# Humanities & Anthropology > Philosophy >  Infinite Reincarnation of One's Self, and the World Around Them

## Jovialis

This is something that someone had proposed to me a while ago, and it sort of stuck in my mind. What do you think?

-We are composed of matter that happened to come together to form who we are today.

-After we die and decompose, what is the chance of the same exact matter ever reforming exactly as it is supposed to be? Even the entire world and galaxy around us?

-Even if it was an unfathomably small chance, over the course of infinite-time it must happen again; It had to have happened already.

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## elghund

> This is something that someone had proposed to me a while ago, and it sort of stuck in my mind. What do you think?
> 
> -We are composed of matter that happened to come together to form who we are today.
> 
> -After we die and decompose, what is the chance of the same exact matter ever reforming exactly as it is supposed to be? Even the entire world and galaxy around us?
> 
> -Even if it was an unfathomably small chance, over the course of infinite-time it must happen again; It had to have happened already.


Maybe. 

I like Alan Watts's musings on this subject.

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## LeBrok

> This is something that someone had proposed to me a while ago, and it sort of stuck in my mind. What do you think?
> 
> -We are composed of matter that happened to come together to form who we are today.
> 
> -After we die and decompose, what is the chance of the same exact matter ever reforming exactly as it is supposed to be? Even the entire world and galaxy around us?
> 
> -Even if it was an unfathomably small chance, over the course of infinite-time it must happen again; It had to have happened already.


Perhaps only if you believe in infinite multiverse. Besides, at the time we are born we are composed of mostly different atoms that we die with. There is constant churn of atoms in our body.

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## davef

A dead person won't ever unless somehow his/her decomposed corpse somehow ends up splitting off as an egg with the right genetic material (within a mother of said genetic material) and the sperm that successfully fertilizes it. What's the chance of that?

Where will that meat sack end up? Especially after a good part of it is maggot lunch? Why should it ever revive or exist again?

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## Jovialis

> Perhaps only if you believe in infinite multiverse. Besides, at the time we are born we are composed of mostly different atoms that we die with. There is constant churn of atoms in our body.






I do think that such a thing as a multiverse may exist.

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## Maciamo

> This is something that someone had proposed to me a while ago, and it sort of stuck in my mind. What do you think?
> 
> -We are composed of matter that happened to come together to form who we are today.
> 
> -After we die and decompose, what is the chance of the same exact matter ever reforming exactly as it is supposed to be? Even the entire world and galaxy around us?
> 
> -Even if it was an unfathomably small chance, over the course of infinite-time it must happen again; It had to have happened already.


I thought about this with exactly the same argument (infinite time) when I was a teenager, and I haven't found anything to disprove it yet. It's just that the timescale involved would be so huge as to be completely unfathomable by humans. Out of the atoms that constitute our body, only those in the neurons are relevant, as the nervous system is what is responsible for our mind, senses and consciousness. However, there are close to no chances that these atoms recombine ever again on this Earth with the same DNA and all. That means that we will have to wait to our part of the Universe to come together again and re-explode as a Big Bang countless times until the conditions are similar enough to recreate the same Earth. As unlikely as that sounds, we would still need the very same atoms, and those atoms will eventually need to be exactly those used to recreate our second body's nervous system. The chances of all this happening being so infinitesimally tiny that there are just no number fitting in a human mind to imagine the time needed. 

It gets more complicated if our universe is like a semi-closed system within a larger multiverse, and that multiple universes can in some way exchange energy and atoms.

Some people say that consciousness is merely an illusion anyway. It may not be necessary for the atoms to remain the same in our brain. In fact, even though most neurons remain the same throughout our life, many of them die day after day as we age, as new ones are sometimes created. Besides, neurons are constantly modified every time they fire or create new synaptic connections. Atoms of Na+ and K+ are absorbed and evacuated during depolarisation and repolarisation when ion channels open and close as the membrane reaches the threshold potential and fires, in response to a signal from another neuron. So even our neurons are not stable in terms of atoms. Consciousness is one of the most difficult things to understand. I am still looking for an explanation as to how I can feel a few seconds or minutes in advance when a close relative or friend is going to call me (and vice versa sometimes). Why is it that I can often feel that I have received an email when my phone is off, and when I check on my PC I just received it at that moment? But it only works with people I know well. It's like our minds are connected somehow. How does that fit in our understanding of consciousness?

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## Jovialis

^^Once I had sent someone a very extensive text message, asking them a detailed question. They responded within a few seconds of it being sent, with a detailed response. For the time it would have taken to read it, think of the response and type it, seemed too fast. It was very bizarre.

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## Johane Derite

Physical reincarnation/resurrection is irrelevant. 

Hypothetically, if an instant clone machine existed, and you stepped into it and
out came a identical clone with every single neuron and cell in the same position and everything as you (including your memories) that clone
would still not be you technically. They would feel exactly the same as you and have all the same memories, but their history would be 
different on the causal chain from yours. You would not be inhabiting the same consciousness as the clone of yourself, thus he would be an "other".

Same goes for a reincarnation scenario, if a person 1 million years from now wakes up with all your memories and body, he would still be "other" to you. 

