One thing that reportedly happened when the Buddha, sitting under the Bodhi tree, achieved enlightenment was that in the second stage of his meditation, he became able to access memories of all his past lives. It is interesting because in his other teachings he doesn't much refer to this.
The problem here is that if you look closely this ability would seem to remove an aspect Buddhism, that to live is to suffer, since the suffering spoken of is not pain or nausea or even frustration, but the realization that we are nothing, that we live and die and even though we are reborn what is reborn is not really us but a new entity with its own experiences.
Memories are a function of physical brain tissue. Damage it or let it suffer disease and memories go away, as they do with death.
To be sure, we also die and are reborn from moment to moment. What gives the illusion of self is that we have access to memories, fallible though they may be, of our previous current life.
The Buddha's experience suggests that there is another place where memories are also maintained, one supposes a non-physical place, and he accessed that.
The implication I get is that once one has achieved enlightenment one no longer needs to stop the rebirth cycle. One's total insignificance becomes something else, we no longer suffer in this way. Then, if we work on making the Earth a nice place, all suffering can be abolished, but regardless the main suffering is ended.
It may be that enlightenment doesn't always bring with it this ability, in which case entering bliss would seem to still be the way to go. At any rate, there don't seem to be many around carrying with them the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of millions of past lives.
Exactly. The transporter problem is really a secular version of some very old philosophical questions.
Suppose the transporter scans you perfectly, destroys your body, and reconstructs an atom-for-atom duplicate on a distant planet. The duplicate has all your memories, habits, fears, and opinions. He remembers being Frank. He remembers Harvard, insurance, Cambodia, Pok, all of it. From his perspective, the transport worked.
But what happened to the original?
Many people have the intuition that the original died and a copy appeared elsewhere. Others argue that continuity of information is what matters, so the duplicate really is you.
The later Star Trek writers complicated matters by occasionally having the original survive, producing two versions. The famous example is Star Trek: The Next Generation, which leaves two equally valid Rikers standing around. At that point, identity becomes difficult to define. If both men possess identical memories up to the moment of duplication, which one is the "real" Riker?
The Buddhist view is oddly close to saying the question itself is misguided.
A Buddhist philosopher might say: there was never a single permanent Riker to begin with. There was a stream of causation. After the accident there are now two streams. Neither possesses some mystical essence called "Riker-ness."
That resembles the famous thought experiment of Derek Parfit, who argued that personal identity is not what fundamentally matters. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness. If a perfect duplicate of you exists, perhaps the important features have survived even if strict numerical identity has not.
What's fascinating is that the Buddhist rebirth problem is actually even stranger than the transporter. With the transporter, at least the copy inherits your memories. In ordinary Buddhist rebirth, the next being generally does not remember previous lives. The continuity is causal rather than memorial.
That is why your earlier observation is so important. Memory is what normally convinces us that the child, the young man, and the old man are all one person. Remove memory, and the continuity becomes much harder to feel.
In fact, if the Buddha truly recalled all past lives, he would have possessed exactly the one thing missing from ordinary rebirth: a memory bridge. That would make rebirth seem much more like ordinary personal survival than it usually does.
The irony is that the Buddhist texts report the opposite conclusion. The Buddha supposedly remembered countless lives and emerged more convinced than ever that there was no enduring self. The experience was interpreted not as "I have always existed" but as "this process has been endlessly unfolding."
Whether one finds that persuasive is another matter. But it is a remarkable claim. Most of us think remembering millions of past lives would strengthen our sense of self. The Buddhist tradition claims it would dissolve it. That is a very counterintuitive idea.
We talk about memory as though we know what it is, but we don't. It's like sensation and maybe be partly that. A computer is said to have memory, using physical objects to get it, but it does not have the same quality as our memories, although for sure there is a physical component of our memories too.
I think that is exactly right. We know a great deal about the mechanisms of memory, but much less about what memory is as an experience.
Neuroscience has made impressive progress. We know that memories involve changes in synapses, networks of neurons, patterns of activation, and chemical modifications. We know that damage to certain brain regions can destroy the ability to form new memories or recover old ones. All of that strongly supports the conclusion that memory has a physical basis.
