WEBVTT - How much does the soul weigh? 0:00:03.120 --> 0:00:06.000 Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff 0:00:06.000 --> 0:00:13.600 Works dot com. Hey, welcome is stuff to Blow your Mind. 0:00:13.640 --> 0:00:15.960 My name is Robert Lamp and my name is Julie 0:00:16.000 --> 0:00:18.320 soul Patch Douglas soul Patch Douglas. Yeah, and weear my 0:00:18.360 --> 0:00:21.160 soul patch today. Oh yeah, right there on the chin. Yeah. 0:00:21.560 --> 0:00:25.320 I've often wondered about the naming of the soul patch. 0:00:25.440 --> 0:00:27.720 Is it is it tied into anything? Like there are 0:00:27.720 --> 0:00:31.440 no chakras that line up with the chin uh? Like, 0:00:31.600 --> 0:00:34.560 why is that like an energy point where the growth 0:00:34.560 --> 0:00:37.560 of a little facial hair would somehow protect the soul 0:00:37.640 --> 0:00:40.280 patch the soul, keep the soul in the body. What 0:00:40.320 --> 0:00:41.839 does it mean when you shave it off to you? 0:00:41.920 --> 0:00:46.880 Are you soul? This we're already getting into that that 0:00:47.159 --> 0:00:50.320 that that that ever present issue of of the soul, 0:00:50.440 --> 0:00:52.920 the human soul. And we've we've talked about this before 0:00:53.640 --> 0:00:58.279 in the past. This idea of of some immortal slice 0:00:58.320 --> 0:01:02.480 of ourselves dates back to ancient times. Ancient religions used 0:01:02.480 --> 0:01:05.360 of use of an astral body, This idea that you 0:01:05.360 --> 0:01:07.600 have your physical body, but then there's also some there's 0:01:07.600 --> 0:01:11.520 an immage, immaterial immortal you as well, and then you 0:01:11.520 --> 0:01:12.960 can take that all the way up into the twentieth 0:01:13.040 --> 0:01:18.600 century um where most of philosophers are are toying with 0:01:18.640 --> 0:01:22.400 this idea of persons has souls and human beings are 0:01:22.440 --> 0:01:26.520 made up of two substances, soul and body, soma and sark. Yeah, 0:01:26.520 --> 0:01:28.679 I wanted to point out that the ancient Hebrew word 0:01:28.760 --> 0:01:32.800 for soul is nepeesche, meaning life or vital breath. The 0:01:32.880 --> 0:01:35.600 Greek word for soul is psyche or mind, which I 0:01:35.600 --> 0:01:38.560 think gives another flavor of this idea of soul, And 0:01:38.600 --> 0:01:41.440 the Roman Latin word for soul is animal or spirit 0:01:41.720 --> 0:01:46.640 or breath. So in all of these variations on the 0:01:46.720 --> 0:01:50.240 word soul, you see how it is multilayered, and again 0:01:50.320 --> 0:01:54.120 this sort of ephemeral quality to it that's sort of 0:01:54.160 --> 0:01:59.200 like fog that you can't trap into a suitcase. Feeling right, yeah, 0:01:59.200 --> 0:02:00.840 and a lot And we're not gonna get too deep 0:02:00.880 --> 0:02:03.720 into this, but I mean, obviously he has is. We're 0:02:03.800 --> 0:02:06.640 we're dealing with our ephemeral lives and the ephemeral lives 0:02:06.640 --> 0:02:09.440 of everyone else around us, Like it's it's it's very 0:02:09.480 --> 0:02:12.440 tempting to to fall into that line of thinking and 0:02:12.480 --> 0:02:15.480 to or even you know, to to embrace that line 0:02:15.480 --> 0:02:18.480 of thinking where when you look at the dead body 0:02:18.480 --> 0:02:21.480 of a loved one and there's something like the spark 0:02:21.520 --> 0:02:23.480 has gone, the life has gone out of them. To 0:02:23.560 --> 0:02:26.120 think about that spark being somewhere else. Yeah, I was 0:02:26.160 --> 0:02:28.200 thinking about that with the law of contagion. We've talked 0:02:28.200 --> 0:02:30.600 about that before. It's it's magical thinking that things that 0:02:30.639 --> 0:02:33.120 have once been in contact with each other will continue 0:02:33.160 --> 0:02:37.240 to act on each other at a distance even when 0:02:37.320 --> 0:02:41.040 physical contact has been severed. And in this sense, the 0:02:41.120 --> 0:02:45.720 soul is part of that contagient, this idea that the 0:02:45.840 --> 0:02:52.480 persistence of the individual soul u continues after life ends. Yeah, 0:02:52.520 --> 0:02:55.720 so again you come down to you have the physical world, 0:02:55.720 --> 0:02:58.320 and you have this world of the spirit, this world 0:02:58.360 --> 0:03:01.919 of the unseen. Right. Uh. And I'm not and I'm 0:03:01.960 --> 0:03:04.840 I'm not like a hardcore skeptic who's going to say, 0:03:05.080 --> 0:03:08.000 all right that you know only the scientific side of things, 0:03:08.000 --> 0:03:10.080 don't you know, don't even entertain the idea of the unseen. 