see a pattern with the bat*poop* crazies that post here.
It seems to me that these folks seem to have insanely complicated arguments, that I think they themselves, must not fully comprehend. You are seriously trying to relate population issues with some finite amount of "soul juice" somewhere? Where is it when there is a surplus? Why can we not detect it? Why is it required and how can you prove that it exists ( aside from postdictive population related theories )? I would love to think that there is such a thing as a soul, but I think that my sentience will remain a mystery to me, and my "free will" is probably just an illusion brought on by a massive amount of variables obfuscating the deterministic nature of my actions. How dreadful... |
19th February 2008, 11:54 AM | #29 |
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At first we must ask whether the premises of panpsychistic evolution are logically consistent. Apriori there is no reason to assume that panpsychism and reincarnation are worse as a foundation of a scientific theory than reductionist materialism, at least if we accept an epistemology similar to the one of Occam or Einstein. And some of the most influential thinkers of the past were panpsychists.
As long as we do not detect logical contradictions, we must take panpsychism as seriously as reductionist materialism. So we have these two alternatives:
I wrote in 1999: "The psychon theory has very concrete consequences, for instance there must be a limit to the number of human souls, which according to the latest demographic data could be even less than 7 billion." If the current world population actually is already around 6.7 billion, then the upper limit is rather 7.5 than 7 billion. Yet there is a big uncertainty in population figures. A good example is Bhutan: "The Royal Government of Bhutan lists their country's population as 752,700 (2003). The CIA Factbook estimates the population at 2,327,849. What accounts for this discrepancy? One explanation given inside Bhutan is that the higher CIA numbers ultimately trace back to an inflated population number the Bhutanese government supplied to the United Nations in the early 1970s in order to gain entry into that body (the UN reportedly had a cutoff population of one million at that time -- see micronation for justifications in support of such a minimum). According to this theory the CIA population experts have retained this original inflated number year after year while adjusting it each year for normal population growth." (Wikipedia)And what about 'demographic smoothing' transforming "Figure 1, Population of India, 2001 Census, Unsmoothed" into "Figure 2, Population of India, 2001 Census, Smoothed" in The Future Population of India? In the light of "An indicator of near saturation of a population is a decline in birth number despite an increase in women in reproductive age."the difference between Figure 2 and Figure 1 is quite fundamental. Are there actually plausible facts making reasonable such a big transformation of 'unsmoothed' data? Cheers, Wolfgang |
19th February 2008, 12:27 PM | #30 |
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What is your aim in this thread?
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19th February 2008, 04:00 PM | #31 |
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20th February 2008, 01:26 AM | #32 |
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20th February 2008, 05:46 AM | #33 |
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If reductionist materialism is such a self-evident fact, as you assume, please provide a falsifiable prediction. The predictive power of The Psychon Theory is much stronger than the predictive power of Darwinism. The reason is simple: the number of psychons having evolved on earth is limited. And isn't it obvious that the claim that only around 7 or 7.5 billion human souls have evolved is a falsifiable prediction? If the current demographic projections of UN come true, then my theory is simply wrong. Cheers, Wolfgang |
20th February 2008, 07:02 AM | #34 |
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Evasion attempt noted. Straw man noted.
Quote:
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20th February 2008, 07:20 AM | #35 |
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That's what I was going to say. Wogoga, you'd be doing yourself a big favour if you stopped all the waffle and long words. It doesn't make your ideas any more valid and it doesn't make you look clever, it just looks like you think you can fool people into taking you seriously by using long words. Everything you have said is nonsense, and will remain that way unless you provide actual evidence, rather than more waffle.
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20th February 2008, 07:22 AM | #36 |
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20th February 2008, 08:09 AM | #37 |
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Doesn't that kind of thing happen at the level of other living things, such as algae? Insects? You appear to be suggesting that all living things are ensouled, but is there a finite number of souls to go around there too? If so, what is that number? Is it even calculable, and if calculable is it useful? If not, then you need to explain the theory that humans alone have limited access to souls in some other way, because everything living has DNA, and if you redefine soul to mean life, then you have no theory; because if reincarnation exists across the boundaries of species (even if we exclude plants), how could the human population be limited in any practical way? There are probably more mosquitoes in my back yard on a summer day than there are people in Tokyo. A shift in the relative numbers that doubled the human population on earth would be trivial if all living things have souls.
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20th February 2008, 08:16 AM | #38 |
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Huh?
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20th February 2008, 08:27 AM | #39 |
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20th February 2008, 06:26 PM | #40 |
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