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 Self and SurvivalSeason 2, Episode 6Complete TranscriptBarry: from Vassar College you’re listening to Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas, I'm Barry Lam.Are you there?Barbro: yes I'm here.Barry: okay great…BK: my name is Barbro Karlen, and I was born in Gothenburg Sweden in May of 1954Barry: Barbro Karlen tells quite a story about how life unfolded in her early childhood. In fact, she wrote a memoir about it as an adult and from there was given a chance meeting with a man named Buddy EliasBarbro: Buddy Elias was the last living cousin of relative really of Anne Frank as well as a very very famous actor in Germany and Switzerland, and he passed away a couple of years ago. He took as his life mission after the war to talk about Anne Frank, first together with Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father and Otto Frank actually lived with Buddy Elias until he remarried again Barry: Barbro was a childhood author in Sweden before growing up to be a mounted police officer there.BK: Buddy and his wife Getty that they live in Basel Switzerland where my publisher that published my earlier books, he published those books in the 90s so I had a very close relationship with Thomas my publisher.Barry: her publisher tells her that he's arranged a meeting with her and a famous person in Boston, where she's giving a talk about her upcoming memoir but he doesn't tell her who it is. He wanted the meeting to be spontaneous, it was important to find out how Barbro and Buddy would react to each other.BK: I was kind of used to that because Thomas always had people that he wanted me to meet that, so I knocked on the door and bootie opened and at the moment I saw him I knew who he was and I just looked at him and I said, “Buddy is that really you?” and and he looked at me and and he just said, “Anne, come here.” Buddy was my my, one of my biggest idols as I grew up, as Anne Frank. He was a ice skater and he was funny and he was just an incredible person in my life before we got captured or before we we moved to Amsterdam. Buddy’s father decided to move to Switzerland that that was a safer place to go while Otto decided to go to Holland where he already had businesses and he felt that that was a safer place to go, and Buddy’s family was one that survived, and he just took me and hugged me and I don't know how long we stood there and we were crying and holding each other, but it was just absolutely incredible to almost said like I came home. So we sat together him and I only alone for about two hours. We talked about memories we had, and he didn't believe in reincarnation before this meeting and then all of a sudden he was just absolutely hundred percent sure that I was his long-lost cousin...so you can imagine the reaction when it came out in big headlines that Buddy Elias as the president of the foundation is declaring that Anne Frank has been reborn, what incredible pressure came on him that, how can you say something like this and do you understand what this could mean legally? And they absolutely demanded him to resign as the president and he was torn apart...and Buddy and I and his family stayed in touch I always stay there when I came to Boston to give my presentations I always stayed with Buddy and Getty and when he came to the United States here and his wife they always visited with me so we had a wonderful relationship behind the doors and to speak…Barry: a large segment of the world's population believes in reincarnation of some form or another foundational texts in both Western and Eastern philosophy include explicit arguments for reincarnation. It's part of every major religion in India. The succession of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism is determined by finding the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. Typically boys under the age of four, who have past life memories, and even among the Abrahamic religions which explicitly deny reincarnation, you'll find a surprising number of people who believe in it. A Pew Research study in 2009 found that almost a quarter of American Christians believe in reincarnation, and the number is even higher among Catholics in Britain in Spain. In fact, many of the people who make a claim to a previous life are very young children, too young to have any coherent religious beliefs.JT: I'm Jim Tucker I am a professor of psychiatry in neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of VirginiaBarry: I found someone who studies the phenomena of past life memoriesJT: well all toll here at the University of Virginia we've studied over 2,500 cases of young children who report memories of past lives. The average age when a child starts talking about a past life is thirty-five months so it's usually around the time of their third birthday their two or three that's sometimes it's later than that, and then typically by the time they're six or seven they have stopped talking about them and pretty much just go on with their lives. There's no reason to think that these reports indicate any mental illness, we've done psychological testing with a number of them and the only thing that really comes out as the children tend to be quite intelligent and quite verbal, but otherwise they they seem to be psychologically perfectly normal like everyone else…Barry: is there a pattern to the kind of memories that they report?JT: yeah they tend to focus on events or people from near the end of the previous life, the average interval between the death of the previous person and the birth of the child is four and a half years. The median interval meaning half shorter half or longer is only sixteen months, they tend to be quite recent 70% of them talk about a life that ended by some sort of unnatural means: murder, suicide, accident, combat. Sometimes the children will have nightmares about those or they will talk about them a great deal during the day. It more