But, Udnarik, isn't that the point of the thread? Unexplained behavior, that does not fit the makeup of a person. It's genus is, where? Or should it be when? My reaction to RFK example - you can't blame it on TV, what I watched was Saturday morning cartoons at a friends house - we didn't own a TV. My grandmother had one, but what kid could sit still for "The Edge of Night?" or Queen for a day? I had no interest in social studies or the news, I had no idea who was president, or what the parties were. Zip. And yet I knew the car coming towards me contained RFK and I stood in the middle of the street, holding my ground, making them drive around me. I am sure someone said he was coming to town and I over heard it, but still Why the protesters reaction?
Have you had a similar thing happen to you in your own life?
Here's another example - A girl, older than me was on a pay phone, upset with her boyfriend. I felt and acted on this compulsion to get on one knee and hold her hand while she was talking to him. Afterward, I was so very WTF? What in the hell did I just do? It was a dramatization of some damn thing. A bad movie? It did seem like that, but if it was, what movie? I watched stuff like Run Silent Run Deep, the 13 ghosts, the Tingler, The Fly, Thunder Road, I didn't watch weepy dramas, romances, etc. Guns, monsters, Vincent Price, Sink the Bismark were the grist in my mill.
It's that - out of left field - something or other that makes you wonder, what in the hell just happened?
Mimsey
OK, Mimsey, I won't be a smartass and leave that last sentence out there hanging. I'm not trying to troll, debate, or piss on your parade, but I will explain why this thread makes me twitch.
I have a lot of experience dealing with Young Earth Creationism and its arguments. One of the big ones is God in the Gaps. If evolution is missing data, God MUST have done it!
The title of this post is very similar to that argument. It started not with "irrational behavior - what could be its causes?", it started with "irrational behavior seems to be anti-survival and anti-Evolutionary, so does it mean we are acting out our past lives?!?!?!". That approach is a recipe for the Cherry Picking fallacy.
I'll post that Dara O'Briain clip again, here:
[video=youtube;YMvMb90hem8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvMb90hem8[/video]
I'll also highlight 2 quotes from it:
Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise, it'd
stop.
...
Just because science doesn't know everything, doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps, with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
Or, in a more philosophical fashion, here's what
Richard Feynman had to say about testing hypotheses:
It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
As a hypothesis, the OP doesn't even come close to having considered all the complexity of the brain and the myriad ways it can be cross-wired, for want of a better term - perfectly physical explanations that do not require a supernatural explanation. Evolution, to athropomorphize a bit, doesn't give a shit how well you live, or even how long you live. It only cares how well you reproduce. So crazy fuckers who cause great harm but still have a mess of progeny (and progeny who are a mess) such as El Wrong are very successful from Evolution's point of view. It's why we have arthritis and diseases of old age - after about 35, evolution gave up on us until very, very recently in our history.
My question is, with as much as ancient humans had to deal with, and given our intelligence arose stochastically without regard for the emotional consequences of being able to think at length about our own mortality, why the hell
shouldn't we behave irrationally much of the time? As long as we behave rationally enough of the time (which, sadly, doesn't have to be much) to generate progeny, that is.
So to a biologist, the OP looks like a fishing expedtion.The way a good scientist (and there are bad ones) would have phrased the question is: are there any human behavior patterns that don't have any good physical / evolutionary explanations that might lead one to believe that there is some extra-physical motivation at work in humans?
And past lives is only one possibility in that question, there are others.
Not that I have seen good evidence for
any of them.
