One possible mechanism for previous reincarnated existences is also a pretty illogical mechanism. In traditional really real reality, reincarnation is useless since any egg and any sperm that conceived you could not have any remembrance of your previous lives. In fact no egg or sperm contains anything non-physical or immaterial, so at conception you have no self-identity, no soul, no essence, no personality, no like or dislikes, etc. Scratch really real reality. That's not the case of course in a computer-generated virtual reality or simulated reality.
Really Real Reality Afterlives and Reincarnations
In a really real albeit supernatural reality, you're only going to achieve an 'eternal' afterlife (of sorts) if and only if your mind (soul, spirit, essence, personality, whatever) is something (that's not really a thing) is separate and apart from your body / brain which goes nowhere after you kick-the-bucket. However, since your mother's egg had no mind, personality, memories, etc. and ditto that for your father's sperm, at conception you had no mind, no knowledge, no creativity, no spirituality, whatever. Of course you also had no brains, no heart, no lungs, no sensory organs of any kind or even any real body yet to speak of. All of that material stuff flowed on by that material nature build into your genetics and the material additions to your newly conceived 'body' came via nutrients supplied via your mother's body; post birth by your own feeding and breathing. So any 'mind' you acquired is material in nature just like your body / brain and thus its tough luck for your hoped for 'eternal' afterlife. Still...
The concept of an everlasting 'soul', that your 'soul' is somehow immortal and has been reincarnated repeatedly goes back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks if not before. It's a concept shared by many cultures over many historical time periods. Might there be some tiny grain of reality in this concept?
The concept of an immortal or nearly immortal you is a subset of the concept that history is cyclic and that history repeats itself down to the tiniest detail, as close to infinitely so as makes no odds. Everything that can happen has happened; some of that is happening again right now; everything that can happen will happen again, and again and again in the future. That's because there are only so many ways in which the Cosmos can be configured; only so many ways in which things can happen and since time marches on and on and on and on, repeats are sooner or later required.
Many Eastern religions / philosophies like Buddhism / Hinduism teach that you go round and round and round and round again, at least until you achieve or reach the state of enlightenment and then you move on to some higher plane or whatever. That's sort of like improving with each time you play a video game until you win all the marbles and achieve a form of video game enlightenment. Enlightenment is just another word for having won the simulation virtual reality game you have been engaging in.
Virtual Reality (Video Game) Resurrection
If you reread a novel or re-watch a TV show episode or film, the characters do the exact same thing over and over and over again. But software seems to be a bit more fluid and malleable and flexible and subject to glitches relative to the strict and fixed materialism inherent in paper and ink or celluloid.
I've noted in the past that if you are a software programmed simulated virtual reality entity then your life is just that - programmed software. But, there could equally be in store a pre-programmed software afterlife. But let's say there isn't an afterlife program. Is your virtual death therefore your final demise? Well no, because if the simulation or video game is re-run, you'll be resurrected!
In a video game you can 'die' but you're never really dead since your programmed software is still in place and still exists and you can be 'resurrected' if the game is replayed.
But the question arises, does the simulation or say the video game or virtual reality landscape (as in a film) need to be re-started from scratch in order to resurrect you, or can you within the game (or simulation or film even) be brought back to your Square One (or some other previous point)? The latter makes more sense. The film, for example, can be rewound. The latter also makes more sense in that this (a video game simulation) might be an ultra-multi-player gaming scenario - one player per simulated person, the simulated person being the avatar so to speak of the player - as in our computer simulation, "Second Life".
So if you 'die' virtually (if for no other reason than there might be time limits to your player's on-line persona - that's you), your external reality player can resurrect you again and again and again each time they log into the game again. The time factor is also relevant in that your perception of time must be different to that of the external player, either that or the player has a very long lifespan. For example, 100 years in your time might only be the equivalent to one hour to the external player who is your real in the external world, 'boss' who controls all that you see and do. A simulation could easily control your perception of the relative passage of time. Sometimes you think time is passing by very quickly; sometimes it drags. Maybe that's really the case - for you.
Virtual Reality (Video Game) Future Memories
If we are in a programmed computer software simulation we can’t really die. If we continue to go around again and again, might that account for Deja vu*, precognition, premonitions, and perhaps those little voices in your head** that tell you to do or not do something, etc.? Are we in a "Groundhog Day" scenario? Is this all past memory revisited that also assists us in predicting the future?
