Reincarnation is real

Since, to Pro, my rebuttal wasn't much of a rebuttal, I'm going to expand on it here, and I wouldn't mind Pro using the last round for responses/conclusions. *Childhood Memories* None of the sources that Pro provided on childhood memories have explained the methods of Tucker's or Stevenson's studies. This is because Pro did not provide the actual studies; Pro provided the reluctant messenger's biased review of Ian Stevenson's work and UVA's magazine's interpretation of Tucker's post-Stevenson work. For example these sources don't show: 1. How many participants were in the total study? 2. How many misses did these kids have, that is to say, how many names, places, violent deaths, and languages did these kids INCORRECTLY identify? 3. Was there a control group of non-possessed children? 4. How were successful/unsuccessful matches of past people/places/violent deaths determined? 5. Stevenson would receive kids who have already been eliciting strange behavior to their parents...what attempts were made to reduce this clear skewing of results? Did they randomize participants? It's unfortunate that Pro's sources don't show the methods in any clear or explanatory way. I'll use on of Pro's sources to demonstrate what I mean. From Pro's source 1, reluctant-messenger.com, Ian Stevenson stated, "...the cases occur most where people already believe in reincarnation. If a child seems to refer to a previous life, it's argued that his parents encourage him and may unwittingly feed the child information about a deceased person. I call this the sociopsychological interpretation of the cases. It is said that despite all my efforts, I have not eliminated the possibility that the subject of a case learned everything he knew through normal channels." http://reluctant-messenger.com... I couldn't have put it better myself. This is where Stevenson's work is lacking in ALL of the "results" he considers to be matches, and since we have no methods, it's hard to find a place to start analyzing all of this. How has Stevenson eliminated ALL possibilities of a kid learning something naturally? Let me guess, he asked the parents if the kid had ever seen/heard of something/someone? How can a researcher POSSIBLY know ALL of the natural channels a kid has experienced in their life? Do parents ever lie? Are parents ever wrong about their kids? Do kids ever lie? Do kids ever tell the wrong thing to their parents? Were any measures taken to confirm that the experiences being told to Stevenson about the kid were true, that the parents weren't lying or just wrong, or that the kid isn't lying to their parents? We wouldn't know, because Pro has not provided a source that shows such. This is in defense of my first rebuttal that Pro's sources are not explanatory or directly relevant. *Substance Dualism* Pro claims: "There is currently no scientific and concrete evidence that thoughts are physical, so therefore, they must be separate from matter or energy itself." My response: Things that are contingent on the physical are not separate from the physical. We call them constructs. Constructs, though not physical themselves, are contingent on physical matter. Thoughts would be considered a construct, contingent on neurons, a brain, and electricity, so thoughts ARE physical due to their contingency on the physical; thoughts are not separate from matter and energy for this reason as well. So we can reject the first premise of substance dualism... "the mind is separate from the physical brain and is not matter or energy..." because without matter and energy there is no mind; the mind is contingent on matter. We can reject the 2nd premise... "If the mind is not physical, by process of elimination, it would have to be a mental substance..." because this is a false dichotomy; as I've pointed out, if something's not physical, it can be CONTINGENT on the physical and doesn't have to be a mental substance, whatever that is. *Pro's Problems With Con* I mentioned that NONE of the reincarnation studies were double-blind, so Pro says: "Con does not show a connection with how this means that reincarnation doesn't exist." My response: Ok. Pro provided a study to show a connection with how this study means that reincarnation does exist. So, I pointed out that the methods were flawed, not being a double blind study and all, negating this attempt at showing a connection to reincarnation. If Pro's source were valid, we might be able to use the results from it to inform our decision on whether or not reincarnation is real...but the methods either suck or are unexplained. Pro then responds to me saying that the names that kids recall only start with a similar letter, or sound like someone's name. Pro says: "This argument is flawed due to the fact that there are no sources to debunk the claim you quoted." My response: How about your source Pro? http://uvamagazine.org... Directly from Pro's source, about a kid named Ryan who was "reincarnated," "Ryan said his old address had "Rock" in its name. Martyn lived at 825 North Roxbury Dr. in Beverly Hills. Ryan said he knew a man named Senator Five. Martyn's daughter said she had a picture of her father with a Senator Ives, Irving Ives, of New York, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1947 to 1959." Any good examiner recognizes this as a textbook example of confirmation bias. Ryan said the old address had ROCK in its name...guess what? IT DIDN'T! It had Rox in its name, which sounds like ROCK, but is not rock...the fact that researchers counted this as a match and not a miss shows why these studies do not get published. Ryan said Senator Five was some guy, and there was a senator Ives. The researchers are filling in the association gaps, even though the kid was wrong. If there had been a senator who was the fifth one to be elected, researchers could have said that this is a recollection of that senator and not senator Ives. There was a group of bad senators called the Keating Five... https://en.wikipedia.org... Look, if Senator Five can be construed for other things, by association, that sound like five or rhyme with five or indicate a fifth entity, then we do not have a valid confirmation method to determine accuracy; we just fill in gaps where they SOUND right, rather then where they have been shown to be correct. If this kid really is a reincarnated soul, why is there any mistaking the name as Five or Ives? Is there some rule of lost information when a soul jumps bodies? The first letter of transmitted memories of names gets changed? All ROX become ROCK in the new body? Without an explanation of the mechanism behind soul jumping, there's no reason to infer that the transmission of information from body to body gets distorted or muddled...why would it, we have no way of knowing why there would be any disconnect from body to body. But perhaps the most important part of all of this is the definitions we all agreed on. Soul-"the SPIRITUAL principle embodied in human beings" Spiritual-"neither material nor contingent on the material. If Pro can only show that the soul exists contingent on humans' bodies, then we must agree that Pro's version of the soul is not a soul in this debate; the soul being contingent on matter, humans in this case, negates the soul being spiritual. Pro hasn't shown a soul, Pro hasn't shown reincarnation, and Pro has only provided interpretations of studies that are not rigorous enough for this type of extraordinary claim. I negate this particular resolution.