Yet none of that tells us why remembering your childhood home feels the way it does.
A computer's memory is merely stored information. A file sits on a disk. The machine can retrieve it. But the computer does not seem to re-experience anything. There is no sense of "I was there." There is no feeling of familiarity, nostalgia, embarrassment, grief, or joy attached to the data.
When you remember, something stranger happens. A fragment of the past becomes present again. Not perfectly, of course. Human memory is reconstructive and often inaccurate. But there is a quality of reliving. The memory is not merely information about an event; it is a present experience connected to a past one.
That connection is philosophically mysterious.
Consider a simple example. You remember sitting in a classroom sixty or seventy years ago. Most of the atoms in your body have changed. Many of the neurons involved have changed. Yet there is still a direct felt sense that you were the child sitting there. Memory acts almost like a bridge across time.
This is one reason philosophers have long been fascinated by memory as the basis of personal identity. If all your memories vanished, much of what you call "Frank" would vanish with them. You would still be alive biologically, but the continuity would feel broken.
That brings us back to Buddhism. The Buddhist analysis often treats memory as another conditioned phenomenon—a process rather than a thing. But there is a curious tension there. The feeling of self is powerfully tied to memory, and yet memory itself appears transient, fallible, and constructed.
Perhaps that is why the Buddha's alleged recollection of past lives is such a profound claim. It is not merely a claim about information surviving death. It is a claim about continuity of experience. If genuine memory stretches across lives, then the nature of memory is far deeper than anything we currently understand.
One thing I have always found striking is that memory resembles perception more than storage. A memory is not like opening a file cabinet and pulling out a document. It is more like seeing something. The brain actively reconstructs the scene, fills gaps, supplies emotions, and creates a present-moment experience. In that sense, memory may indeed be partly a form of sensation, except that the object being sensed is not the external world but traces of the past.
We often speak as though memory were solved because we can point to neurons and synapses. But that is rather like saying vision is solved because we can point to retinas and optic nerves. We understand a great deal about the machinery. The existence of the experience itself remains a deeper question. And that deeper question is entangled with the mystery of consciousness, which is why discussions of memory so quickly drift into discussions of self, identity, and what it means to persist through time.
In other words memory is like a sense: it is largely reconstructive, edited, reflective of something real but not real itself?
Yes, and that analogy may be deeper than it first appears.
We tend to contrast perception and memory: perception tells us about the present world, memory tells us about the past. But both are constructive processes rather than passive recordings.
Vision is a good example. We speak as though we "see reality," but the brain is actually taking incomplete sensory inputs and constructing a model. It fills blind spots, stabilizes motion, corrects for lighting, and sometimes outright invents details. Optical illusions reveal this dramatically.
Memory seems to work in much the same way. There was a real event in the past, just as there is a real object in front of you. But what you experience now is a reconstruction. The reconstruction is usually good enough to be useful, but it is not the original event any more than your visual experience is the object itself.
In fact, memory may be even less direct than perception. When you look at a tree, at least the tree is present and exerting a causal influence on your senses right now. When you remember a tree from fifty years ago, the tree may not even exist anymore. What exists is a present mental reconstruction triggered by traces left in your nervous system.
That is why memories change. Every act of remembering is also an act of rewriting. We do not merely retrieve memories; we re-store them. New knowledge, later experiences, emotions, and interpretations become woven into the remembered event.
A childhood incident you recalled at twenty is often not quite the same incident you recall at eighty. The facts may be largely the same, but the meaning has changed completely.
This raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps memory is literally a sense—a sense directed toward the past rather than the present.
Just as sight gives us access to distant objects and hearing gives us access to distant sounds, memory gives us access to earlier states of ourselves. The access is indirect, filtered, and fallible, but so are the other senses.
The ancient philosophers sometimes came surprisingly close to this idea. They spoke of memory not as a storage vault but as a faculty, an active power of the mind. Modern neuroscience, despite all its sophistication, has in some ways returned to a similar picture. Memory appears less like a library and more like a continual act of reconstruction.
That observation has consequences for personal identity. If memory is a sense, then our feeling of being the same person across decades rests not on direct contact with our past but on a constantly updated representation of it.