or less seems as if the memories just sort of pick up where they left off in the last life. A number of them have even birthmarks or birth defects that match wounds the previous person got. One American case is a little boy named James Leininger, his parents are just this Christian couple in Louisiana and his father in particular is quite opposed to the idea of reincarnation, but around the time of James's second birthday he started having horrible nightmares multiple times a week in which he would kick his legs up in the air and scream, “Airplane crash on fire little man can't get out,” And then during the day he would take his little toy airplanes and say, “Airplane crash on fire,” and slam them into the coffee table over and over again, in fact his parents have a picture of the coffee table with dozens of scratches and dents on it. So he looked like a kid who had been traumatized but he hadn't been through any trauma at least, you know at least in this life. Soon after his second birthday his parents were able to have several conversations with him where he could talk about this material while he was awake and he said how his plane had crashed on fire, how it had been shot down by the Japanese and how he flown a Corsair, which was a type of plane that was developed during World War II, and he also said one day that he had flown off of a boat when his parents asked him the name of the boat he said “Natoma.” The USS Natoma Bay was an escort carrier that was stationed in the Pacific during World War II, so then his parents asked him who he was and he would always say, “me or James?” Which they didn't make anything up at the time, and one time they asked him who else was there and he said, “Jack, Jack Larson.” Now this was all when he was two and then when he was two-and-a-half his dad bought a book on Iwo Jima to give to his own dad and they were looking through it one day when James pointed to a picture of Iwo Jima and told his dad that that's where his plane had been shot down, which floored his dad his little two and a half year olds was talking like that, and then he learned that the Natoma Bay did in fact take part in the Iwo Jima operation. Eventually he learned that there was only one pilot from that ship that was killed during the Iwo Jima operation, it was a twenty-one year old from Pennsylvania named James Houston and his plane crashed exactly the way that James did described James said how his plane had been shot in the engine, it had burst into flames, it crashed in the water and quickly sank and that's exactly what happened to Houston's plane, and the pilot of the plane next to Houston's on the day that he was killed is named Jack Larson. Barry: Let's start from the beginning, could you tell me a little bit about your childhood? Was it a normal childhood? Was it a turbulent childhood?BK: I was perfectly normal except for that I lived with my past life memories very close to me, of course my parents didn't understand at all what what that was all about, so that was also kind of difficult for me because I had older I got the more I realized that so-called normal people did not remember what the past life and where they came from, so my only way to express myself with that was to write.Barry: how old are you when you first have these memories and what were they what were the first memories you had?BK: my mother later in life she told me that when I was about three years old I when she called me and I didn't listen to her and she said, “You have to listen when I call you to come,” and I said, “Yeah but you have to call me my right name because my name is not Barbro,” so she’s like, “Oh so what’s your name then?” and I said, “No my name is Anne Frank, but you can call me Anne.” and at that time the Anne Frank diary was not published in Sweden, so she just dismissed it. There was other things happening as I grew up, I was four or five and I refused to eat beans and I pushed them away if I don't eat beans I had enough of that last time, and I refused to take showers so totally hysterical when she tried to cut my hair off, if I saw a police officer on the street I was hiding behind my mom, “We have to go because he's gonna take us.” I was absolutely convinced up until I was about six or seven years old that my dad would gonna come and pick me up, I was waiting for him every day I told my mother that too, so she was terrified really, even took me to the psychiatrist to figure out what was wrong with me. When I was ten we went on a trip around Europe to the capitals of many countries, so Amsterdam was one of them. When we were there of course by then my parents knew about Anne Frank Diary and they knew about me saying that I had been Anne Frank in my previous life. My father said, “Okay let's go to that Anne Frank house now so we have done that and have got over done with.” For some reason I knew exactly where we were and I said, “We only ten minutes away we can walk over there.” And my mother said, “Let her show us then if she's so sure about this let's go and see where we end up.” So we did and I recognized where I was and I knew that around the corner we would see the house on the other side of the canal, so when they saw that of course they were surprised. We went in and as we went up the stairs that fear that I, that unreasonable fear, that I had grown up with and my dreams just came over me like a big mud wave, but I felt an urge to do it because I had my whole life knowing that this is the place where I lived in my previous life, and I'm now I was there and I was not going to go back out again without going up and see my room and see what it looked like now. So we did we came up there, and we looked around and I was kind of relieved I said to my mother, “Look even the pictures are still there,” and she looked around and she looked she said, “What what pictures what are you talking about?” and and I couldn't see any pictures when I looked again I there were no pictures, so