In his 2005 book Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker of the University of Virginia presents an overview of more than 40 years of research into children's reports of past-life memories. He argues that the cases give evidence for the reincarnation.
For example, a young child (called Sam in the study) born a few months after his grandfather’s death reported at the age of 3 as his father changed his diaper, that he remembered changing his father’s diaper. A few years later he recognized himself in old photos of his grandfather he had never seen and recalled the murder of his grandfather’s sister even though the boy had no knowledge of these events.
Is Sam the same person as his grandfather?
ReplyDeleteThe reincarnation is the process or the notion that after death, your soul leaves your physical body and re locates into another being. Now the question is are you still the same person? In the short paragraph, a young boy recalls the actions and memories of grandfather. The things he recalls are memories that the boy would not have known. Now the question presents itself, are the boy and the grandpa the same person? Now, the memory view tells us that if person A remembers the same experiences as person B then they are the same person. The Son (person A), recalls the same experiences and actions as his grandfather (person B), so according to this theory they are in fact the same person, mean they have the same soul meaning, therefore proving reincarnation to in fact be real. Now you could also justify this by saying it is a weird phenomenon, but according to the memory view, it is not. As lock says, wherever the psychology of memories go, that is where the person will go. An earlier reading of the Prince and the Cobbler furthers this. Like in the Prince in the Cobbler, your self-identity is different then the perspective of others. If I am seen as the Boy, but if I have the memories and the Intel of the Grandfather then do I go off the prospect of others, or is it how Is it in fact my own self-identification?
According to the memory view, Sam can be the same person as his deceased grandfather because he shares experiences. Again the memory view is A and B are the same person if and only if A remembers the experiences of B. This study explains that Sam, a young child, recounts events that happened in his deceased grandfather’s life who he never met. Examples of events Sam recounted include the memory of changing his own father’s diaper, pointing out his grandfather (or himself) in photos that Sam had never been shown, and recounting a specific event of his grandfather's life. Recounting the specific event, the murder of his grandfather’s sister, and the recognition of the photo are both extremely important in deciding whether Sam is in fact the grandfather. The study specifically stated with both pieces of evidence that Sam never encountered the photo or was told about the murder by anyone else. This proves that Sam could not have fabricated the story or lied about remembering because he never knew about the examples in the first place. For example, say that at a family dinner a daughter was told a story about how on her mother’s fifth birthday she remembered that she made a huge mess with cake with all her friends. The daughter goes on to tell this story to her friends at school. In this example, there is no way that the daughter can be the same person as her mother because she was told and retold a memory instead of remembering it herself. The family of the daughter knows that she cannot be her mother because they were all told the memory. Additionally, if the daughter recounts it and claims it to be her own memory the family is able to determine it is not her memory by checking with the mother. In Sam’s case, he can be his grandfather because of the memory view and the fact that he was recounting memories he was not aware of in the first place.
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