Submitted by lettuceLeafer in Science (edited )
So let's say I eat some lentils and I'm in caloric excess. The carbs of the lentils get turned into fat in my body and the protein turns into my muscles. The lentil plant died and part of it had become me. On some level the lentil plant has become conscious bc it is me.
Let's say I die and none of my friend will be cool and dump my dead body in the wood to decompose but they cremate me. Then dump me into a compost pile. Then some white button mushroom spores start growing on the ashes then make a fruiting body after decomposing my ashes. I have on some level become the same mushroom.
Then a deer or something eats said mushroom and the carbon n stuff that used to be my body gets turned into a deer.
The fact of life is if things are allowed to decompose life dies then turns into other life. We are nothing more than an amalgamation of a bunch of dead body all fused together to be conscious. So prob not quite what people mean when they see reincarnation but like people's bodies do turn into other living things.
CosmicMessenger wrote
Sure, but that seems like a conversation more suited for metaphysics than science. Before we can even formalize reincarnation into an empirically observed process, we have to state what we're even observing. What measurements will tell you about consciousness? What are the relations (mathematical or otherwise), that can be used to experimentally verify consciousness? Is consciousness an amount? An ordering? Is it an object? If so, is it simple or composite? Are quanta of consciousness unique or indistinguishable? Is it an emergent phenomenon, or is it foundational? These questions need to be addressed, if a scientific study about consciousness is to be constructed. All I've heard from people talking about consciousness in the spiritual sense don't specify enough to give a useful account of how to formally define it, so that it can be observed and experimentally measured.
I don't think a metaphysical account of consciousness and the general concept of things turning into other things is rigorous enough to be able to test or observe. Also, I feel we should be very careful about the wording of "scientific fact". In my experience, anything that I've come to know as "scientific fact" has always had counter-examples and nuances which arents addressed in the statement of the "fact".