you can imagine ten years old and I didn't really know what happened and I saw the pictures and then the pictures were not there so I started to cry and I said, “I promise you mom they were there I saw them.” and so she walked over to the guide and she asked her and she said you know, “are there any pictures on the wall here have there been any pictures?” and the guide said, “Yes there Anne Frank had pictures posted on the wall that was from movie stars and things like that that she admired from Hollywood and we're just putting them behind glass and frames so we can preserve them because people tend to touch them and that's what we're doing there will be absolute again.” And I think that was the moment when my mother totally have had what you call “aha moment” or revelation that, “oh my god she has been telling me the truth the whole time.” The memories stayed with me until I was about fifteen years old and and they slowly disappeared…Barry: what is the working hypothesis to why they fade the way they do?JT: we all lose our memories of early childhood over virtually all of our memories of early childhood at around the time of age 5 or 6 or 7, so for instance I've got a couple of little grandchildren where we were clearly, my wife and are in their long-term memories, but if something happened to us our youngest is two and a half he knows who we are he's happy to see us, but if something happened to us tomorrow by the time he was 6 or 7 he might very well not remember us. The brain of course has gone through all kinds of changes at this age and it's not that the memories necessarily get lost it seems, but after a while retrieving them becomes extremely difficult for the older brain to do. So with these memories it makes sense if you lose memories of early childhood you would also lose memories of a past life…Barry: when did your story go public?BK: I had a friend of mine who was a freelance journalist, she was a friend of family, yeah she was a friend of us. She had heard occasionally, somebody maybe had said something or there was you know joke made or something within the family. We talked about it and I was talking open with her because she was a friend and then she wrote an article about that, and she sold it to the biggest magazines in Sweden, and they blew it up in big letters and it was terrible. I lost my friend because I couldn't trust her anymore, I did not want that to come out, I was a police officer at the time and I worked and I had changed my last name, because I didn't want to be recognized as Barbro Karlen. I wanted to have a private life, I didn't have any memories really and I was a perfectly normal person. I couldn't do anything to stop the articles, they came everyday and everyday and everyday, and finally I was just pounded to the ground when I felt like I can't I can't even stand up in the morning, I can't get out of bed and that's when the memories started to come back and I could not make any sense out of it like I could not understand why the memories came back with such force and in different stages of my previous life. Eventually I came to the point where I was just gonna I've had like I'm gonna give up, why should I even try to fight this? And it went on to the point where I was just going to jump in the ocean. To tell you the truth, I was driving to the beach, I was driving me there and I walked on the edge, and I was praying for health, and for understand it, to understand what was going on and what I should do. At that moment I really I guess I just reached my higher self or I got help from the universe but I felt this voice inside me saying to me that they came to in a previous life, they're not going to kill you in this life…Barry: we'll be back to talk about the self and its survival after these messages from our new sponsors.How about this for a great idea? You go online and look at a bunch of frames for your eyeglasses, you get them sent to you for free, where you can try them on for friends and family, and then you pick your favorite frame to use with your prescription. There's one place to do this it's called Warby Parker. Warby Parker is able to provide high quality great-looking eyewear at a fraction of the usual price. Their prescription glasses start at $95 this includes frames lenses and coatings, they’ll even call your doctor if you don't have your prescription handles. Head to hiphi to order your free home try ons today.Barry: this is Hi-Phi Nation a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I'm Barry Lam. Do you have any views about people who are trying to manipulate things in the world to try to extend their consciousness in some ways, like uploading themselves into microchips or anything like that?JT: Or people who have their heads frozen after they die, yeah if you uploaded all your memories into memory chip, those memories exist, but it doesn't mean that you exist, so you know with these kids they are not just reeling of rote facts, they are talking about things that certainly from their perspectives, or experiences that they had it is not just information or knowledge it goes beyond that.Barry: so it sounds like you're saying the people are over and above just the list of memories that's what just sounds like you're saying.JT: yes exactly.Barry: there is little to agree about when it comes to the concept of a person. If you spend any time online you'll know that people have been discovering lately that they physically resemble painted portraits from the distant past. In fact I saw a slide show where people snapped photos of themselves standing next to their doppelgangers from art history, none of these resemblances lead people to think that they're the reincarnation of some previous person, that's because we think physical appearances and resemblances, even when they're perfect, aren't the kind of thing that make for a particular person, but with memories it seems different. For some reason people tend to think