Category: Metaphysics

 

While philosophers and religious thinkers have taken past lives seriously, it is usually assumed that serious scientists are happy to leave them to it. But the University of Virginia School of Medicine has applied the scientific method to this matter and has found interesting evidence that cannot be dismissed out of hand. Recently, the Washington Post did a thoughtful piece on this subject, looking at the evidence in a critical but balanced manner.

The method of testing the possibility of a past life, or at least the possession of memories from before a person was born goes back at least to Socrates. In the Meno, Socrates endeavors to argue for his doctrine of recollection. He claims that knowledge of such things as geometry and the Forms are acquired by the soul before it is embodied. People forget that they have this knowledge, but it can be restored by philosophical discussion. This, as I tell my students, can be seen as like losing files on your PC due to some corruption and then restoring them with a utility.

In the dialogue, Socrates walks Meno’s slave through a geometric exercise Because, according to Socrates, the slave did not learn geometry in this life, he must have learned it before he was born—while his soul was communing with the forms.

This, then, is the test for past lives: if a person has knowledge of a past life that they could not have acquired in this life, then that counts as evidence for a past life. Other factors, such as behavioral changes, can also serve as evidence. The Washington Post article does provide examples of cases that seem to provide evidence of such knowledge and behavior. Perhaps the best-known case is that of James Leininger. Dr. Jim Tucker provides a detailed analysis of the evidence and considers alternative explanations.

Going back to Socrates, critics respond to his argument by claiming he guided the slave through the exercise and is thus supplying the knowledge in a way that does not require any prior existence. The same concern applies to evidence of past lives: a person could be asked leading or guiding questions that make it appear that they have such knowledge. This is not to accuse people of deceit; this could happen without any such intention. But, of course, fraud is also a matter of concern. The credible investigations consider both these possibilities, and they should be given due consideration. As Hume said about miracles, we know that people lie and that can often be the most plausible explanation. Less harshly, we also know that people can unintentionally ask leading and guiding questions while we don’t know if people have past lives. So that explanation is, by default, the favored explanation until it is overturned.

Another obvious concern is that with the internet, a child could learn information that they present in a way that might seem like they are recalling a past life. Children also often pretend they are other people, be it a type of person or a specific person. The challenge is determining whether the child could have plausibly found the information and whether the behavior that seems to indicate a different personality is a matter of play or something else. By Occam’s Razor, the explanations that do not require metaphysical commitments have an initial advantage. But there are certainly metaphysical matters to consider.

Socrates presents what could be considered the standard version of reincarnation: a person is a soul, and the soul has a means of storing memories across lives. When a soul is reborn, it (might) recall some of these memories. While Socrates focused on things like the Forms, these could be mundane memories from a past life. As there are many competing accounts of the metaphysics of personhood, memory, and identity, these would all need to be considered and assessed. For example, Hume dispenses with the soul in favor of the idea that the self is a bundle of perceptions (before he concludes this matter is just a dispute over grammar). Memories are just stored perceptions, and these presumably could end up being part of a new person (or a continuation of the old).

John Locke explicitly talks about consciousness persisting or not doing so, so his theory would allow for the possibility of reincarnation. Buddhism also has a metaphysics that allows for reincarnation, albeit in a way that involves no self.

Interestingly, Dr. Tucker’s paper presents “thought bundles” or “thought pools” as possible explanations of these past life memories. The idea is that a living person connects to these bundles or pools and somehow taps the information in them. In terms of a metaphysical foundation, these could be Hume’s bundles or perhaps the remnants of a Lockean consciousness. These bundles or pools do raise many questions, such as what they are, how they would persist and how a person would access them. That said, the human brain is a known storage system for such information, and we routinely transfer information—you are experiencing this right now as you read this. But due skepticism is wise here and the idea of thought bundles existing like lost smartphones and being accessed by a mental 5G is one that should only be accepted based on adequate evidence. After all, this would seem to require that people have a form of psionics that allows them to access such information. While not impossible, since we know information can be transmitted, there does not seem to be much credible evidence for this.

In closing, as there is some credible evidence of this sort of special knowledge and metaphysical theories advanced by philosophers that would allow past lives, then this matter is worthy of due consideration.

 

While lab-grown meat is a staple chow in science fiction, researchers are working hard to make it a commercially viable product. While there are many controversial aspects to lab grown meat, one matter of dispute is whether it is meat.

