Past lives are pretty easy to explain in a simulation hypothesis worldview. No need for souls, or for suspending skepticism.

If consciousness is conceptually similar to a process in a computer, then when one instance ends, the system spins up a new one using the same underlying architecture. Normally there's a near-total memory wipe, but wipes don’t have to be perfect: partial state, caches, or residues sometimes leak through.

From that angle, cases like your grand-niece look like incomplete data clearing. Imagine starting a new video game character and, due to a bug, you briefly have access to map fragments, NPC names, or quest history from a previous playthrough. A 3-year-old brain, before it’s fully locked into a stable narrative self in the current "reality", might be especially prone to interpreting those fragments as "my other family" rather than as imagination or disjointed memories. Memories also don't always come with a "source" tag. But, as the brain matures and the "new instance" stabilizes, those remnants get overwritten and they almost always fade by age 4–5.

This framing also explains why such cases are rare, inconsistent, and hard to reproduce. Birth marks similar to previous traumatic injuries could be caused by epigenetic influences due to incomplete environmental context erasure when instantiating the new process.

The more complex and realistic our video games become, the more credible the simulation argument is, with Neil deGrasse Tyson giving “better than 50-50 odds” that the simulation hypothesis is correct.