that memories that resemble each other, maybe even perfectly, are a sure sign that we're talking to an incarnation of the same person. This led the philosopher John Locke to simply identify what it means to be a person with a totality of their memories. If two humans at two different times in history share the same memories, then they’re incarnations of the same person the identification of a person with their memories and conscious experiences, rather than their body, is what drives the plot of body-switching movies, and all of the stories of reincarnation that Dr. Jim Tucker has studied. But upon closer examination there are reasons to be wary. The idea that there are false memories is well studied so much so that the criminal justice system is reevaluating the weight that it puts on eyewitness testimony. From the perspective of the person doing the remembering, a false memory and a true memory are indistinguishable, they feel exactly the same. If this is true then two different people can share the same indistinguishable memories, one of them true and one of them false, maybe even both of them false. And if that's right, then having the same memories don't make for incarnations of the same person, anymore than the sameness of physical appearance. The way out of the predicament is to give an account of what it means for a memory to be true rather than false. In real life a false memory is one that just didn't happen to the person remembering, but look what I just said, I said the person doing the remembering. This person has to be something different from the memories themselves. The best candidate for this in real life is the very physical organism that stores memories and has experiences if that is what makes a person a person then there's no way for there to be an afterlife unless the same physical organism that dies somehow doesn't die and nobody thinks that makes sense. And so you need to find something that is, well, something. Something which is not the memories not the physical organism and not even the physical brain, that has to be the thing that must survive in order for a person to survive, and most philosophers today think that there's no such thing. Maybe most scientists also. But Dr. Jim Tucker disagrees, and he has a conjecture.JT: there are a lot of different ways obviously to interpret quantum physics but one that many people have looked at is the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that physical reality is secondary to it. In essence, consciously observing reality is what causes reality to come into existence, but if you then explore that idea with this question of, “Can consciousness survive after someone dies?” Well if you look at consciousness as being fundamental then why would it be dependent wholly dependent on the physical brain, if in fact physical reality grows out of it? This evidence and this work and in other fields, such as near-death experiences, that this evidence that consciousness carries on, may in fact be correct that consciousness does carry on.Barry: I decided to call up a philosopher of physics to help me sort through this, maybe even explain to me if reincarnation is consistent with quantum physics.AN: I'm Alyssa Ney I'm an associate professor of philosophy at UC DavisBarry: okay so Alyssa I want to get to the bottom of this idea that quantum physics allows or maybe even supports the idea that consciousness, the mind, or the self, is separate from the physical brain or physical matter. Can you tell me first of all where this idea comes from?AN: so I think the first person that made this kind of connection was Eugene Wigner in the 1960s. Quantum mechanics is special in that it allows material objects like atoms or electrons to go into states that are called super positions.Barry: you're not going to get all the details of quantum mechanics from a few minutes on a podcast, but the important thing to know is that the laws of quantum physics tell us that electrons and other particles on their own will evolve into super positions. That is, they have these weird properties such as not being in any particular place at a certain time. The laws of quantum mechanics say that when a material system has properties like this, they will continue to evolve into more complex super positions, as they interact with other material systems.AN: but it seems to come into conflict with our own experience of what we observe when we measure systems, so if you want to locate a system and see where it is, it's always going to be have some determinate location.Barry: what happens is when we look for an electron and take a measurement of its location we will always find it in a determinate place, but the law said that right before we measured it it was in a superposition, it was not in that place, in fact not in any determinate place.AN: and so what physicists have said traditionally and this is still what appears in textbooks is that quantum systems can evolve into super positions but when you measure them they collapse out of them.Barry: in other words, the act of looking for an electron with an instrument makes that electron drop out of the superposition into the location where we end up finding it. What Eugene Wigner argued was that you can think of a room containing an electron and his friend trying to make a measurement as itself a single system, the electron goes into a superposition of sending a flash of light and not sending a flash of light, it doesn't have either it doesn't have both.AN: but now Wigner says well what about me I'm outside of this laboratory I haven't measured the particle and I haven't talked to my friend either to ask him whether or not he's seen a flash or not. So what quantum mechanics says is, since I haven't taken a measurement I have to say that my friend and the atom are still in the superposition, and so my friend is in a superposition of seeing a flash and not seeing a flash.Barry: so far so good but the question