0:03:10.080 --> 0:03:11.680 I mean, I think the unseen has it has a 0:03:11.680 --> 0:03:14.760 place in my life. I recognize it has an important 0:03:14.760 --> 0:03:18.880 place in other people's lives. The inevitable conflict, though, is 0:03:18.919 --> 0:03:23.359 when you have scientific understanding of the world butting heads 0:03:23.400 --> 0:03:27.920 with ideas about the unseen and and and magical thinking 0:03:28.360 --> 0:03:34.120 and uh and at times elaborate metaphysical ideas about what 0:03:34.240 --> 0:03:38.480 is happening to some immortal part of ourselves. The problem 0:03:38.520 --> 0:03:42.680 here is that you cannot prove the soul. You cannot 0:03:42.880 --> 0:03:46.560 disprove it. And yet it's one of the maybe the 0:03:46.640 --> 0:03:50.480 largest looming questions that we have as humans because it 0:03:50.560 --> 0:03:53.800 involves the sort of beginning and ends of things that 0:03:53.840 --> 0:03:56.240 we've talked about before. You've even tied this back to 0:03:56.560 --> 0:03:59.240 the Big Bang. We know the Big Bang began, that's 0:03:59.240 --> 0:04:02.240 when time be in. What was before it, you know 0:04:02.320 --> 0:04:04.880 what is after it. So it all sort of circles 0:04:04.920 --> 0:04:09.400 back into this idea of it's culmination of atoms that's 0:04:09.520 --> 0:04:13.920 organized in our individual bodies. What is there some sort 0:04:13.960 --> 0:04:17.200 of fate for that that we don't understand or we 0:04:17.240 --> 0:04:21.920 don't know or they're not Yeah, I think skeptic Michael 0:04:21.920 --> 0:04:25.880 schermer Uh puts it perfectly over on skeptics dot com 0:04:25.880 --> 0:04:28.800 excellent website. Um He says, I define the soul as 0:04:28.839 --> 0:04:31.560 the unique pattern of information that represents the essence of 0:04:31.560 --> 0:04:34.400 a person. By this definition, unless there is some medium 0:04:34.440 --> 0:04:37.160 to retain the pattern of our personal information. After we die, 0:04:37.560 --> 0:04:39.520 our soul dies with us. Our bodies are made of 0:04:39.520 --> 0:04:43.159 proteins coated by our DNA, so that the disintegration of 0:04:43.400 --> 0:04:46.360 d n A, our protein patterns are lost forever. Our 0:04:46.400 --> 0:04:49.000 memories and personality are stored in the pattern of neurons 0:04:49.000 --> 0:04:51.440 firing in our brain, So when those neurons die, it 0:04:51.520 --> 0:04:54.880 spells the death of our memories and personality, similar to 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:58.839 the ravages of stroke and Alzheimer's disease, only final. And 0:04:58.880 --> 0:05:01.719 this underlying the fact that it's really difficult to try 0:05:01.800 --> 0:05:05.440 and use science to create a working model of of 0:05:05.680 --> 0:05:08.880 of what a soul would even be. Yeah, the soul 0:05:08.920 --> 0:05:11.880 problem is very similar to the immortality problem and the 0:05:11.880 --> 0:05:16.000 consciousness problem. And I would even say that, um that 0:05:16.680 --> 0:05:20.320 in some ways consciousness is we've talked about it, and 0:05:20.320 --> 0:05:22.479 we do talk about it is kind of a stand 0:05:22.480 --> 0:05:25.200 in for the soul, and that maybe in these more 0:05:25.240 --> 0:05:27.160 modern times we talked less about the soul and more 0:05:27.200 --> 0:05:30.720 about consciousness because we have this idea of consciousness about being, 0:05:30.760 --> 0:05:35.080 this awareness and it existing inside of time, and the 0:05:35.120 --> 0:05:38.279 big question is can it exist outside of time? And 0:05:39.040 --> 0:05:42.599 if you say consciousness arises from the electrochemical process of 0:05:42.640 --> 0:05:45.560 the brain and nothing more than you