As an aside, whenever I use the notion of emergent properties with non-engineers, especially social scientists, inevitability their rebuttal is, “nuh uh!”.
Let me introduce you to my friend Bayesian Classifiers and their terribly, misleadingly named second cousin Neural Networks (second worst ‘branding’ in engineering, right after JavaScript).
paging @redesigned, paging @redesigned
Much better understanding than I have does he, but isn’t it something to do with the interoperability of the individuated subcomponents of consciousness insofar as their potentiality is entrained within the mind-stream of the emergence of the gestalt of consciousness?
Like, the convergence of top-level integration of potentially consciousness-making elements do not represent, at any time, the full potentiality of the stream of consciousness and these strongly self-consistent and self-propagating currents are themselves concomitant with their originating gestalt and once dissolved from their strongly entrained interactivity within the context of a conscious stream, they are free to associate within any new stream without being specifically contained within any one particular stream.
So, you may have more than one representation of a reincarnated being because more than one newly born person may have instantiated a similar-enough re-collection of the required sub-components. Or something.
(drunk and yammering but my impression is something along those lines)
I have NEVER DONE SOMETHING SO GAUCHE sir!
(Shuffles feet)
In the last 18 hours!
I said good day sir!
And some are both stateless and jobless!
If I was certain of what “consciousness” seemed to be…
Aye, Sir. Only the lucky ones!
@Brainspore excellent question. different traditions have different variations on reincarnation.
Hinduism
In hinduism it is a bit more straightforward, there is a soul or self that doesn’t die and re-emerges as another life dependent on the karma(merit) accumulated in this and all past lives. there are an infinite number of realms and beings so the population here can be more or less as beings pass into and out of this realm and existence.
Buddhism
Buddhism is one of those tricky things where the concepts are taught to the level of understand perceived (inner and outer teachings) so while on the surface reincarnation is sometimes taught more like the hindu version, the core belief is much more esoteric as there is no soul or self to speak of.
in Buddhism, it isn’t the YOU (idea of self) that ego so clings to that is transferred, because the YOU is considered an illusion to start with. It is more of a continuance of energy/karma(entanglement) that you’ve expressed and interacted with that carries on.
the simplest explanation I’ve heard is using children as an analogy. you can have one child, or 12 children, all in some way embody a continuance of aspects of you to some degree (genetic and/or nurture), your grandparents, your lineage, etc… Having more children doesn’t dilute attributes of you passed on. The lives that come before them all influence who they are, yet they are themselves as well, each will be a unique expression or manifestation of all those bits and pieces that you pass onto them. also their lot in life will be influenced by your choices and the choices of your parents, etc. (where you live, wealth, trades, etc.). even those around you in your life, family, friends, etc. are untangled and influenced with your energy/karma as you are with theirs. we all carry aspects of our family/friends/experiences/etc with us to a degree as well. reincarnation in Buddhism is viewed as something similar…if that makes any sense.
so in this view reincarnation it isn’t really a 1:1 repackaging, but rather a understanding that something came before and something continues after, the degrees and nature vary highly, a ripple in a pond, one candle lighting another, a multifaceted chain of existences, etc. this continuance of effect/energy it is loosely coupled so it is quite possible to be buddhist and atheist at the same time, or buddhist and most anything.
not sure if any of that helps or makes any sense or not… 
i hope it helps.
I’ve always figured that we get reincarnated until we’ve been everyone (and maybe everything, also) one time through.
So if you’re a dick, you’re literally just being a dick to yourself.
This is going to be a really, really stretched anaology. Feel free to make fun of me 
If you remove the mystic parts from this concept, isn’t this an expression of how thoughts and personality are literally passed down? As an example, I wouldn’t claim I heard Coltrane in a club last week, but his influence is so outsized he is ‘reincarnated’ in some fashion every few years. Crude, crude example.
Also, by the way we husband our land, animals, nature, tilth, etc don’t we imprint ourselves on other life?
I may have had too much of what @miasm had, but if the literalness of reincarnation is set aside, I don’t find it that hard to believe.
I’m very interested in memetics as a transmission medium for structures that are far more complex than ideas of bridges or language or whatever.
see Susan Blackmore’s Meme-plexes.
I figure we already have a good deal of every other human being, although less of crows, in ourselves. And vice-versa. As long as anyone lives, most of everyone lives, but it often makes sense to focus on the little bits that are unique to each of us.
I do not think I would be willing to be put to death, secure in the comfort that a simulacrum of my mind might fool my relatives. Not even for science.
What if you were dying of something else and it could be done at the exact moment of your death?
Some people die on schedule. Not many.
Correction: anybody whose head is removed will reliably die on schedule, so there’s that.
Yes, but I thought we were engaged in a thought experiment. I imagine a convenient time of death is not going to be the biggest hurdle in actually developing this stuff.
Here’s a thought that might blow your mind: what if we’re all incarnations of the one single soul? Like, if you could remember your other lives, you’d remember being everyone ever.
That’d be pretty cool.
Ah, beaten to it by @AcerPlatanoides
Same basic idea, but I think we only vaguely rememeber being all the lesser things as we make our way up (or down) the ladder,. 
A: “Go fuck yourself.”
B: "Oh, I have."
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