Unless there is an immortal element that is attached to the continuity of individual consciousness (like a soul) then reincarnation/resurrection is eternally 
irrelevant and self undermined. I think brain trauma victims who lose their memory and thus their identity are testaments to the lack of such an element.

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## Jovialis

> Physical reincarnation/resurrection is irrelevant. 
> 
> Hypothetically, if an instant clone machine existed, and you stepped into it and
> out came a identical clone with every single neuron and cell in the same position and everything as you (including your memories) that clone
> would still not be you technically. They would feel exactly the same as you and have all the same memories, but their history would be 
> different on the causal chain from yours. You would not be inhabiting the same consciousness as the clone of yourself, thus he would be an "other".
> 
> Same goes for a reincarnation scenario, if a person 1 million years from now wakes up with all your memories and body, he would still be "other" to you. 
> 
> ...


Yes, but that would be a duplicate. In this scenario, it's exactly your original parts reassembling. But even so, we would have no recollection of the past life.

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## davef

You'd have to reincarnate through reproduction. That matter that makes up your dead body would have to be picked up by and exist within other people. This same matter did exist outside other organisms before, maybe before the first living thing came to be I guess, so perhaps the same chain of events that passed it along from the first micro organisms to your parents and finally yourself would have to repeat. My two pennies

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## paul333

Not sure about re-incarnation, but I read somewhere that carbon from human cremations in the UK, was traced and found on leaves or trees in America, not sure if carbon contains any evidence or chemical remains of an individual, but if plants such as trees etc use carbon for growth, then it opens a door for continuity in some form.

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## Maciamo

> Physical reincarnation/resurrection is irrelevant. 
> 
> Hypothetically, if an instant clone machine existed, and you stepped into it and
> out came a identical clone with every single neuron and cell in the same position and everything as you (including your memories) that clone
> would still not be you technically. They would feel exactly the same as you and have all the same memories, but their history would be 
> different on the causal chain from yours. You would not be inhabiting the same consciousness as the clone of yourself, thus he would be an "other".


That's true. But what makes us feel like we are us and not someone else? Jovialis was saying that it might be the atoms themselves, and not just the DNA or position of the neurons in the brain. After all the brain reshapes itself all the time based on our everyday experiences, but we still feel like we are ourselves. Identical twins share the same genome but feel like separate individuals. Nevertheless, it seems that identical twins feel much more "connected" with one another than with other individuals. They can feel each others' pain and emotions, and many experience some sort of intuition about the other at a distance, like when I explained above that I can feel when someone is about to call me. So it may be that DNA can somehow link people "wirelessly" as if the two consciousness were gently interconnected. I can't explain it yet. It may have something to do with brain waves, at least when they are physically close to each other. No idea what it could be over distances of dozens or hundreds of kilometres.

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## Maciamo

> Not sure about re-incarnation, but I read somewhere that carbon from human cremations in the UK, was traced and found on leaves or trees in America, not sure if carbon contains any evidence or chemical remains of an individual, but if plants such as trees etc use carbon for growth, then it opens a door for continuity in some form.


It's much easier for our body's atoms and molecules to be recycled by other life beings. It fact, that is what happens when we eat something as it is always organic matter from another life being. When we die, unless we are cremated, our bodies are decomposed by bacteria and worms, which in turn find their way in other organisms. That's the cycle of life. But I doubt that any form of consciousness can survive the experience, even if say all the atoms of the part of the brain hosting consciousness (thalamus?) were to find their way into an animal's egg and then that the equivalent part of the brain of that foetus. I just can"t see how consciousness could be stored in atoms. But as the brain changes all the time and twins can share identical DNA, neither the genome nor the brain are the answer to our feeling of uniqueness. There is still a lot we don't know.

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## FBS

Human arrogance (ego, separation, identity, or whichever way we like to think of it) has discontected us from one another. Otherwise we are all connnected on the quantum level and not only humans, but we lost these senses since we consider ourselves superior to other species and we are extremely influenced by the “memes”. Actualy we are the best vessel (our brains) for memes (information). So, reincarnation,.... naaahhh, it’s just another meme helping us not to loose our minds when realizing that we are used by “something” else, same as the belief in god and the like, ....it sounds a bit like “matrix” all over, I know...

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## Jovialis

> Human arrogance (ego, separation, identity, or whichever way we like to think of it) has discontected us from one another. Otherwise we are all connnected on the quantum level and not only humans, but we lost these senses since we consider ourselves superior to other species and we are extremely influenced by the “memes”. Actualy we are the best vessel (our brains) for memes (information). So, reincarnation,.... naaahhh, it’s just another meme helping us not to loose our minds when realizing that we are used by “something” else, same as the belief in god and the like, ....it sounds a bit like “matrix” all over, I know...


We are literally made from stardust, thus we are part of the universe trying to understand itself.

We are basically the universe becoming self-aware.

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## Carlos

As I like to have experiences I made a series of regressions to past lives with a professional, and results are obtained but as humans we have such an imaginative mind I do not know to what point we are wrapping the situations in a movie from another life or it is really true what of reincarnation.

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