could take the 0:05:45.600 --> 0:05:47.680 hard line and say that when the lights go out 0:05:47.680 --> 0:05:51.479 in the brain, so too does consciousness, so too does 0:05:51.560 --> 0:05:55.880 this sense of soul. Yeah. Indeed, hearkens back to our 0:05:55.920 --> 0:06:00.920 episode on reincarnation where you had scientific xplory of reincarnation 0:06:00.960 --> 0:06:03.719 and they referred to it as UH survival of of 0:06:03.720 --> 0:06:08.480 of consciousness. Now that doesn't mean that that some intrepid 0:06:08.920 --> 0:06:13.159 UH explorers out there in the world couldn't try to 0:06:13.240 --> 0:06:20.200 quantify the soul UH qualified even And there is one 0:06:20.279 --> 0:06:26.240 person in particular named Duncan McDougall who was a respected 0:06:26.279 --> 0:06:28.960 turn of the century surgeon in Massachusetts, and he was 0:06:29.040 --> 0:06:33.240 occupied with a very particular question which maybe even started 0:06:33.279 --> 0:06:36.839 out as a thought experiment, but then became an actual 0:06:36.920 --> 0:06:39.880 experiment that he tried to do. And according to Mary 0:06:40.000 --> 0:06:43.480 Roach in her book Spook, McDougald wrote, quote, it is 0:06:43.680 --> 0:06:48.800 unthinkable that personality and consciousness can be attributes of that 0:06:48.920 --> 0:06:52.960 which does not occupy space. And if they occupy space, 0:06:53.040 --> 0:06:56.120 he reasoned, they must have weight. He says, quote the 0:06:56.120 --> 0:06:59.080 equal the question arose in my mind, why not weigh 0:06:59.120 --> 0:07:02.679 a man at the very moment of death? This he thought, 0:07:02.760 --> 0:07:06.000 would give you the exact weight of the soul, and 0:07:06.080 --> 0:07:08.200 not just the weight of the soul of like, hey, 0:07:09.400 --> 0:07:11.120 I wonder how much this wul ways, but more like 0:07:11.960 --> 0:07:14.880 the soul exists. Yeah, he's going into it with the 0:07:14.960 --> 0:07:18.360 preconceived notion there's a soul. Uh. The open question is 0:07:18.440 --> 0:07:21.720 how much does it weigh? Now. This led to McDougall 0:07:21.960 --> 0:07:26.440 hanging around a consumptive's home around nineteen o one, chatting 0:07:26.520 --> 0:07:31.600 up the gravely ill tuberculoisis patients and, according to McDougal's 0:07:31.640 --> 0:07:34.800 writings in the Journal of the American Society for Physical Research, 0:07:34.920 --> 0:07:38.400 obtaining consent from a few of them to weigh their 0:07:38.440 --> 0:07:41.600 bodies at the moment of their death and side note, uh, 0:07:41.720 --> 0:07:46.400 he chose this particular illness advanced stages stage of tuberculosis 0:07:47.040 --> 0:07:50.320 because quote, a consumpt of dying after a long illness, 0:07:50.360 --> 0:07:54.040 wasting his energies, dies with scarcely a movement to disturb 0:07:54.120 --> 0:07:57.280 the beam means that the beam that is on the 0:07:57.320 --> 0:08:01.080 scale their bodies are all a very light and we 0:08:01.160 --> 0:08:03.720 can be for a warned for hours that a consumptive 0:08:03.760 --> 0:08:06.760 is dying, because you need that window in which to act, 0:08:07.040 --> 0:08:09.400 and he's not a complete crazy person. So he's not 0:08:09.440 --> 0:08:12.240 gonna go around killing people. No, no, I actually thought 0:08:12.240 --> 0:08:14.720 this was a very a logical way to hone in 0:08:14.840 --> 0:08:17.480 on the person who's dying, that you would the ideal 0:08:18.160 --> 0:08:20.480 dying person, right, is going to be quiet about it 0:08:20.520 --> 0:08:24.760 and easily transported. Indeed, so he transports him in. He 0:08:24.960 --> 0:08:28.080 puts him on the bed on the scale, and uh. 0:08:28.160 --> 0:08:32.160 In on April tenth, nine oh one, Uh, he you 0:08:32.200 --> 0:08:35.800 could say, treats his first patient. Assisted by two physicians, 0:08:35.840 --> 0:08:38.840 they watch a man die upon a cot placed upon 0:08:38.840 --> 0:08:43.040 a customized industrial scale scale for weighing silk. Yes, and 0:08:43.080 --> 0:08:46.439 for three and a half hours, they watch his every 0:08:46.480 --> 0:08:49.360 single movement, his chest going up and down, to try 