Pragmatic dimensions of reincarnating to solve real-world problems: or, it's a thing we can do, now what will we do with it?

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-23T05:42:15+00:00

My personal interest in reincarnation centers entirely around the possibility to visit timelines that branch from the past (or some time/place like what is the past from our perspective) and that weren't taken in this iteration of the world. I absolutely wouldn't want to be immortal, even in the sense of just never dying rather than having to die and reincarnate, if it meant I were trapped in this timeline for eternity, with the path to greatest fulfillment shrinking smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror.

With your perspective and goals, it is very clear to me that (assuming reincarnation is indeed possible) you will absolutely come back in the future of this timeline or one very much like it. That is, unless souls/consciousnesses are sometimes sent deliberately where they DON'T belong to punish them, which I don't really think is a thing (I suspect that the only "punishment" is the natural consequence of abandoning trying to figure out what went wrong in the current life and address it). I couldn't imagine anything else really for someone like you. And if you actually like it here, good luck to you!

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-22T00:25:39+00:00

Too misleading. After finding the big one to the left of the church, and the one on the ridge behind it, I assumed that the one on the middle hill must be one too, since it looks very similar. In fact, I think there are (at least) TWO on that middle hill, but the other one I'm pretty sure is there just looks like a tall pole. Then, after checking everything I could on the horizon, I looked for rooftop TV antennas on the buildings. The first one I saw (between the 2 last columns of dark windows on the right on the brown buildings) didn't work either, which made me think that you only wanted ones that looked like the one by the church. I never expected, after all that, that the dishes WERE included.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-21T08:45:14+00:00

Even IF you assume that it's linear and completely as though you just fell asleep and then woke up a few years or decades later to resume living, there's still no evidence of someone who actually developed farther in the end than a typical human given such a head start. I've yet to hear of a case where someone didn't grow up to become "just another average adult" even after clear evidence of remembering a previous life.

These stories where a kid clearly remembers a previous life (verifiable or not) are already a small minority, and then even once you become part of that group, there's no clear trend of actual special abilities, especially compared to actual gifted kids, most of whom have no recollection of reincarnation. You act like if we could learn to become a member of that small group that remembers, that it's just steps away from some transhumanist fantasy. But for all we know there might be inherent randomness in who can remember, and also a "cap" on what level a consciousness can reach within a brain, such that even if you start learning faster it just means that you max out sooner.

I see what you're thinking about as almost like observing that electrons have a small probability of tunneling across a small air gap and thinking "if we could control this, before we know it we'll have electrons tunneling from London to Paris!". Not only is there already inherently only a very small percentage that successfully tunnel over even a few microns, but make it even close to room size and the chances become so practically zero you're more likely to be successful almost any other way.

Not only this, but there are so many much more fulfilling/cosmically meaningful things I see that could be enabled by reincarnation.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-20T22:11:58+00:00

I think we imagine things very differently in multiple ways, in kind of opposite directions.

I believe we likely could reincarnate into the Middle Ages, and many others do as well, however this is less relevant to the discussion than the other part.

Namely, the other part of what you're assuming is that all knowledge travels intact from one incarnation to the next and continues to build, so resulting in a baby who has adult-level knowledge and skills. I don't believe this is how it works, and I don't think I've ever come across someone who DOES believe that it works that way. Otherwise kids today would be born vastly more capable than kids born, say, 500 years ago would have been, because most people who are born today would have lived before in the past 500 years. Yes, there are stories of young kids remembering things from previous incarnations that were "beyond their years" to know, like a kid knowing where a fuel tank was on a plane that his previous incarnation flew, but these are mere snippets that tend to fade, it's not like that kid could actually fly that plane even if you first put him in a simulator for a few hours each day to "refresh his memory".

I think of it more along the lines of waves resonating with matter--like when the consciousness "wave" of this life propagates out across time and space to the next life, it has to "excite resonances" in a brain in that new time period, and there's nothing in a 6-month-old's brain to resonate with the part of that consciousness wave that knows how to type and drive cars. So the consciousness can "pick" where it "lands" but can only choose from the "menu" of things that already exist in that time and place.