is: how can any human being be in a superposition of seeing a flash and not seeing a flash?AN: that seems absurd because if I go and I talk to my friend and I ask him, “did you see a flash before I talk to you or were you in this superposition state of seeing a flash or not seeing a flash?” Of course my friend is gonna say, “No.” if he saw a flash he'll say, “I saw a flash,” and if he didn't he'll say “I didn’t,” and so what Wigner says is what that's showing us is that conscious systems like ourselves are never in super positions what quantum mechanics shows us according to Wigner is that there's a fundamental distinction between conscious systems and systems that he says are inanimate.Barry: Wigner argument is that to make sense of the fact that humans always see things as having places, momentums, colors, and so forth we need to postulate that human consciousness is what makes reality determinate. Quantum mechanics describes a world in which material systems without conscious observers will just evolve into more complex superpositions. Quantum mechanics plus a non-physical consciousness describes the world as we actually see itAN: and so we can't be materialists if we're going to accept quantum mechanics Barry: if human consciousness is not reducible to electrons and protons or subatomic particles then in principle it's something that can survive the death of a physical organism, or can it? We still don't have a story about how that could happen and why memories would be preserved if it did. It's hard enough to preserve your memories when you have a functioning brain how can it be preserved with no brain? Here's the philosophical paradox accompanying this story: suppose there is a consciousness separate from the physical brain, if that immaterial consciousness really does get reincarnated, but with absolutely no memories or psychological traits, how is that incarnation me any more than any other thing is me, material or immaterial?So can I tell you now that we're coming close to the end of our conversation what this show is going to be about?At this point I ran dr. Jim Tucker's conjecture by Alyssa Ney -and he's persuaded by some of these casesAN: yeah yeah I almost wonder if what he's thinking is something about nonlocality though, ‘cause we didn't talk about nonlocalityBarry: quantum nonlocality, or the idea that things that happen in one corner of the universe can simultaneously have an effect on another corner of the universe through something called quantum entanglement.AN: entangled states are states where you have two different systems and there are these persistent correlations between the states of the systems and those persist no matter how far you separate the systems in space.Barry: if one particle gets entangled with another into a superposition then particle a and particle b are both in super positions or neither are. If some conscious mind ends up measuring particle a at one point in space and time and makes it drop out of a superposition, then wherever or whenever particle b happens to be it too must simultaneously drop out of the superposition. These correlations that are produced by quantum entanglement might be able to capture these relationships between you now and somebody else very far away, if your constituents, your particles were entangled with each other.Barry: here's another story: we have two beings across time being correlated with one another through quantum entanglement, so that there's a memory transfer, but if it's a memory transfer, does that make the new being a reincarnation of the first or just someone who gets a kind of quantum memory transplant? and how does a memory transplant make someone a reincarnation any more than a nose transplant? Somehow we have to put both of our quantum physics stories together. We need in material consciousness and memory transplants between the same consciousness at two different times all realize in two different organisms. Once we have that story we have a story fully consistent with science, right?All of these are out there hypotheses but are they possible?AN: well they're logically possible because they're consistent. Are they likely to be true?Barry: are they consistent with the empirical evidence that we have?AN: I wouldn't say that they're consistent with the empirical evidence we have. The best supported theories most widely agreed upon among physicists and other people who think about quantum mechanics don't appeal to any kind of fundamental conscious experiences. There are many other ways of understanding how systems go from superpositions to what look more like classical states, and we just don't need to postulate consciousness.Barry: Occam's razor: if you don't have to postulate it leave it out of your theory. We don't need to postulate an irreducible conscious self, the best empirical theories today say the size and complexity of measuring devices are enough to explain the collapse out of superposition. Other theories actually say no collapse ever occurs, the world might well be one were everything, even as human beings are in states of superposition all the time, it just doesn't look that way. Even the hypothesis that the universe splits into many universes at every superposition is taken more seriously than the one that says consciousness is immaterial.YAL I'm Yuval Avnur, professor philosophy at Scripps College and Claremont, one of the Claremont Colleges.Barry: Yuval Avnur is a philosopher who has recently been writing to defend the existence of the afterlife from the charge that all of scientific and philosophical arguments tell against it.YA: I don't think there's any good reason to think that there isn't an afterlife, I don't think there's any good reason to think there is an afterlife, in fact I think that it's the kind of hypothesis or the kind of possibility that you couldn't possibly get any evidence for or against.Barry: one of the main targets of avner's reasoning is the appeal to