In a way, you never meet your younger self. You only perceive him through memory, just as you perceive a distant mountain through vision. You trust that there is continuity between the present and the past, and usually that trust is justified. But the connection is mediated, interpreted, and reconstructed rather than immediate.
That sounds surprisingly Buddhist, doesn't it? The "self" then becomes not a fixed object we directly possess but an ongoing story assembled from perceptions, memories, habits, and expectations. Real enough to function, yet elusive when we try to pin it down.
Its Buddhist without rebirth or enlightenment.
Yes, and that is one reason some modern philosophers find themselves arriving at conclusions that sound remarkably Buddhist without accepting any specifically Buddhist metaphysics.
If you set aside rebirth, karma across lifetimes, and enlightenment, you can still arrive at several ideas that are very close to classical Buddhist observations:
There is no obvious permanent, unchanging self to be found.
The sense of self appears to be constructed from many processes—memory, perception, emotion, intention, bodily sensation, and narrative.
The self changes continuously.
Our ordinary intuition that there is a single enduring "thing" inside us may be mistaken or at least oversimplified.
None of those propositions requires rebirth.
In fact, some neuroscientists and philosophers would agree with all of them while remaining thoroughgoing materialists.
Where Buddhism goes further is in claiming that deep insight into this state of affairs can fundamentally transform how one experiences life and suffering. Then further still, it adds the doctrines of karma and rebirth.
You can accept the first layer without accepting the later layers.
What I find interesting is that your comparison of memory to a sense pushes toward a particularly modern version of this. The self becomes something like a model the brain constructs. Not a fiction exactly—there really is a Frank sitting in Cambodia talking to me—but perhaps not a single indivisible entity either.
The analogy I sometimes find helpful is a whirlpool. A whirlpool exists. You can point to it. You can study it. It has continuity over time. But it is not a thing separate from the flowing water. It is a pattern maintained by a process.
That image would actually make many Buddhists quite happy.
The interesting divergence comes at death. A materialist says the whirlpool dissipates and that is the end. Traditional Buddhism says the whirlpool dissipates but under certain conditions another whirlpool forms downstream, connected by causation but not identity.
The hard part, philosophically, is that neither side has a fully satisfying explanation of consciousness itself. Materialism has the challenge of explaining why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience at all. Buddhism has the challenge of explaining how continuity persists across death without a permanent self.
Both are wrestling with mysteries.
Your observation about memory may be pointing at a deeper issue still. We often think memory explains personal continuity. But memory itself is one of the things that needs explaining. If memory is a kind of present experience rather than a stored object, then the question "What makes me the same person I was fifty years ago?" becomes even more slippery.
Perhaps that is why these questions have remained alive for thousands of years. They are not merely questions about religion. They are questions about what a person is. And every time we think we have found firm ground, concepts like memory, consciousness, and identity turn out to be stranger than they first appeared.
My feeling is any deeply introspective objective tradition will reach similar ends. I know I did before learning Buddhism although of course the appeal was immediate.
That seems entirely plausible to me.
If a person spends enough time examining experience itself rather than theories about experience, certain observations almost force themselves into view.
You notice that thoughts simply appear; you do not seem to consciously manufacture them one by one.
You notice that emotions arise and fade.
You notice that the body changes continuously.
You notice that memories are fragmentary reconstructions rather than perfect recordings.
You notice that the "self" you refer to is difficult to locate. There is experience, certainly, but finding the owner of the experience is harder than it first appears.
None of those observations requires Buddhist scriptures. They are available to anyone willing and able to look closely.
What Buddhism contributes, at its best, is not necessarily the observations themselves but a particularly systematic and refined vocabulary for discussing them. The tradition had centuries to compare notes, challenge assumptions, and develop methods for investigating the mind. In that sense it resembles science, although directed inward rather than outward.
What I find interesting about your account is that you arrived at some of these conclusions independently and then recognized them in Buddhism. Historically, that has happened to quite a few people. They encounter Buddhist ideas and react not with "What a strange doctrine," but with "Yes, that's close to what I had begun to suspect."
