Detecting the Soul.

Hey, guys.

For those replying to the blank thread, I'm sorry. I pressed tab, then enter assuming it would be in the blank composition box, but it selected the post button so I apologize.


Okay, I didn't know where to post this, as everyone has their own views and beliefs and i didn't want it to boil down to a thread about a soul existing or not based on beliefs alone.

I chose this forum because many of us do have some belief in a soul, spirits, or internal energy. I was wondering how we could go about proving the existence of a soul? My first thought would be to try and test for an energy, or presence we have overlooked with in the human body, but then it occurred to me. How can we tell it's the soul unless we can capture the change unless the subject is on their final breaths. Which lead me to thinking it would be hard to get the chance to watch. I'm not sure many people would want to be hooked up to machines and have a group of individuals running through their checks as they breath their final breaths. So I think it would have to have voluntary subjects who know the end is near, and would be willing to assist in looking for the soul.

My thoughts on this are ATS, would this work? Do you think people on their death beds would volunteer to be monitored specifically for the exit of their soul upon death? If so, what would be the measurement tools one would use? The soul could be anything, and seeing as we are unaware of it's Scientific existence at this time, where would we begin? EMF? Light? EMP? What is the soul? How would we begin to look for it scientifically ?


Thoughts, comments, additions? All are welcome.

Sorry again for the blank premature post.

Did you find it yet?

ETA: There was a study that showed the body weight after the persons death and it happened to be 21g lighter...

reply to post by Hijinx


Like the soul... your thread seems to not exist.

Maybe we should weigh this thread and see if its 21 grams lighter.

reply to post by Wertdagf


I edited the thread Do we think souls have weight now?

reply to post by PurpleVortex


I would love to be the man who definitively proves it's existence. On the other hand I don't know I would enjoy disproving it as much. A remarkable discovery either way, but I Imagine a huge portion of the religious world would call me the anti-christ or attempt to burn me for proving it to not exist. Imagine all the religious world having to grasp all their loved ones are gone for good, and there is no heaven or hell. It would be utter chaos. It's far too much for them to grasp.

21 Grams. Hey, at least that's what Dr. Duncan MacDougall said:

In 1901, MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis in an old age home. It was relatively easy to determine when death was only a few hours away, and at this point the entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale which was apparently sensitive to the gram.

He took his results (a varying amount of perceived mass loss in most of the six cases) to support his hypothesis that the soul had mass, and when the soul departed the body, so did this mass. The determination of the soul weighing 21 grams was based on the average loss of mass in the six patients within moments after death.

Experiments on mice and other animals took place. Most notably the weighing upon death of sheep seemed to create mass for a few minutes which later disappeared. The hypothesis was made that a soul portal formed upon death which then whisked the soul away.

MacDougall also measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances and reported the results as "uniformly negative," with no perceived change in mass. He took these results as confirmation that the soul had weight, and that dogs did not have souls.

en.wikipedia.org...(doctor)

Contrary to a certain popular movie, it appears, All dogs do NOT go to heaven. If true I'ma miss Zoey my Yorkie.

reply to post by Hijinx


Its going to happen... just like every other religious belief.

Just wait till GOD is gone from society and we still have all these people still missing skin from their penis's. What a reminder of how stupid people can be.....

Originally posted by Hijinx
reply to post by PurpleVortex

 

I would love to be the man who definitively proves it's existence. On the other hand I don't know I would enjoy disproving it as much. A remarkable discovery either way, but I Imagine a huge portion of the religious world would call me the anti-christ or attempt to burn me for proving it to not exist. Imagine all the religious world having to grasp all their loved ones are gone for good, and there is no heaven or hell. It would be utter chaos. It's far too much for them to grasp.

No need to prove anything to anyone, especially the ideas of spirituality/religion...We will all find out in time.

reply to post by The GUT


Could this not be attributed to gas loss through the lungs? Our lungs contain gas which has weight, when you let our your last breath, you would in theory weigh less than while your lungs were full would you not?

