Grantywanty
Registered Senior Member
You have told me what you don't know. Can you now please tell me what you do know and how you know it, as I'm trying to understand reincarnation.
In my close association with Hindus about twenty years ago I was never told that there was a limit to the source of new souls. Some talked about new souls, versus old souls - ie. souls that had been through many incarnations. The impression I got was that the universe was breaking into souls and these would often start at the beginning and work their way back to 'getting it'. I never got the impression any of them thought their was some limit on the number of souls.
I believe in reincarnation and not in the same way they tended to. I also abhor the caste system and the way it and notions of entitlement and blame (karma) get mingled with reincarnation theories for a lot of Hindus. My version is different, but my sense is that would be better placed on the religion forum.
I accept your point about animals being broken and regenerated, earthworms come to mind, but such animals are surely special cases. I suggest you are arguing from the particular to the general without discussing possible intermediate phases. You also seem to assume that animals and souls are in the same category, something that many would deny.
I also accept your point about our Newtonian ( mechanistic ) view of things ,because that is all we have to go on. I am not aware that QM or Einstein suggest there is anything other than a physical universe. Both represent attempts to explain how " matter " behaves.
I doubt many physicists would say that Newton's view is all we have to go on things or that mechanistic views of the universe are all we have to go on. Words like physical and matter take on very different qualities in both QM and Einstein's theories as does the boundary between energy and matter. I think the Newtonian model, which we have not outrgrown as metaphysics, gives us a map of the world as distinct objects with hard boundaries acted on by forces. Energies and matter are different things. Local effects are the only possible ones. Stability is the norm affected by forces on these discrete objects. The QM universe is not like this. It would be a challenge for me to go into this and show how one can find transformations of patterns like reincarnation as less strange once you start seeing the world from a more QM perspective. Fortunately it would be off topic.
Perhaps a better metaphor than the animals being split would be from information technology. Oddly enough large numbers of scientists and lay science groupies are fascinated by notions of being uploaded and copied and a great many of them seem to see this as not being a loss of identity, or at least that there might be a way to do this without identity loss - not simply pattern recreation but actual transformation of the self.
Rupert Sheldrake's work comes to mind where life forms are fields as well as objects. Perhaps the fields collect the bodies around them. I think that would be closer to how I think of it.