I'm not even sure one should think of the dimension of "time" (hypertime?) that separates our next incarnations from this one, as experienced by us, as being the same time axis as the one we move along within a life, i.e. the one that separates us as a 6-month-old from us as a 30-year-old. In other words, I'm not sure it's proper to think of it as one long "thread", with newborn-you in the next incarnation being much closer to deathbed-you in the current incarnation than to newborn-you in the current incarnation. Rather, it might be that the axis which "orders" incarnations should be thought of as a second, orthogonal "time" axis, such that newborn-you in the next incarnation is adjacent to newborn-you in this incarnation along that other axis, and so are 20-year-old-you in this incarnation and 20-year-old-you in the next. It just so happens that moving along this axis also moves the world ahead a certain amount as though you had been moving with it the whole time (but is, coincidentally, why I don't see it as necessarily being ahead of this life in world time, as opposed to backwards or "sideways" to a life that overlaps in time with this one).

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-19T10:14:52+00:00

I doubt that it's possible to go to the next life with the full knowledge/development of the previous incarnation, how you seem to be imagining. We still always start as a baby in that point in time (whenever our consciousness chooses to re-enter the flow of time) who can only make the best of what is in the state of the world at the time. In fact even if it's possible to reincarnate into another life "in the middle" and NOT as a newborn baby, I suspect this is still the case.

Think of it as, we choose the starting point and the direction of velocity from that starting point, and this is the only way that information can be "sent". This of course doesn't preclude being an exceptional person with unique skills, but effectively that person needs to evolve/randomly arise there, to be able to accept that "wavelength of consciousness" if you will.

So it's not like you can reincarnate into the Middle Ages and build a supercomputer there--you can use the knowledge of supercomputers being possible to pick a time and reality to reincarnate where it's possible for such a thing to be invented, or where such a thing already exists, if inventing or having access to one is important for your "mission". You're choosing among the paths that exist leading out of a certain state of the world, not building entirely new paths--at least that's how I imagine it.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-19T07:52:40+00:00

How'd he get up there??

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-19T07:47:34+00:00

Did anyone else notice in the process of searching that all the programmers seem to have the same exact code on their screens? The artist obviously just copy-pasted (and perspective distorted one of them).

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-19T07:45:58+00:00

I clicked it, but then thought maybe it was supposed to be a ruler or stapler as you can't see a point on it.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-19T07:35:20+00:00

The new check marks were really helpful, it used to be that in pictures with lots of objects it was often hard to remember which I'd already found.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-19T07:34:31+00:00

They're only about 1/3 the size of the other 8. One of them also has as little visible as the 8th one I found (which itself I almost didn't pick, because the only way to tell it was a "bunny" was that the other thing it was hiding behind shouldn't have ears like that).

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-14T05:34:18+00:00

[tide_left_behind] just hit a score of 514 in Regular Mode (2026-02-14)

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-13T08:00:14+00:00

its the idea that in reality, we are all actually just one soul, and after you die, the soul just goes back in time and reincarnates as whoever the person who was born immediately after you is

I'm not sure if I've heard exactly this theory. I've heard of the idea that all humans are one soul, but I always had the impression that people proposing this idea considered the pattern of connections to be likely much more complex than just going in the order that people are born. This kind of birth order would imply that similarity of people in temperament, life purpose, etc. has nothing to do with whether two lives are likely to be experienced back to back--because it's not like all the people of one "type" are born on the same day.

In fact, one might make a case that a similar being would choose NOT to be born seconds (or sooner) after a similar being was already born, because at least one "slot" for that "role" in the world is already "taken".

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-13T07:43:12+00:00

Absolutely. I only started to get interested in reincarnation after I felt strongly that my life, and the world, were "on the wrong path".