0:08:49.400 --> 0:08:53.480 to determine the exact moment that he dies so that 0:08:53.520 --> 0:08:58.920 they can hopefully record a lowering of his weight, which 0:08:58.960 --> 0:09:02.560 would uh give them some sort of clue that the 0:09:02.600 --> 0:09:06.520 soul had escaped the body. And low and behold he 0:09:06.600 --> 0:09:10.280 dies in the scale lowers to three quarters of an 0:09:10.280 --> 0:09:16.600 ounce or about indeed. Uh. And so that's where you've 0:09:16.640 --> 0:09:20.319 ever heard the twenty one Grahams. It was the name 0:09:20.360 --> 0:09:23.560 of a film several years ago. And and and in 0:09:23.720 --> 0:09:27.160 naming the film that they probably helped substantiate this, uh, 0:09:27.280 --> 0:09:30.360 this idea that the solways twenty one ground. Yeah. And 0:09:30.360 --> 0:09:35.720 in fact, right before he published his results in American Medicine, 0:09:35.880 --> 0:09:39.000 he had a paper that he was um publishing. The 0:09:39.040 --> 0:09:42.680 New York Times got wind of this, and they pretty 0:09:42.760 --> 0:09:45.560 much just reported it as fact, like, hey, by the way, 0:09:45.640 --> 0:09:47.400 the soul when it departs twenty one grams, and that 0:09:47.480 --> 0:09:51.440 kind of cemented this idea in popular culture that this 0:09:51.840 --> 0:09:53.760 was indeed a thing. Yeah. I mean despite the fact, 0:09:53.800 --> 0:09:56.400 as we'll get into that, it's not like everyone was like, oh, 0:09:56.440 --> 0:09:58.880 that sounds great, I buy that. No, there was plenty 0:09:58.920 --> 0:10:03.560 of scientific minds out there criticized this after it came out, 0:10:03.600 --> 0:10:10.720 but um, McDougal repeated this experiment five times. Um. His 0:10:10.720 --> 0:10:14.559 his findings appeared in American Medicine nineteen seven, and uh, 0:10:14.600 --> 0:10:17.440 that's when the well deserved criticisms began to roll in 0:10:17.559 --> 0:10:21.160 regarding these experiments. In their findings, findings that were there 0:10:21.200 --> 0:10:26.840 were crude, varying, and unreplicated in subsequent experiments. And naturally, 0:10:27.040 --> 0:10:29.640 that's a major red flag about any experiment out there. 0:10:29.960 --> 0:10:33.120 If if, if no one else can follow your steps 0:10:33.160 --> 0:10:36.439 and come to the same result. Now, Mary Roach in 0:10:36.480 --> 0:10:38.959 her books Books says there are two ways of looking 0:10:39.120 --> 0:10:43.040 at mcdougald's findings. One is that he was pretty much 0:10:43.040 --> 0:10:47.160 like a nutter. That's that's actually the word she uses 0:10:47.240 --> 0:10:52.679 for him, um. And the other is that his experiment 0:10:52.679 --> 0:10:57.280 protocols were weak sauce, essentially lacking rigor and uniformity. And 0:10:57.320 --> 0:11:00.600 we'll talk more about that. So the not a question 0:11:00.720 --> 0:11:04.280 is interesting, why why might he have been a nutter? Well, 0:11:05.160 --> 0:11:08.160 he wrote his thesis on the law of similars, this 0:11:08.320 --> 0:11:11.679 idea that like cures like and this is a homeopathic 0:11:11.720 --> 0:11:15.240 approach to medicine. Now, back in his day, homeopathy was 0:11:15.320 --> 0:11:19.400 not something that was fringe. UM. McDougald was just kind 0:11:19.400 --> 0:11:21.760 of following the lead at the time. So it may 0:11:21.800 --> 0:11:24.400 not be that he was so much a nutter, but 0:11:24.520 --> 0:11:29.400 maybe just trying to rack up some accolades and some 0:11:29.480 --> 0:11:32.120 status where he could. Now I was pointed out by 0:11:32.640 --> 0:11:36.480 mcdougald's contemporary critics, um and and this may have come 0:11:36.520 --> 0:11:39.920 to the mind of people listening as well. Um. There 0:11:39.960 --> 0:11:42.640 are other things that leave the body over the course 0:11:42.679 --> 0:11:46.400 of death, um, such as a theces and urine and uh. 0:11:46.520 --> 0:11:49.560 And so this was one instant critic criticism where people say, well, 0:11:49.559 --> 0:11:52.439 the body died urine, THECES came out, maybe that had 0:11:52.440 --> 0:11:54.959 something to do with the loss. McDougal was quick to 0:11:55.040 --> 