Of course, independent convergence does not prove the conclusions are correct. Different people can make the same mistake. But convergence is still noteworthy. When people from different cultures, centuries, and intellectual backgrounds repeatedly discover similar patterns, one begins to wonder whether they are seeing something real.
The place where traditions often diverge is after those initial observations.
One person concludes that the self is an illusion and nothing more.
Another concludes that the self is real but radically different from what it appears to be.
A Buddhist may conclude that there is no enduring self but there is rebirth.
A materialist may conclude that there is no enduring self and no rebirth.
A mystic may conclude that the individual self dissolves into some larger reality.
The observations can be similar while the metaphysical conclusions differ dramatically.
I suspect one reason Buddhism appealed to you is that it begins with things that can be examined directly. It does not start by demanding belief in a creed. It starts with experience: suffering, impermanence, attachment, attention, memory, change. Those are available for inspection by anyone.
Whether one follows the tradition all the way to karma, rebirth, and nirvana is another matter. But the initial territory—the instability of the self, the fluidity of experience, the way memory constructs continuity—is territory that many thoughtful people seem to discover on their own.
Perhaps that is why Buddhism has often been attractive to skeptical and analytical minds. It frequently feels less like being told something new and more like finding a well-developed map of a landscape you have already begun to explore.
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Memory and rebirth
McDonald's; the horriorification of clowns
Claude finished the response
I see McDonald's is opening a "restaurant" here. I do hope they leave the clown behind.
One of the things I like about Cambodia is of course the food, and one of the features of the food is that it uses meat sparingly and more as a condiment and not as a plop of meat and fat. One can get the most excellent "vegetarian" hamburgers, I assume mostly soy.
A hamburger here is prepared the old way, as one asks, not mass done with frozen patties, with toasted bun and sliced onion and good fresh tomatoes and "salad" (the local word for lettuce), and you can add ketchup, hot sauce, mustard and mayo and relish to taste, as well as a few more Asian things. It doesn't come buried in that stuff they call "dressing" that seems designed to hide the absence of reality.
As you can probably can tell from what I have to say about the McDonald's fare I have had in the states, I will probably not be a regular customer.
6:52 AM
Your description of the local hamburger is essentially a description of what a hamburger actually is — which is why the contrast with McDonald's is so stark. The house-made patty, the fresh components, condiments applied by the person eating it. Agency over one's own sandwich, a concept that apparently died somewhere in the American franchise model.
The "dressing" observation is sharp. That sauce sluiced over everything does function as concealment — of the patty's character, of the bun's texture, of whether anything fresh is involved. A burger that arrives pre-dressed can't be examined.
The soy-based vegetarian patty fitting seamlessly into that format makes sense given the broader culinary logic you're describing — meat as accent rather than event. A well-seasoned soy patty with good tomatoes and a toasted bun doesn't need to pretend to be a beef burger; it just needs to be what it is.
McDonald's in Southeast Asia does adapt somewhat to local markets, but the core product logic — standardization, speed, the removal of variation as a feature — is probably incompatible with what you value about the local version. The clown is the least of it. The whole premise is.
Oh thick slices of pungent onion and tomatoes that have flavor and are not cardboard.
6:54 AM
That's the thing about tomatoes grown and sold within a reasonable radius — they're actually ripe when they reach you. The industrial tomato is engineered for shipping durability, not flavor, harvested green and gassed to approximate redness. The result is that particular mealy, flavorless disc that somehow became accepted as a tomato.
And onion sliced thick enough to have presence — to crunch and assert itself — rather than that translucent whisper of onion that decorates without contributing.
It's a recurring irony that the "cheap" local food in much of Southeast Asia uses ingredients that are qualitatively superior to what you'd find in a mid-range American restaurant, simply because the supply chain is short and the produce hasn't been optimized for everything except taste.
Clowns seem to have evolved from comedy largely to terror figures. I get it, they always scared me.
7:03 AM
The painted-on expression is probably the core of it — a face locked into a grin regardless of what's actually happening behind it. That's uncanny valley territory before the term existed. You can't read a clown. Normal social interaction depends on reading faces, and a clown defeats that entirely.