Wiki has a bunch of volumes ranging from an average of 6 liter total capacity, and then a whole bunch of factors.

Average inspiratory volume in (healthy)men is 3.3 liters 1.9 in healthy women.
Tidal volume .5 liters in men .5 liters in women.
Expiratory reserve volume in men 1 in men 0.7 in women
residual volume 1.2 in men 1.1 in women

Soooooo if you die and you let out your breath, would you not weigh less? This doesn't necessarily mean our souls have weight. As gas could be attributed to these weights. Including anything expelled from our lungs that was in our breath.

reply to post by Wertdagf


Well then wouldn't this be a motivational factor for you to want to prove the lack of the souls existence? It has motivational factors for either side. The religious, comfort, the non-religious an I told you so. Would this sort of experiment not interest you, how do you propose we go about finding it out? I'm unbiased in this whole thing, but I'm curious as to how it could be done. Weight seems preposterous to me, as a soul as described by religious/spiritual individuals is described as an energy, and it just seems unlikely it would maintain mass.

reply to post by Hijinx


You cant disprove something that hasnt been proven.

I could say that purple unicorns used a time machine to alter our timeline. How the %&*^ do you prove that didnt happen?

Just like all this soul nonsense that has never had ANY evidence.

Originally posted by Wertdagf
Just like all this soul nonsense that has never had ANY evidence.

No evidence? Kind of like your intellect and flair for diplomacy you mean?

reply to post by Wertdagf


How very ignorant of you. As out there as it may seem you can not say something does or does not exist until you can prove it. As annoying, and fantastical as it may seem, no person can say definitively something does or not exist with out some kind of proof. It may not be probable that purple unicorns traveled through time and altered our time line, but are you sure? What proof do you have? I know that sounds awful, and I really hate when people throw the " Prove it doesn't " line at me for a whole number of things, but it's still a possibility. How ever unlikely it may be, there is still a chance. From our current understanding, and experience, unicorns likely do not exist, nor does time travel. How ever, we do have some knowledge with physics, mathematics that suggest time travel could be probable, how ever at this time we can not prove it can or can not happen.

reply to post by Hijinx


Well good luck with that then.

Ive said my bit, you can have fun wallowing in the mud with the rest of the pigs.

reply to post by Wertdagf


Insults come when the intellect fails. Good luck, to you as well. " When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either."

reply to post by Hijinx
I've read about such studies before and recognise GUT's example. So I tried to think of an analogy and came up with trying to measure the difference between an empty hard-drive and one that's been filled full of data - it doesn't work as nothing is ever added, it just moves data around. When unplugged (dead), the disc (body) holds the same data (weight).

As an extension of that analogy, perhaps a soul would be more akin to the 'internet' being plugged in to a machine? In that case, there's I/O traffic going on continuously and when the internet is disconnected we're left with the HD the same weight as ever. Simultaneously, the internet continues to exist and includes at least some of the data inputted by the now *dead* computer.

Maybe book analogy works better? In that frame, we'd be like a book that has all the words removed and how could we weigh that difference?

Maybe an idea is to use super-colliders? You take a victim volunteer who has little time left and install them in the interior of a particle-accelerator. Then you monitor their life-signs until the familiar death-signature is written on the monitor screens. At that moment, you blast the crap out of them and see what particles get pinged?! Yeah sure, the notional soul might be very pissed off at such white-coated pioneerism and vision, but hey, it's all part of the soul's journey right?!

*If* we did find evidence for something like a 'soul,' it'd certainly shake us all up a little. We'd immediately have a dichotomous awareness knowing that our organic senses are thinking one thing and knowing that something else is piggy-backing us and thinking something else. In a way, it might be like split-brain patients and their 24/7 knowledge of the two hemispheres having distinctly different experiences of the same stimuli.

I'd suppose also that discovering evidence of a 'soul' wouldn't be proof of anything more than the existence of an energy of unknown intent and origin. It wouldn't be *proof* of [pick a religion]. We'd have to use some extraordinary rendition to water-board one in the LHC until it spills the goods!