0:11:57.480 insist that the bed on the scales would have caught 0:11:57.520 --> 0:12:00.280 all of this, so it wouldn't be an issue. But still, 0:12:00.400 --> 0:12:04.520 there's something called insensible loss. This is body weight that 0:12:04.640 --> 0:12:09.520 is continually lost through evaporating perspiration, through water vapor in 0:12:09.559 --> 0:12:13.320 your breath, and just throughout a normal day, and daily 0:12:13.400 --> 0:12:17.080 loss really can't be measured, but we're probably talking like 0:12:17.559 --> 0:12:20.880 between forty and six hundred UM mill of leaders in 0:12:20.920 --> 0:12:25.360 an adult under normal circumstances, and certainly death is not 0:12:25.679 --> 0:12:31.280 a normal circumstance, right, So you have that criticism going 0:12:31.320 --> 0:12:34.440 on about what the loss actually consists of, and then 0:12:35.040 --> 0:12:38.240 you have the criticism again of the scientific rigors or 0:12:38.280 --> 0:12:42.280 the lack of them. So let's consider that first, six 0:12:42.440 --> 0:12:45.120 dying patients is not a large enough sample size. Just 0:12:45.520 --> 0:12:48.240 the outset like this is not, you know, something that 0:12:48.360 --> 0:12:52.000 draw a bunch of conclusions upon. Second, the time of 0:12:52.040 --> 0:12:55.920 death is a really tricky thing. Even now, it's a 0:12:55.960 --> 0:13:00.160 tricky thing. So when you look at McDougal's work, you 0:13:01.280 --> 0:13:04.920 have to wonder what he did he mean by the 0:13:04.920 --> 0:13:07.760 time of death, are we talking about cellular death, brain death, 0:13:07.880 --> 0:13:11.640 physical death, heart death, legal death? And the fact that 0:13:11.760 --> 0:13:14.240 at that time they didn't really have all of the 0:13:14.440 --> 0:13:19.160 technology available to even try to determine any of those. Third, 0:13:19.360 --> 0:13:22.280 his data in his sample size was all over the place. 0:13:22.960 --> 0:13:25.640 Two of the results had to be excluded because of 0:13:25.679 --> 0:13:29.080 technical difficulties. For instance, when it came to patient number four, 0:13:29.160 --> 0:13:32.600 McDougald wrote, quote, our scales were not finally adjusted, and 0:13:32.640 --> 0:13:35.360 there was a good deal of interference by people opposed 0:13:35.360 --> 0:13:37.600 to our work. And he doesn't say, like, what what 0:13:37.640 --> 0:13:41.280 do you mean? What people? What kind of interference? I mean, 0:13:41.320 --> 0:13:44.199 I can't help the picture people with pitchforks, like out 0:13:44.200 --> 0:13:48.920 of franky, Yeah yeah right. Um. And then one patients 0:13:49.080 --> 0:13:52.280 death did show a drop in weight of about three 0:13:52.360 --> 0:13:55.400 eighths of an ounce, but this later reversed itself. Two 0:13:55.520 --> 0:13:57.840 of the other patients registered and immediate loss of weight 0:13:57.920 --> 0:13:59.760 at the moment of death, but then their weight dropped 0:13:59.760 --> 0:14:03.320 again in a few minutes later, so that that led 0:14:03.600 --> 0:14:08.800 uh some people that say, well did that person tied twice? Um, 0:14:08.840 --> 0:14:11.120 And only one of the six patients showed a sudden 0:14:11.160 --> 0:14:14.719 and non reversible loss of weight of three four s 0:14:14.760 --> 0:14:16.600 of an ounce of course our twenty one Graham, So 0:14:16.640 --> 0:14:22.040 that's one and as you had said in follow up studies, 0:14:22.720 --> 0:14:26.880 this could not be replicated. Now fil this under the 0:14:27.560 --> 0:14:31.200 the realization that McDougal again is probably not a complete 0:14:31.240 --> 0:14:35.480 crazy person like he He knew that he lacked concrete findings. 0:14:35.520 --> 0:14:38.360 He didn't say case closed, just the soul. He wanted 0:14:38.400 --> 0:14:42.240 to do more, including placing an electric chair on the 0:14:42.280 --> 0:14:44.680 scale so as to measure the sole loss of an 0:14:44.680 --> 0:14:50.320 executed prisoner, but there was already objection from from local officials. 