Deja vu has to derive from your own previous experience, it's not an experience you experienced as someone else in a previous life. Further, some might include a reoccurring dream as Deja vu, but that don't impress me much in that dreams tend to be rather ill-remembered at the best of times and similar (but not identical) daily life experiences can trigger similar (but not absolutely identical) dreams. Dreams and dreaming have often been given all sorts of ancient historical as well as New Age mystical meanings and interpretations, but I still prefer my explanation which is that dreams are just the brain's ways and means of keeping the brain active and stimulated when your normal sensory apparatus (your five senses) are in an inactive state (i.e. - you're asleep). In the absence of external perceptions, the brain provides its own internal ones. Any port in a storm!
Can past-come-future memories provide another explanation for say mental creativity? The act of creativity, the connecting-of-the-dots, might be nothing more than drawing off of your previous knowledge / memories from a prior lifetime(s).
*Is Deja Vu just a false 'memory' or an actual experience previously experienced? That's just one of many $64,000 questions.
**In some cultures that 'little voice' is often termed a "spirit guide" or perhaps even a "guardian angel".
Virtual Reality (Video Game) Event Alterations
In any video game or other computer / software programmed virtual reality scenario, every possible outcome is already encoded or programmed in. Everything that can happen will happen if the software allows for it. Thus, the tweaking of replays of any scenario can lead to event alterations.
If you can't remember any of your experiences, hence lessons learned, from your previous go-rounds; your previous lives, then your previous existences all seem pretty pointless. That’s not an overall satisfactory concept to have to come to terms with. What’s the point of going through a life and learning all sorts of things and experiencing all sorts of things only to have it all go for naught at the end?
Reliving the same lifetime, again and again and again, but being able to draw on those nebulous future memories from your past; from your previous go-rounds as you reincarnate yourself (albeit with some help from the software) again and again and again, can you alter your current life relative to previous incarnations? If so, each lifetime is not going to be an exact carbon copy of any other lifetime.
Could there be precognitions based on previous simulated go-rounds? An oft-quoted example by analogy features in discussions by British writer and YouTube personality Anthony Peake. His analogy is the video game "Tomb Raider". You have the heroine Lara Croft come down the hall only to be gobbled up by the resident monster. Game Over! Restart the game. Laura Croft comes down the hall, but this time her (and your) 'consciousness' 'knows' from your previous experiences about the monster and thus her and your precognition about that hallway leads her and you to head off in a different direction and thus avoids her fate - this fate anyway. Of course there are lots of other game-ending fates, but eventually, based on all those collective failures, she makes it through all scenarios in the entire game thanks to her (and your) previous close encounters with nasty game endings.
As we (as game players) can alter Lara Croft's fate next go-round, The Supreme Simulator(s) who programmed our virtual reality, or whomever is controlling the simulation (i.e. - the game player) can play a role in altering our own fate next go-round.
'Multiverse' Virtual Realities (Video Games)
What if there is more than one copy of our simulation software package, and/or more than copy each an upgrade from the previous copy, so you have the original edition, the second edition, the third edition, the fourth edition, etc. And so, if that's so, even without replays, you've had numerous 'life' experiences and also (with replays) lots of resurrections, maybe even a software-generated 'afterlife'. Of course you'd never know about your alternative selves in those other versions of the 'Multiverse' software, unlike that possibility in the 'you' that's confined to just one software package / edition.
Virtual Reality (Video Game) and Atomic Empty Space
Although it is hardly ever thought about or commented on, it remains one of the most profound observations ever made. What's that? It's the discovery that atomic space - the volume occupied by an atom, is 99.999% empty.
The New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford in 1911 proved that the atom (nucleons plus electrons) were roughly 99.999% empty space. However, you certainly don't think or yourself and other so-called 'physical' objects as being 99.999% empty space. But when you sit down, are you actually in contact with solid matter as it appears to be? No, the reason you don't fall through the chair is due to the electromagnetic forces and fields that keep you and the chair separate and apart thus giving the illusion of you and the chair being 100% solid and not 99.999% empty.
In order to demonstrate this another way apart from Rutherford's experiments with alpha particles and metal foils, one needs un-charged 'bullets' since atoms are minefields of electromagnetic forces and fields and charges. That rules out neutrons and protons (since they contain electrically charged quarks) and obviously electrons. Photons and gravitons are uncharged particles, but since they have zero mass, they wave (i.e. - light waves; gravity waves). Even if an atom is 99.999% empty space, waves might be too large to pass through and thus the concepts of opaqueness and transparency has a lot to do with the nature of the waves trying to wave through. Glass is transparent to visible light; opaque to infra-red 'light'. However, neutrinos are electrically neutral and have mass (so they don't wave) and yes, they can pass through light-years worth of 'solid' lead or gold or whatever without any effort at all. All 'solid' matter is transparent to neutrinos unless by sheer bad luck they slam into the nucleus or an 'orbiting' electron.