As lab-grown meat startups arose, the beef industry rushed to argue that lab-grown meat should not be labeled as meat. Interestingly, legal definitions of food types do not need to correspond to ways chemists or nutritionists would define them. For example, since high fructose corn syrup has a bad reputation among consumers, the industry tried to get the name changed to “corn sugar.” To the chemist and nutritionist, high fructose corn syrup is a sugar; but the sugar industry rejects this definition—they presumably see a financial advantage in fighting this legal label. While the legal wrangling over how foods should be categorized can be interesting, it does not solve the problem of, metaphysically, what it is to be meat. This is because the legal answer is easy and obvious: it is whatever the law says, and this need have no rational foundation at all. My concern, as a philosopher, is with the issue of whether lab-grown meat is real meat.

While philosophers are often accused of lacking common sense, some philosophers think this is where philosophy should begin. That is, when trying to define what something is, a good starting point is where we already are in terms of common sense. J.S. Mill took this approach in his discussion of poetry, electing to start with the generally accepted view of poetry and working from there. This seems to be a sensible approach and will be applied to the matter of meat.

The common-sense definition of “meat” is that it is the edible flesh of an animal, most commonly the muscle tissue. While people do refer to the kernel of a nut as “nut meat”, common sense divides this sort of meat from animal meats. To illustrate, a vegan will not say, “I do not eat coconut because that is meat.” But a vegan would refuse to eat a turkey leg—because that is the meat they do not eat. As such, I will stick with animal-based meats and ignore the other uses of the term “meat.” This does mean that I am rejecting all plant-based meats. They are not, on the face of it, real meat.

On the face of it, synthetic meat would not seem to meet the common-sense definition. It is not cut from an animal since it is grown in a vat (or whatever). Thus, it would fail to be meat. On this view, it is the origin of the meat that defines it as meat. At this point, one could raise a weird sci-fi scenario: what if scientists created an animal whose body also included vegetable matter, such as potatoes growing as part of a genetically modified cow? The potatoes would be part of the animal, but they would not seem to be meat. As such, the composition of the material also matters and to be meat something must have the right composition (typically muscle tissue). On this view, composition would be a necessary condition for being meat (so cow-potatoes would not be meat). But composition would not be a sufficient condition. On this view, synthetic meat that was not cut from an animal would not be meat. While this quick and easy solution is appealing, it does not seem to be the final word.

Suppose that a cut of muscles cells is taken from a cow. This would obviously be a steak. Now suppose these meat cells were cultivated in a lab and grown into a massive slab. These cells originated from steak and are the same. As such, it would seem to be hard to claim the slab is not meat. To us an analogy, if someone took a plant cutting and grew a slab of the plant cells in the lab, it would seem undeniable that the slab would be plant. The same should also apply to meat.

There are two replies to this analogy. One is to argue that plants lack the individuality of animals and hence plant material works differently from meat. If potato was grown as a slab in the lab, it would still be potato. But meat must come from an individual animal, or it is not meat. The second reply is that the “plant” slab is not plant (to use “plant” like “meat”) since it is not coming from a plant. A slab grown from potato cells is not a potato plant and hence is not plant.

The counter to these replies is to focus on the question of what the discernible difference would be between the slabs and the plants and animals. Obviously enough, looking at them in the lab would be a dead giveaway, but that would be an unfair comparison. After all, a living cow does not look like a steak. A fair comparison would be to put a steak cut from a cow against a synthetic steak in a series of tests. Some would relate to food, such as taste testing. Some would be chemical and genetic, to see what the material is. Naturally, the tests would have to avoid being rigged. So, a test that was aimed only at telling if the meat was grown in an animal would be an example of a rigged test. If synthetic meat passed these test (it tastes like meat, has the texture of meat, looks like meat, has the amino acids of meat and so on), then it would be hard to deny that it is meat.

So far, I have only been discussing synthetic meat that can trace its origin back to non-controversial meat. But there is also the problem of completely synthetic meat. This is meat that is completely synthetic and has no causal chain linking it back to an actual animal. In the ideal, it would be chemically engineered protein that duplicates the qualities of meat. To use a science fiction example, think of the replicator from Star Trek. This fictional machine could create a perfect steak by assembling it from raw materials, no cow involved. Unless someone insists that an animal must die (or at least be cut) for meat to be meat, it would be difficult to argue that replicator meat or properly engineered protein would not be meat. After all, unless one knew that it did not come from an animal, it would pass all the empirical tests for being meat.

This does point to the obvious counter—someone could draw a line and insist that meat must, by definition, come directly from an animal to be meat. Anything else could be meat-like but would need to be distinguished from meat. This, of course, nicely mirrors what Locke said in the context of personal identity regarding the use of words, “And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases.” As such, the problem of meat could be solved by having multiple terms for various meat and meat-like things. Or we could follow the lead of Hume and conclude that “…all the nice and subtle questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.” In this case, “meat” is merely a matter of language, which is to say that the problem remains unsolved