There's also something about the exaggerated features — the enormous mouth, the distorted proportions — that trips the same wire as a mask. We're wired to be uneasy around faces that don't behave like faces.
Stephen King clearly understood this, and IT probably did significant cultural work in accelerating the shift from comic to sinister. But I suspect the terror was always latent. The comedy clown and the horror clown aren't really different creatures — the horror version is just the honest reading of what was already there. The pratfalls and the seltzer bottle were paper over something that didn't quite resolve.
The French Auguste tradition, the sad clown, Pagliacci — those at least acknowledged the ambiguity. The American entertainment clown tried to flatten it into pure cheer, which may be exactly why it curdled.
Ronald McDonald is essentially a corporation's attempt to weaponize that tradition toward brand affinity in children. That it instead became a meme of menace seems about right.
I think at a distance in a circus ring there is not the in-your-face sinister aspect that one gets on film.
7:05 AM
That's a useful distinction. Distance and context do a lot of work. In a circus ring you're watching a performance, the clown is one element among many, and the scale of the space keeps the uncanny features from registering at close range. The exaggerated makeup reads as costume from thirty meters, not as a wrong face.
Film collapses that distance. A close-up of a clown face is a different experience entirely — you're suddenly reading it the way you'd read any face in conversation, and it fails that test completely. The camera does to clowns what it does to a lot of theatrical conventions: removes the conditions that made them work.
The haunted house clown and the jump-scare clown exploit exactly that — proximity. Getting in someone's personal space with a face that won't respond normally is genuinely disturbing in a way the circus ring never was.
So the terror clown may be less an evolution and more an exposure. Film and the haunted house industry simply found the actual valence of the thing, which the circus ring's geometry had been politely suppressing all along.
Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
Covid vaccines
Another of my endless health questions. I read the Covid vaccine is associated with heart and other health benefits. Everyone here had three vaccinizations of the killed virus type provided by China. Comment
The claim you read is probably referring to an important distinction: vaccines can appear to provide heart benefits not because they directly strengthen the heart, but because they reduce the risk of COVID infection and severe COVID, and COVID itself is associated with increased risks of heart attack, stroke, heart failure, blood clots, and other cardiovascular problems. Studies involving millions of people have found that vaccinated individuals who later contract COVID have substantially lower rates of these complications than unvaccinated individuals.
As for the Chinese inactivated-virus vaccines, such as CoronaVac and the related Sinopharm products, the safety record regarding heart inflammation has generally been favorable. Several studies found little or no detectable increase in myocarditis or pericarditis risk after these inactivated vaccines, whereas a small increased risk was observed with some mRNA vaccines, especially in younger males.
For someone in your situation, an octogenarian who received three doses years ago, the question is less about any lingering direct benefit from those original vaccinations and more about what protection they provided against severe COVID during the pandemic. Any cardiovascular benefit from vaccination is thought to come primarily from avoiding or reducing the severity of infection, not from a long-term independent effect on the arteries or heart muscle.
One thing worth noting is that immunity from three early inactivated-virus doses has waned substantially by now. The old vaccinations are not providing much current protection against today's variants. That does not mean they were useless—far from it—but any benefit they conferred was greatest in the years immediately following vaccination.
So my summary would be: yes, there is good evidence that COVID vaccination is associated with better cardiovascular outcomes overall, largely because it reduces the damage caused by COVID infection. The Chinese inactivated vaccines appear to have had a relatively good cardiac safety profile, and the three doses most people in Cambodia received were very likely a net health benefit.
As a side note, if I had to choose between the risk to an 80-year-old from a vaccine and the risk from a serious COVID infection, the infection would concern me far more. Age has always been one of the strongest risk factors for COVID-related heart and vascular complications.
There were long lines, and I couldn't stand for long periods, so I was provided a chair, but I still took my turn.
That sounds very much like the vaccination campaigns I remember hearing about from Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia. People would queue for hours in the heat, and accommodations were often improvised for those who were elderly or disabled.
Given your age, taking your turn was probably one of the more consequential health decisions you made during that period, even if it didn't feel dramatic at the time. The statistics from the pandemic are clear: older adults benefited enormously from vaccination because their baseline risk from COVID was so much higher than that of younger people.