0:14:50.880 --> 0:14:54.320 So definitely there was opposition to the prospect of executing 0:14:54.360 --> 0:14:57.520 people in his lab. So he didn't get to experiment 0:14:57.600 --> 0:15:01.800 on people anymore after these initial experiments. Now he did 0:15:01.840 --> 0:15:06.800 turn to dogs. He experimented on fifteen which he killed himself. Uh, 0:15:06.800 --> 0:15:09.440 and he saw no weight change, but he had an 0:15:09.440 --> 0:15:14.040 explanation for that, maybe dogs just don't have souls, which 0:15:15.120 --> 0:15:18.760 kind of underlines again the problem of taking the seen 0:15:19.160 --> 0:15:23.160 world of science and using it to investigate the unseen, 0:15:23.280 --> 0:15:25.800 that where so much of it is just based on 0:15:25.800 --> 0:15:29.840 on these these different metaphysical ideas of and these different 0:15:29.880 --> 0:15:33.120 constructs of how it's supposed to work. Um, does a 0:15:33.200 --> 0:15:35.560 dog have a soul? You know? Yeah, I mean you 0:15:35.600 --> 0:15:38.560 have to say it's his? Is his? Uh? This is 0:15:38.600 --> 0:15:41.160 not for a lack of trying. I mean he once 0:15:41.280 --> 0:15:44.040 he cannot have access to humans, he's going to dogs. 0:15:44.040 --> 0:15:48.160 He's also inviting other people to try to replicate his results, 0:15:48.160 --> 0:15:51.320 to try to do these experiments. But of course, and 0:15:51.360 --> 0:15:56.280 the medical community isn't exactly embracing this. Luckily, ten years later, 0:15:56.320 --> 0:16:00.400 Los Angeles Polytechnic High School physics teacher h. Laft Whining 0:16:00.640 --> 0:16:03.360 self published a book called The Physical Theory of the Soul, 0:16:03.800 --> 0:16:06.200 in which he decided to jump into this and you know, 0:16:06.240 --> 0:16:10.320 following the footsteps, the scientific footsteps of McDougal. Um, he 0:16:10.440 --> 0:16:13.160 didn't work on any people, but he did kill thirty mice, 0:16:14.120 --> 0:16:17.320 which he was convinced must surely have souls, which is 0:16:17.640 --> 0:16:21.960 again it's an interesting, colorful a deviation from from McDougall 0:16:22.040 --> 0:16:25.120 himself said the dogs probably don't have souls, is why 0:16:25.160 --> 0:16:27.160 he didn't register. But he's going into this saying, yes, 0:16:27.280 --> 0:16:29.960 mice have souls and therefore their perfect thing to experiment 0:16:29.960 --> 0:16:33.880 on in his soul weighing experiments using a varying UH 0:16:33.920 --> 0:16:37.880 and at times creative methods of execution resulted mostly with 0:16:38.040 --> 0:16:42.120 no loss. No possible weight loss that you could attribute 0:16:42.120 --> 0:16:44.080 to a soul, the only one save in the case 0:16:44.160 --> 0:16:48.560 of cyanide poison mice UH which he conducted may have 0:16:48.760 --> 0:16:54.320 lost weight via frantic death throw perspiration. So he drowned 0:16:54.360 --> 0:16:57.120 some mice after that in a sealed container and recorded 0:16:57.200 --> 0:16:59.920 no weight change. So this is probably our best exam 0:17:00.000 --> 0:17:03.360 ample of someone following up his work abbit with mice 0:17:03.880 --> 0:17:07.960 and in recording his results. Yeah, that is actually pretty 0:17:08.080 --> 0:17:12.560 rigorous testing and experimenting in comparison to the next person 0:17:12.640 --> 0:17:17.320 who takes on McDougal's legacy, and his name is Gilbert Carpenter, 0:17:17.400 --> 0:17:23.040 and in he publishes the online book Physically Wing the Soul. Now, 0:17:23.080 --> 0:17:26.400 he does not conduct any experiments himself, but he does 0:17:26.440 --> 0:17:29.520 a lot of tinkering with numbers, and he thinks about 0:17:29.560 --> 0:17:33.480 this deeply. And his idea was that the souls of 0:17:33.520 --> 0:17:36.320 the dogs and mice were so light that they just 0:17:36.600 --> 0:17:40.280 wouldn't register on the scale. That's why this this is failing. 