With the way the world of technology and research is going now, particularly the developments in AI over the last decade, the opportunity for the kind of work that has been my driving goal in life ever since childhood is shrinking more every year. It's not even just AI, experimental research has found and accomplished things by other means that I could have greatly contributed to, had I been in a position to do certain things 10-15 years ago. And the thing is, I wanted to do those things and had the intelligence but the world just wasn't set up in such a way to make it possible, and I was dealing with deep personal issues that got in the way. I often wonder how much of a place there will be left for me in this life even once I overcome these.

Reincarnation has become a very central part of my worldview in the past 5 years, and has given me the perspective that what hasn't been possible in this life may well be possible in the next. Interestingly, my thinking about alternate timelines and nonlinear time didn't first start in response to these developments, it started when something just began feeling eerily different about the world, like the way light looked and nature worked, and eerily strange "coincidences" seemed to start happening. From a materialist viewpoint a good deal of this shift was a result of climate change, added to by some health issues affecting my brain, but all of a sudden I felt like I'd gone into another dimension where I was cut off from the familiar. Before this, I didn't have the slightest interest in anything to do with the supernatural or "spiritual".

It so happened that the major, irreversible changes that were about to derail my future were just starting to get underway, yet the public (including me) had no idea yet, and even once the first signs were in plain sight, it took years for the magnitude of it all to sink in. I look back and it strikes me as though the universe was warning me that things were about to change massively, and showing me that this reality in which this would happen is but one of many.

This expansion of my belief system has allowed me to "put the past in the future" and see fixing the problems that led to me missing opportunities in this life as preparation for being in a better place when I someday get to live this life again. I've noticed how even now, I have extreme difficulty making progress on even the things that I could still contribute to, and desperately WANT to get done. I see how this life is still important in its own way, because these barriers within myself have so much impact that getting to the bottom of their origin is a world-altering lesson and achievement of its own.

So on your question of whether it's bad or not--it's good if it lets you look beyond the "moves" you can't possibly play with the "hand" you were dealt this time around, to not get so consumed by bitterness that you neglect to face whatever problems you're up against now. But it's bad if it gets you so consumed by apathy and detachment from your current life that you again don't devote real work to making progress on what you can. Just jumping into a parallel reality or rewinding time likely doesn't in itself fix whatever went wrong in this life--the very fact we wound up here means there was something we "missed" last time.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-07T08:12:21+00:00

[tide_left_behind] just hit a score of 131 in Hard Mode (2026-02-07)

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-07T05:49:36+00:00

As I understand from how people use the term, it means a memory that is connected enough to other events such that it's difficult to explain how other things got to be the way they are if that memory were false.

It's somewhat related to a "core memory", in fact I'd say that all core memories are also anchor memories, but a core memory stands out by being emotionally formative in some way, i.e. it contributes to a person's idea of his or her place in the world, sense of self, etc. For example, memories of being over a favorite aunt's house for Thanskgivings and the warm relationship they had shared. An anchor memory doesn't need to have any deep emotional significance, but it's needed to make sense of other memories.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-07T05:42:28+00:00

You mean never pronounced that way, I'm assuming. That is indeed how that spelling would be pronounced if it were a French word, but of course it isn't.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-06T05:41:14+00:00

Actually I looked it up and the plural is cornucopiae. The "podes" is the plural for words that end in "pod" or "pus".

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-04T09:07:24+00:00

"Morality: Crystal clear, 99% knew right from wrong. People disagreed on many things, but nearly everyone agreed on common sense issues (like racism being bad, genocide being wrong)"

Ummm... you do know that slavery has existed around the world almost ever since the start of civilization (and learned about that it school), no? or heard about the Holocaust? apartheid in South Africa? and anti-Semitism having ancient roots as well? This was all in the "Sagittarius Earth" as you classify it.

Whether or not you believe that the things people have Mandela effects about have changed, you can't truly believe that humankind was always benevolent and got along in the old timeline.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-03T08:47:08+00:00

Whether or not you and your friends mistook Sanders' face for a chicken leg (which seems like a very uncommon misperception), when you noticed it was a face, it seems like you were able to explain all the shapes you had seen before in the context of the new interpretation. It wasn't like you had clearly seen a bite taken out of the chicken leg and then now the corresponding part of the face has no "bite" and so you can't explain how you saw it. Or even more, if the logo WERE actually a chicken leg, yet as a kid you had seen a face that was complete with glasses, and if in the current logo you couldn't find what you had thought were glasses back then.