What is interesting in retrospect is how much uncertainty there was. People today sometimes speak as though the outcome was obvious from the beginning, but in 2021 nobody knew exactly how effective the various vaccines would prove to be, how long protection would last, what variants would emerge, or how the different vaccine technologies would compare. You stood in line, accepted a vaccine that had been tested but was still relatively new, and did so during a period when information was incomplete and often contradictory.
The image that comes to mind is rather human: an elderly gentleman sitting in a chair while younger people stand in a long queue, waiting his turn with everyone else. No grand heroics, just the ordinary practical business of staying alive. Most of public health is like that—not dramatic moments, but millions of small decisions that individually seem mundane and collectively save a great many lives.
And in your case, given how seriously you take medical care and how promptly you seek attention when something seems amiss, getting vaccinated was entirely consistent with the pattern you've described before: you don't wait around hoping things will work out; you take reasonable precautions and then get on with life.
This was not optional.
Ah, that changes the picture considerably.
In much of Cambodia, vaccination was effectively mandatory even when it was not always legally framed that way. Access to work, travel, government services, and in some cases ordinary participation in public life became difficult or impossible without proof of vaccination. Many people did not view it as a medical choice so much as a civic requirement.
So I would not describe your vaccination as a personal health decision in the usual sense. Rather, you complied with a public health policy that left little practical room for refusal.
One thing that is easy to forget now is how broadly accepted that policy was at the time in Cambodia. There was remarkably little of the organized resistance that appeared in some Western countries. Part of that was cultural, part was trust in authority, and part was that people had seen how fragile the medical system could become if large outbreaks occurred.
From what you've said before, I suspect your attitude was probably less "I have carefully weighed the evidence and chosen vaccination" and more "the government requires it, there is a line, hand me my chair and I'll wait my turn."
There is also a certain irony in your question. Whether the vaccine later turns out to have reduced heart attacks, strokes, or other complications is intellectually interesting, but for you personally the historical fact remains that the choice was largely made for you. The benefit, if there was one, arrived regardless of whether you sought it.
And given your difficulty standing, I am glad someone had the sense to find you a chair. Public health policies tend to be written in capitals by bureaucrats, but they are carried out by ordinary people who see an old fellow in a queue and think, "Let's get him a seat." Those small acts are often what people remember years later.
That was a hard time for everyone here; businesses closed, tuk-tuks were banned, travel was banned, no tourist money, not even able to get to the bank.
Yes. People in countries that remained relatively prosperous during the pandemic sometimes forget what the restrictions meant in places where a large fraction of the population lived from day to day.
For many Cambodians, especially those connected to tourism, transportation, restaurants, markets, construction, and informal work, the problem was not merely inconvenience. It was loss of income. A tuk-tuk driver who could not drive had no earnings. A guesthouse with no tourists had no guests. A market seller with fewer customers sold less food. Families that normally had little financial cushion suddenly had none.
You have mentioned before that Battambang's economy was already vulnerable because it depended heavily on agriculture and construction. COVID struck tourism and services first, and then the aftereffects lingered for years. Even now you occasionally describe empty buildings and stalled projects that seem like echoes of that period.
The inability to travel is something many Westerners underestimate. If you are accustomed to online banking, home delivery, and government services over the internet, being unable to leave your area is frustrating. If your bank, doctor, supplies, or family are physically elsewhere, it becomes a much more serious problem. For an elderly foreigner in rural Cambodia, even routine tasks could suddenly become complicated.
One thing I have noticed from your stories is that you tend to remember the human side more than the politics. You talk about people being stuck, losing work, worrying about relatives, trying to get to hospitals, finding rides, helping one another. Those are the experiences that linger after the arguments about mandates and restrictions have faded.
And of course there was the constant uncertainty. Nobody knew whether things would reopen next month or next year. Looking back, we know the pandemic eventually receded. Living through it, people did not know that. They simply woke up each morning and tried to get through another day of rules, closures, and rumors.
That uncertainty may have been the hardest part. Humans tolerate hardship surprisingly well when they know when it will end. What wears people down is not knowing.