0:17:41.240 --> 0:17:45.960 And according to Mary Roach and Spook quote using McDougal's findings, 0:17:45.960 --> 0:17:49.399 that the soul weighs about twenty Graham's Carpenter calculated the 0:17:49.520 --> 0:17:53.840 ratio of soul weight to body weight at birth one 0:17:53.880 --> 0:17:57.960 to forty. He then applied this to typical puppy birth 0:17:58.000 --> 0:18:02.120 weight and from there deduced the average dog soul weighs 0:18:02.200 --> 0:18:06.439 one gram, which it turns out is less than the 0:18:06.480 --> 0:18:11.600 sensitivity of the scale McDougal used to weigh the dead dogs. 0:18:11.760 --> 0:18:14.439 And I that's the rub right, because mcdougull's scale was, 0:18:14.480 --> 0:18:17.480 according to McDougald, accurate to one sixteenth of an ounce 0:18:17.920 --> 0:18:22.280 or one point eight grams. Therefore, dog soul to light. 0:18:23.600 --> 0:18:28.600 Now that seems like a convenient loophole. I wanted to 0:18:28.640 --> 0:18:31.240 mention that other features of a Carpenter's book is that 0:18:31.280 --> 0:18:35.640 he calculates the volume of the human soul, and this 0:18:35.800 --> 0:18:38.560 volume he uses them as a metric, dubbing it the 0:18:38.600 --> 0:18:43.400 MAC after McDougal. He puts forth the idea that one 0:18:43.440 --> 0:18:45.840 way to weigh the soul would be to weigh a 0:18:45.920 --> 0:18:49.280 pregnant woman at the moment that the MAC entered the 0:18:49.280 --> 0:18:53.000 fetus around forty three days, when the brain waves are 0:18:53.040 --> 0:18:56.480 first detected. He says, um, and if you have a pint. 0:18:57.200 --> 0:18:59.080 He even goes into this, This is a great Mary 0:18:59.160 --> 0:19:01.600 Rage goes into this in in her books book Um 0:19:01.680 --> 0:19:04.080 that he suggests that the best way to get rid 0:19:04.080 --> 0:19:06.960 of a ghost is to invite a pregnant woman over 0:19:07.800 --> 0:19:11.840 around that three day period and then use her as 0:19:11.840 --> 0:19:15.239 a portal to store the ghost away. Well that that 0:19:15.280 --> 0:19:18.320 makes the next perfect sense. It gets worse from there. 0:19:18.359 --> 0:19:21.399 There's there's talk about lepri cons too, Yeah, something about 0:19:21.440 --> 0:19:23.760 the like the human soul would take up the space 0:19:23.800 --> 0:19:26.160 of a lepricn because you want to start throwing lepricn 0:19:26.240 --> 0:19:28.879 into your study just to make yourself, no, make it 0:19:28.880 --> 0:19:30.359 seem like you know what you're talking about. Yeah, and 0:19:30.400 --> 0:19:33.600 then there's some calculations about Jesus soul, which is I 0:19:33.600 --> 0:19:37.840 don't know, five hundred two hons. Uh. What I like 0:19:37.920 --> 0:19:40.400 about it is that he did do some reverse engineering 0:19:40.400 --> 0:19:42.640 with mathematics to try to get at the heart of this. 0:19:42.840 --> 0:19:47.920 But unfortunately, this is where McDougal's legacy leaves off. Yes, 0:19:47.960 --> 0:19:50.479 indeed it does. UM. But you know, we're gonna take 0:19:50.520 --> 0:19:53.000 a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna 0:19:53.040 --> 0:19:58.040 look at some some more modern uh cosmic uh and 0:19:58.320 --> 0:20:02.120 physics based ideas about what what this where this soul 0:20:02.200 --> 0:20:04.399 might be in and indeed how you might try and 0:20:04.520 --> 0:20:15.800 measure it in some way. All Right, we're back, and 0:20:15.840 --> 0:20:19.399 I bet you, just bet you that quantics is going 0:20:19.480 --> 0:20:22.280 to get wrapped up in all this whole wing. Oh yeah. 0:20:22.280 --> 0:20:24.800 I mean, quantum physics is kind of a it's a 0:20:24.840 --> 0:20:28.640 handy place at times to sort of store these unknowns, right, 0:20:28.680 --> 0:20:31.000 because it's kind of it's kind of a wild frontier 0:20:31.080 --> 0:20:34.639 in many respects um. In Mary Roach's book Spook, she 0:20:34.920 --> 0:20:37.600 does talk to an individual by the name of Gary 0:20:37.720 --> 0:20:42.400 naum Um. He's a Duke University Medical School professor, uh, 0:20:42.720 --> 0:20:45.199 and he has done a fair amount of thinking in 0:20:45.240 --> 0:20:46.919 this now he's he's he's done a bit of writing 0:20:47.000 --> 0:20:52.040 on oh on on predicting the future via science, uh, 0:20:52.160 --> 0:20:53.840 into to what extent we can do it. And he's 0:20:53.840 --> 0:20:56.679 also done a lot of of of thinking and writing 0:20:56.960 --> 0:21:04.120 on consciousness. So he proposed, is that one interesting way 0:21:04.480 --> 0:21:08.960 to potentially measure or at least hunt for the weight 0:21:09.000 --> 0:21:11.919 of the soul, if you will, is to use hermetically 0:21:11.960 --> 0:21:15.440 sealed box a top hyper sensitive scales. Alright, so far 0:21:15.520 --> 0:21:18.320 that that pretty much lines up with some earlier notions 0:21:18.359 --> 0:21:22.760 we're discussing, But then he ads this you also surround uh, 0:21:22.920 --> 0:21:26.919 the box and the scales with various radiant energy detectors. 