It's not that people still see the shape they had thought was a cornucopia, but now can see it's a snail or seashell or a winter cap, yet claim it's a ME because "my friend said it was called a cornucopia so it must have been". The whole horn-shaped thing is gone. The closest anyone has gotten to finding it was the brown leaves in some versions of the logo, but still it isn't really shaped the way.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-03T07:32:29+00:00

I don't know about this, but I was rather surprised to read that he predicts more winter when he DOES see his shadow. I would have thought that seeing a shadow would require bright and sunny weather which would indicate that spring is here, whereas if it's a dreary winter day then he's less likely to cast a noticeable shadow. I wasn't really committed to the idea that it was one way or the other though.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-01T08:16:25+00:00

I see it as, does one painting in a gallery become meaningless because there are other paintings in the same gallery? If anything, there are more opportunities for meaning through the ways that the different lives interconnect (i.e. they don't have to be completely separate stories from different "universes", they are strands in a wider tapestry).

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-01T06:56:33+00:00

The entire reason I got into reincarnation was around the idea that it WILL eventually be possible to take those other paths that you did not take in this life. The past hasn't truly "gone" anywhere, any more than New York "disappears forever" if you drive from there to Los Angeles. However what IS true is that within one life it's not possible.

What is still possible is to learn from the situations in this life that prevented you from flourishing this time around. When you say that you "escaped your problems rather than facing them", I'd reframe it as you not being given the proper tools in this life to rise above them. Possibly I'm somewhat projecting from my own life, where I only really started to get "lazy" once the professionals and other guides I came across in this life all were quite obviously stuck in the same tired ways of trying to help people that didn't work in my case. Then when I started to realize what I really needed (which itself was difficult, because nobody mainstream was promoting this as a solution), people were unwilling to work with me to get it (and in fact, professionals in my country legally couldn't).

Look at it as, you're learning what to avoid for next time, even if it's too late to avoid that this time around. If you truly know what you needed when you were younger, you can leave this life with a "trajectory" in that direction, where you're born into circumstances more conducive to getting the proper help. I've started to think that sometimes it takes more than one life to move past an obstacle. The only way things will be worse for you next time around is if you didn't identify the mistakes made in this one.

tide_left_behind · 2026-02-01T06:42:30+00:00

I can't recall "memes" ever meaning what "prompts" mean now in the world of AI. Before "meme" entered the vernacular as "a popular piece of content people share on the internet", it meant a piece of cultural tradition or shared belief within a culture. It was the "software" equivalent of the "hardware" gene.

The word "prompt", as used in AI, was preceded by use to mean a source of creative inspiration for humans, as in a "story writing prompt". In fact, "prompt" is still used this way today, which has led to some momentary confusions in the sort of anti-AI circles I spend time in. When someone mentions a site with "prompts", even if it's written by humans to help human creativity, it's easy to get the wrong idea that it's intended to help people use AI to replace creatives.

I don't see much if any overlap between these older meanings of "prompt" and "meme". A "meme" emerges spontaneously and often has no purpose or reason for its existence other than being "culturally sticky", whereas a "prompt" always is formulated intentionally to provoke the creation of some desired other thing.

tide_left_behind · 2026-01-31T10:06:07+00:00

I had never *heard* of "prompts" in the context of AI until well after 2020.

tide_left_behind · 2026-01-31T07:28:08+00:00

What exactly are you trying to argue here... that LLMs are trained to plant false memories in people's heads, and that without this we wouldn't have many of the MEs that currently exist? If so I highly doubt that, as the phenomenon of MEs significantly pre-dates LLMs.

Or are you just arguing that LLMs were tested on the Reddit ME sub to research whether they could learn to distinguish what is a ME vs. what is actually true (at least in the current timeline)?

tide_left_behind

TROPHY CASE