Occam's razor. The simplest explanation of the world is that we are physical beings just like everything else. If that's true, then we should always believe that by Occam's razor, over any belief that says there's the physical world and also in material minds or selves.YA: Occam's razor yeah I don't think people are super clear about what they mean about itBarry: Avnur thinks that any way you formulate Occam's razor, you can't get evidence that the afterlife doesn't exist.YA: don't add anything to your theory that you don't need in order to account for your evidence. Physicalism is the view that everything that exists is physical and describable and principle by the sciences and nothing else exists, so it's a conjunction. Now I'm going to propose to you another view, it's just the first part, it’s just, “physical stuff exists and behaves like science says it does” period. It doesn't have “and nothing else exists.” which of those two theories is more elegant?Barry: the most likely view according to Avnur has to be that physical things exist, but we don't say anything about whether immaterial things exist or notYA: and in fact you can prove that it's more likely given the evidence, because it says lessBarry: another version of Occam's razor doesn't rule out the afterlife but for different reasons YA: whenever you get some evidence unless an entity is necessary to pause it in order to account for that evidence you should believe that it doesn't existBarry:this version of Occam's razor also seems to make sense, we posit that gravity explains why two objects attract each other, we don't posit that in addition there are invisible gremlins that are pushing objects towards each other because gremlins are attracted to each other. We believe in gravity, and we believe that these gremlins don't exist. But Avnur does not like this line of reasoning.YA: I have all kinds of objections to that principle, I think probably you do too, I think most people who take it some time to think about it will. It can't be that I should be more confident in whatever hypothesis posits the least amount of stuff, because then I would sort of start out believing DesCartes evil demon, like all there is is just a demon deceiver in my mind and the two think two is way better than the trillions and gazillions of stuff that science ends up telling me there is. So that that can't be right, it must be more nuanced than just believe in as few things as possible. I want to ask you this for real, a priori, how likely is it would you think that all of reality and all that is interesting and sort of worthy of consideration in reality is accessible to humans?Barry: pretty lowYA: pretty low! I think the point I'm making is kind of a Copernican point. Reality could well, and for all I know most likely does, contain all kinds of amazing weird stuff that I have no possible access to. If so, then why would I take my lack of evidence for something as evidence that it doesn't exist? I think that for a religious person who has a view about the afterlife, the significance of their life and the significance of certain events in their life all take place within the context of this assumption about the afterlife, and I think the same thing applies to people who are pretty sure that there's no afterlife, that this just lights out. I think that that idea informs the way you think about time, informs the way you think about wasting your time, and informs the way you think about your interactions with your long-term loved ones like your parents or your family or whatever. Among philosophers today, it is so widely assumed that the lights-out theory is true, that we don't talk about that part of the background when we talk about the significance of things, we just assume it, in fact explicitly sometimes when people write books about the meaning life, well I'm just gonna assume this life is all there is.Barry: Avnur is arguing that it should be an open question always no matter what we learn that there is some way for us to survive the death of our bodies. The conclusion he's reached is that we don't know how this can happen or whether it takes place by way of immaterial souls or reinstated memories or some other way we can't envision or imagine. The central philosophical question about whether a surviving thing is an incarnation of the same person that was once alive, that doesn't bother him that much. Avnur thinks maybe we survive not as the same person but as something else something we know not what. But it bothers me, I want to know what it takes for me to be around, to have experiences after my own death. If it takes an immaterial soul, then that's what I want, if it only takes saved memories, then bring on the memory uploader. Knowing what it takes for me to survive is a way of me knowing what I am now.Can you tell me about how you think about Anne today? Do you think of yourself as Anne? Do you think of her as a distant past self? How do you think about the relationship?BK: I am one hundred percent Barbro today. I could not walking around thinking about who I was in my previous life, I have learned from from that lifetime, I have learned from this lifetime, and I have it all in my soul and in my higher. I am perfectly normal human being with both feet on the ground.Barry:what do you think is going to happen to you like personally?JT: well I will say this I think if you look at our strongest cases as a group that we do have good evidence that significant part of us can survive after the brain dies. Certainly my hope is that I do. I don't have any particular expectation for what I personally will experience, you know what we're all here for a fairly short time and hopefully we can have meaningful experiences while we're here, and then if a part of us continues on that's great, but if it doesn't then you know we just tried to make the most of the time we do have here. ................
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