0:21:27.480 --> 0:21:30.760 Why well, because information, right, Because in Schermer's words that 0:21:30.800 --> 0:21:33.280 we mentioned earlier, we're talking about this unique pattern of 0:21:33.320 --> 0:21:36.040 information that represents the essence of a person, and that 0:21:36.119 --> 0:21:40.440 information is energy. There's always a weight loss with energy loss, 0:21:40.480 --> 0:21:43.080 and if the energy changes, then the mass must change 0:21:43.080 --> 0:21:48.920 in some minute, barely discernible way. So uh Nam's idea 0:21:48.960 --> 0:21:52.000 here is that if more mass dissipates they can be 0:21:52.000 --> 0:21:55.919 accounted for due to energy change, then perhaps perhaps that 0:21:56.080 --> 0:21:59.920 extra energy would be consciousness leaving the body. And since 0:22:00.080 --> 0:22:02.639 energy can neither be created or destroyed, it has to 0:22:02.640 --> 0:22:07.480 go somewhere, right, Um, now, that's somewhere. Uh is kind 0:22:07.480 --> 0:22:11.159 of trippy because uh In according to some of the 0:22:11.240 --> 0:22:14.640 names uh uh theories and in idea and ideas here 0:22:14.880 --> 0:22:18.080 he postulates that, based on the increase of black hole 0:22:18.320 --> 0:22:22.360 entropy in the region of event horizons, that similarly the 0:22:22.400 --> 0:22:26.840 negative entropy or post death ordered transformed consciousness may go 0:22:26.920 --> 0:22:30.439 through a type of extra dimensional parallel universe hyperspace in 0:22:30.480 --> 0:22:33.359 the regions of the plank length, where the energy of 0:22:33.400 --> 0:22:37.000 the departed consciousness goes into small types of singularities embedded 0:22:37.040 --> 0:22:41.920 within our own four dimensional spacetime world. In two thousand five, 0:22:41.960 --> 0:22:44.679 attempted to raise some money for experimentation, but nothing came 0:22:44.720 --> 0:22:47.840 to fruition. But again he's he's written about this, and 0:22:48.119 --> 0:22:51.679 it's at the very least it's some some very interesting 0:22:52.280 --> 0:22:56.879 thought experimentation in terms of again taking on that difficult 0:22:56.920 --> 0:23:00.960 task of trying to make create a working model how 0:23:01.000 --> 0:23:04.959 a soul and survival of the soul might work in 0:23:04.960 --> 0:23:07.399 our scientific world. But how do you suss out the 0:23:07.440 --> 0:23:15.280 electrochemical um changes in the brain that are part of 0:23:15.560 --> 0:23:18.719 death and part of consciousness and then just part of 0:23:18.760 --> 0:23:24.480 the rest of your body, Uh, you know, falling apart. Atomically, 0:23:25.280 --> 0:23:28.520 We're not falling apart, but you know, I'm saying like 0:23:28.560 --> 0:23:31.320 this is where it gets. At this point, you just 0:23:31.400 --> 0:23:34.920 you just want to call the ghostbusters proton PACs, you know. 0:23:35.240 --> 0:23:38.400 So this makes me think about Richard Kiman, who gave 0:23:38.440 --> 0:23:42.639 this talk about scientific rigor and about really trying to 0:23:42.680 --> 0:23:46.440 make sure that your processes were correct. And he talks 0:23:46.480 --> 0:23:49.720 about this experiment with rats in nine seven and it 0:23:49.760 --> 0:23:53.120 says it's a little known experiment, but as guy Paul 0:23:53.160 --> 0:23:58.880 Thomas Young had this long corridor with um doors on 0:23:58.880 --> 0:24:03.119 one side that the rats amen, and doors on the 0:24:03.160 --> 0:24:05.240 other side of those doors there was food, and he 0:24:05.240 --> 0:24:06.760 wanted to see if he could train the rats to 0:24:06.760 --> 0:24:09.360 go in at the third down, third door down from 0:24:09.359 --> 0:24:13.639