Originally posted by Wertdagf
Like the soul... your thread seems to not exist.

A person who truly believes in science never says that something definitely does not exist. A true scientist is always searching. To say that something does not exist is giving up in the quest for answers. I'm not religious, nor am I atheist. I'm always looking for new information and am willing to expand my mind to anything that might come along and offer insight when it comes to topics like this. It seems to me like you've given up the quest for answers and closed the door early.

Originally posted by Wertdagf
Its going to happen... just like every other religious belief.

Just wait till GOD is gone from society and we still have all these people still missing skin from their penis's. What a reminder of how stupid people can be.....

I've been seeing your posts for at least half a year now, and I get the feeling that many of the things you say aren't driven by logic or skepticism, but rather emotions resulting from a past psychological trauma. I have reason to believe this because of a post you once made in a circumcision thread:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Wertdagf
I am not happy im circumcised.

It is a mark on my body from religious fanatisicm and ignorance.. it shows you what religion can do to a weakminded person... it can make them take a knife to their child to cut away what ever it takes to make their imaginary friend happy.

That is disgusting.

I'm not trying to insult you in any way, but I've seen this with so many other people too. People have some past childhood trauma or resentment that was caused by religion, such as being molested by a priest, one too many ruler smacks from a nun in Sunday school, or having the shell taken from their turtle. As they get older, they become atheists not due to skepticism, but because they have pent up anger and hostility towards any spiritual beliefs whatsoever. To them anything remotely spiritual equals religion, which brings back bad memories, so it can't possibly be true in their eyes. I'm not trying to be an armchair shrink here, but I've just seen it so many times, and the pattern is so similar every time. I know a guy who was raised Catholic, and it messed his childhood up so badly that he refuses to believe anything at all now. Not because of science or skepticism, but simply because anything spiritual in general makes him cringe due to his childhood.

TL;DR - Don't let emotions such as pent up anger and resentment override logic. That's actually the antithesis of what science truly stands for.

I is.

I be.

I am "IS BE".


Eternal and forever, good enough for me


SS

Only one time I saw a dead body, it was my grandmas. It was in the hospital after they pulled her breathing apparatus. I remember getting ready to walk not that room not sure what to expect. I wasn't close with her so there was not much emotion but It was quite disturbing to see her lifeless body. She looked like a zombie costume, an empty bag of bones, a lifeless object. She could have been a sheet, a cup or the pen in the cup. She, i mean it was meaningless.

Her soul was not present in that room. If we can recognize the lack of soul wouldn't that prove the existence of the soul.

I think about how when will talk with someone who is alive, "that's not like you " or "she doesn't seem like herself".
Are we in tune with something deeper or are we just observing inconsistency in expected patterns of behavior.

Was because my grandma did not sit up and turn her head to acknowledge my presence my cue that she was without a soul, or was there deeper connection that was missing.

Wow, I haven't revisited that memory in a while, sorry I rambled a bit.

I'm a Christian by the way, so I have my own reasons to believe we have souls, but I love your approach to the question of soul.

While I was writing this post, the song below was playing. I thought it appropriate for the mood.

It would be far better to develop a way to measure energy. From orgone to spirits to the enrgy which surrounds all living things, we have no way to measure it or detect it yet as far as I know. Once you manage this, you can determine all kinds of "proofs' which science requires to "validate" something. It is the height of arrogance to put science's approval on something anyway. Why should we need that approval to know that it was experienced or real?

If you managed this, you would also probably pick up James Randi's million bucks for proving 'something' ESP/energy/ghosties/whatever exists. Thats better than a poke in the eye and may provide some motivation.

I think the first thing to do is to go speak with some Russians as they are well up in this field, and they have developed the Kirlian (photography) and related technologies and even use them for diagnosis already.

Of course, once you have discovered the way to measure those different kinds of energy, the military may be interested in you as well since you will be interfering with their technologies and once measured will expose their secrets.