Reincarnation Again

A friend of mine recently attended a wedding where the couple getting married were followers of Kardecist Spiritism which among its many tenets holds a belief in reincarnation and a belief in an immortal soul that experiences life through many iterations in order to achieve an angelic state as the culmination of its existence.

I have thought about the concept of reincarnation many times from many different perspectives, namely the notion that it is perhaps the most scientifically compatible religious view being that the first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed it can only be transferred from one form into another; the notion of persistence of being albeit in an altered state after death isn't scientifically implausible, there's just the small complication of the existence of the soul being something that is speculated but has no empirical proof.

Never the one to look at things through rose coloured glasses, always the one to find the darkness, my natural thought process with this veers off to ask a question, if reincarnation is possible then how do you account for population growth?

Consider for a moment that it were true, you are born, you live, you learn, and you die, then you are reincarnated and you repeat the process. If this was actually true, then one of 3 logical conclusions must also be true:

1 - Souls can procreate

Given that the total number of human beings estimated to ever have lived is around 100 billion including the 8 billion alive today, and given that at the outset of the 20th century as an example the global population was 1.6 billion, if every human being is a vessel for a soul and every human being must have a soul, then those souls must be able to procreate in order to increase in number so that the living population of humanity is at parity with the total number of souls.

2 - Some people don't have a soul

If souls can't procreate, then at some point in human history the living human population would have reached parity with the total number of human souls, after which the continued population growth of humanity would have lead to the birth of soulless human beings. Taking the start of the 20th century as an example point of parity, that would mean today 1 in 8 people approximately would have souls, the other 7 would not. Make of that what you will with the impression we often form that the world has gone to shit and that the worst of humanity is on display - maybe most of that is due to people without souls acting without humanity in essence.

3 - There is only one soul

There is of course another conclusion, that rather than each human vessel containing a different soul, there instead exists only one soul. If this holds true then you as a reader are either a past, or future, version of me, and I of you. This is immediately challenged by the notion of free will and the complexity of choice but this can be dismissed by a concept known as the probability matrix, or as you may know it in pop culture, the multi-verse.

In some interpretations of the multi-verse there exist separate time-lines each distinct realities accounting for universes that exist with variations, but this probably isn't how the multi-verse actually works.

There is a theory known as the Holographic Universe Theory which in simple terms posits that all matter not just light can exist in particle or wave form, this theory has a lot of research that presents a compelling argument that this is in fact the case. The conclusion is that all matter exists in wave form until it is observed, then it condenses into particle form.

One emerging interpretation of the multi-verse is that each individual exists within their own Universe which at any given time only exists so far as you can perceive. Your interactions with others cause your Universe and theirs to overlap, creating a shared Universe, this overlap is possible only if the level of "friction" between the realities is low enough, differences that are inconsequential are permitted which causes the Mandela Effect, whilst differences that are consequential cause sufficient friction to prevent them from overlapping. Meaning you will never interact with a version of me from a Universe where 9/11 never happened because that would be consequential and cause too much friction, whereas you may interact with a version of me from a Universe where there was a hyphen in Kit-Kat as the difference is inconsequential.

If this holds true then every soul can be a single soul in one long linear progression that twists and turns throughout all of human history, with alternate versions satisfying the need for overlap when necessary with the possibility that you may interact with simulated versions of me created by the multi-verse as place-holder like an NPC in a video game.

If we are all the same soul at different points in a linear timeline then the interesting question to pose is where in that timeline are you? Are you an earlier version or a later version? When I discussed reincarnation in the past one thing I asserted which I still stand by is that I feel tired not just in my physical being but in the depths of my soul. If reincarnation is real, when I die if I have the choice I'm not coming back, I'm not doing this again, there is nothing in this world right now that would compel me to want to come back, nothing in our potential future that I am curious enough to want to see and have to deal with the reality of being alive, because just being alive is exhausting.