"Explanation" of reincarnation

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One night shortly after the beginning of the pandemic, I had a dream where someone asked me for a scientific "explanation" of reincarnation. The person and I were standing in an empty room across from a yellow-painted wall. I gave an explanation, which I had never consciously thought of in waking life. When I woke up, I wrote it down (below) as closely as I could to the spirit of the dream. 

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As a Buddhist, I find reincarnation a useful framework for understanding my life. As a scientist, I find scientific knowledge and approaches to be useful framework for understanding the material world.  I don't think anything in Buddhism requires scientific explanation, and I don't think anything in science requires religious justification! I don't know whether the Buddhist concept of reincarnation has a scientific basis, and my opinion is that it isn't important. But I did think the dream was interesting, so here ya go.

 

If I ask you "why is that wall yellow?” there are multiple “correct” levels of explanation. One is that the wall is yellow because of yellow pigment being present and reflecting yellow light. The other is that someone painted the wall yellow. You need both explanations to have a complete description: one tells you something practical / phenomenological: “yellow-ness” is an experience linked with the presence of pigment, reflection of yellow light, yellow light arriving to the eye, and our brain processing that information. However, saying that “someone painted it” is also explanatory: yellow pigment is a complex structure, unlikely to spontaneously form out of randomly arranged atoms. By saying that someone painted it, we say that the yellow pigment came from somewhere else, maybe from a source more suited to generating it (like a turmeric plant), and just give an explanation for how this particular wall came to be yellow. Both explanations are “correct” and give pieces of the whole picture.

 

That color is part of our experience is indisputable. Likewise, continuity of awareness—“consciousness”—is also indisputably part of our experience. Let us ask, “Why are we conscious?” As with color, the explanation inevitably gives insight into what this element of experience we call “consciousness” is.

 

Fundamentally, we can say “consciousness” might be composed of extraordinarily complex energetic structures sustained by neurons firing in the brain. We suspect it cannot just be the neurons, because no one has ever experienced consciousness in a brain without electricity. These are the “pigments” of the stream of consciousness. The neurons are like the wall that upholds the energetic structure of the mind. However, another part of “Why are we conscious?” is the “how did it become that way” part. Just as it is extraordinarily unlikely for a wall (a relatively simple structure) to spontaneously produce yellow pigment, we could argue that it is extraordinarily unlikely for neurons to spontaneously give rise to consciousness. The structure of neurons can clearly support those energetic structures—that is clearly their design, just as the wall can clearly support yellow paint. However, how particular energetic structures came to exist on those neurons is not explained by the structure of neurons being able to support them. 

 

Not knowing what happens to these energetic structures after death, we might be inclined to say they appear spontaneously at birth and disappear forever at death. However, what if there is a hidden, yet unseen structure that can also carry complex energetic structures—consciousness—in addition to the brain? Such a structure might have a role in putting those energetic structures there at birth, and transferring them at death, like a metal can also holds paint temporarily and can be used to transfer it from place to place. This is not so unreasonable: we already know the electromagnetic field is an invisible, information-carrying structure that we use all the time to transfer energetic structures from one device to another (phone to phone, computer to computer). Again, the analogy is striking: clearly the computer is designed to store and display information, but that information did not spontaneously appear on the computer—it came from somewhere. While we have not yet physically identified an analogy to these information-carrying and paint-carrying devices for consciousness, we can reasonably assume it is there since consciousness is far more complex than yellow paint. And just as we assume yellow paint came from something yellow, we can assume consciousness comes from something conscious. 

 

In all this, it is essential to understand that one level of explanation does not rule out another, and that we can never find a “deepest” explanation that will not leave us with more questions. Where did the turmeric plant’s ability to make yellow come from? Maybe its DNA, a complex information-carrying structure. Where did DNA come from? Millions of years of evolution. Was that random or did the information come from somewhere else? We don’t know. The evolution of DNA over millions of years does not preclude the possibility that it was not random, just as saying “my wall has been yellow since I moved in” does not preclude the possibility that someone painted it before I arrived.

 

Let us be reasonable about what we know and don’t know. Where was the yellow paint of your consciousness before it was held on the wall of your neurons? Maybe in another consciousness-carrying device — a human body.

 

Those familiar with the second law of thermodynamics in physics will know that explanations via probabilities of events are commonplace, and that low entropy structures tend to come from lower-entropy structures. In other words, order comes from more ordered things, rather than out of disorder. If there is a field that can hold energetic structures we call consciousness, outside of the brain—which is possible given that the EM field already does this with the complex information we store on computers—then energy patterns entering the brain from this field is more probable than them spontaneously arising. This would make the transference of consciousness at death scientifically likely.