Now the upshot of this with respect to virtual reality is the creation of an illusion of 'solid' matter when in fact you are creating 'matter' that's 99.999% empty space is a massive savings in bits and bytes used in creating your virtual reality landscape.
Virtual Reality (Video Game) and Time
There are two kinds of time. There's external time that ticks on by quite independently of you, and then there is your own personal inner time; internal self-time; how you perceive time flowing. For example, to use Einstein's example, one hour with your favorite lover seems like a minute; one minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour. Does pleasure versus pain effect your perception of time? As per Einstein’s example, the answer is of course “yes”.
There's even a discrepancy between your dream-time and the time of your dreams. That is, a ten minute dream by the clock might last in your dream-state for hours or days.
Various drugs and medicines and internally-generated brain chemicals as well as all sorts of neurological disorders (temporal lobe epilepsy; schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, migraine headaches, autism, Alzheimer’s, etc.) can cause all manner of interesting personality phenomena, like the perception of time. Various drugs and medicines and internally-generated brain chemicals as well as all sorts of neurological disorders might play a role too in recalling more readily than most other people previous memories / experiences from previous simulated lives. Of course these drugs and medicines and internally-generated brain chemicals as well as all sorts of neurological disorders are nothing that no self-respecting simulation equally cannot account for.
Eternal recurrence in a simulation, albeit the concept is more one of a spiral than a circle (i.e. - the snake eating its tail). Cyclic time, A-B-C-D-E-A or A-B-C-C-B-A is quite a different concept to linear time A-B-C-D-E-F, etc.
Virtual Reality (Video Game) and Dimensionality
Our simulations are obviously 2-D. They may appear 3-D, but just like a hologram, they are really 2-D. And thus we too, assuming we are virtual reality beings in a simulated landscape, are really 2-D 'existing' under another illusion, that being that there is such a thing as depth and that we are 3-D entities in a 3-D really real reality Universe.
The $64 Million Question: How To Tell What Your Reality Is - Really Real or Virtual?
The proof of the virtual reality (or for that matter the supernatural) pudding, short of a direct announcement from the VR Creator or Supreme Programmer, would be to identify some sort of tweaking / upgrading in the software that results in a change (for the better? new and improved?) that you can identify but one without any apparent cause. If we tweak our own video game software, would the embedded characters be aware of the cause of the change or of just the change itself?
Fortunately there are a few such transitional changes that we've yet to come to explanatory terms with.
Firstly there was the transition of a decelerating expanding Universe to an apparently accelerating expanding Universe. The scenario, according to most cosmologists goes something like this. In the beginning gravity hence deceleration ruled the roost. But as the Universe kept expanding, albeit at an ever slower rate, the increase in space itself produced Dark Energy which helped drive the expansion rate countering gravity. That produced more space which in turn produced more Dark Energy which produced even more space which produced even more Dark Energy until such time as the pushing pressure produced by Dark Energy surpassed the pulling pressure of gravity. That transition sealed the fate of our Universe to one of either a Heat Death and/or Big Rip instead of a Big Crunch. The problem, solved by programmed software, is that this endless Dark Energy - Space - more Dark Energy - more Space cycle is in total violation of the conservation laws so beloved by physicists. Cosmologists tend to ignore or gloss over this anomaly as quickly as possible, but the upshot is that they cannot explain this.
Secondly there is the transition from non-life to life. The ways and means of the origin of life as a natural occurring event has remained in the too hard basket even since naturalists pondered their navels over the issue. That remains the case today. Of course software can simulate that transition without raising a sweat.
Thirdly, there was the transition from unicellular life to multicellular life about 500 million years ago (in our time frame). That transition is pretty much known as the Cambrian Explosion well all of a sudden (geologically speaking) some unicellular life combined forces to produce a sudden and massive diversity of multicellular life. Exactly why this should have happened after some 3.5 billion years when all that while just unicellular life forms ruled the roost remains a mystery. I mean you'd think it should have remained every general unicellular critter for itself instead of having to specialize in a cohabitation with other now specialized unicellular critters. That's two mysteries - why specialize and why cohabitation?
Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, any account of literal impossibilities like miracles (as opposed to highly unlikely but still plausible events) lie in the realm of simulations, or equally Hollywood special effects!