Alex's questions at the end of the podcast:
1. From a scientific standpoint, is reincarnation nonsense? How would we explore such a question scientifically?
1. No. Scientifically, we still do not know what creates consciousness or what it actually is. There is not a single scientific fact demonstrating the brain produces consciousness. However, there is a growing amount of evidence pointing to the brain as some kind of mediator of consciousness or acting as a filter, or may even be a product of consciousness. This scientific evidence, however is in the class that Skeptics like Krauss usually don't even bother to look at - which he even admits in the interview here i.e. the empirical work in psi and nde research, and the work in psychology - which surprisingly, Krauss also had a fairly disparaging attitude toward - psychology! As if psychology is not even a science, or nothing worth looking at can be found in psychology.
How can one be so scientifically ignorant of a subject one disparages so much as Krauss? I could understand his attitude perhaps if it were just a bunch of yahoos who have done the research in psi or Stevenson's work in reincarnation etc. But that certainly is not the case. You have some leading scientists who spent their time in psi research, and in psychology as well. Some having won Nobel prizes in science. And yet Krauss is so sure of himself, none of these people should be listened to. It's a remarkable (at least to me) attitude to have if one calls oneself a scientist - this dismissive attitude toward your fellow scientists.
2. How can life have any meaning if we live in a meaningless universe?
Krauss I found logically consistent in his answer here, which philosophically (although, according to Tyson philosophy is dead) - is an existential answer: meaning is simply whatever we give to our lives. It is an old philosophical debate that has been ongoing since the birth of philosophy. Is meaning purely a subjective phenomena, or is there any kind of objective meaning to the universe and reality? Krauss clearly believes meaning is a purely subjective phenomena that is produced by the brain - which itself produces consciousness that ceases to function once the brain stops functioning. Meaning for the individual does not lie outside the individual - it is whatever that individual makes it.
There are a host of ethical philosophical problems with Krauss's belief system, athough in the interview he doesn't call it a belief system, he pronounces it as scientifically established - there is no questioning of the "facts". Which to me simply is a form of fundamentalistic thinking.
He may be right - but he also may be wrong. Since scientifically, we still do not know the source of consciousness or what it is, which meaning at the very least, has a very tight correlation with. Why psychology is also a rather important aspect of studying consciousness - which I would not dismiss as Krauss does in the interview.
3. How can reincarnation be true when there are more people alive today than have ever lived before? (Alex doesn't know).
I liked Alex's answer. Instead of trying to argue with Krauss - he said I don't know. Whereas, apparently Krauss does know based (I guess) on arguments like the above. Alex appears to me here to be the real Skeptic. He hasn't adopted any hardcore belief system - he's looked at the reincarnational empirical data that Stevenson and his colleagues so carefully collected over decades, and as I think most reasonable people would - came away convinced Stevenson provided some intriguing scientific data pointing to something which at the very least, would be worth pursuing further in science, and to continue asking scientific questions.
There are of course, a number of hypothesis that could be constructed to explain to Krauss how more people alive today exist than the past. I imagine Krauss would refuse to hypothesize any of it as he has refused to look at the research performed.
By the way, Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing" is the same kind of word tricks Skeptics use when redefining meaning. Krauss's "nothing" in his book is simply the quantum fields that particles come in and out of all the time. Krauss calls that "nothing", which is just word play. Krauss relies heavily on science discovered and ideas provided by quantum physics. Yet - nothing really should be nothing, not whatever a Skeptic like Krauss arbitrarily decides nothing to be, and then writes a book about it! The book doesn't answer where "quantum fields" come from, nor even, where the precise laws of quantum physics came from.
Same thing should be said about materialism. You find more and more these days as Skeptics are actually learning the scientific facts about quantum physics (since they never really bothered with it before IMO) - you find more and more of them redefining what "materialism" is - in this kind of schizophrenic attempt to keep their worldview of materialism safe from such spooky ideas like
"non-local entanglement" or "q
uantum wave function collapse by the observer" - by calling this same phenomena as materialistic, which of course is silly.
My Best,
Bertha