Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome is stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamp and my name is Julie
Speaker 1: soul Patch Douglas soul Patch Douglas. Yeah, and weear my
Speaker 1: soul patch today. Oh yeah, right there on the chin. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've often wondered about the naming of the soul patch.
Speaker 1: Is it is it tied into anything? Like there are
Speaker 1: no chakras that line up with the chin uh? Like,
Speaker 1: why is that like an energy point where the growth
Speaker 1: of a little facial hair would somehow protect the soul
Speaker 1: patch the soul, keep the soul in the body. What
Speaker 1: does it mean when you shave it off to you?
Speaker 1: Are you soul? This we're already getting into that that
Speaker 1: that that that ever present issue of of the soul,
Speaker 1: the human soul. And we've we've talked about this before
Speaker 1: in the past. This idea of of some immortal slice
Speaker 1: of ourselves dates back to ancient times. Ancient religions used
Speaker 1: of use of an astral body, This idea that you
Speaker 1: have your physical body, but then there's also some there's
Speaker 1: an immage, immaterial immortal you as well, and then you
Speaker 1: can take that all the way up into the twentieth
Speaker 1: century um where most of philosophers are are toying with
Speaker 1: this idea of persons has souls and human beings are
Speaker 1: made up of two substances, soul and body, soma and sark. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to point out that the ancient Hebrew word
Speaker 1: for soul is nepeesche, meaning life or vital breath. The
Speaker 1: Greek word for soul is psyche or mind, which I
Speaker 1: think gives another flavor of this idea of soul, And
Speaker 1: the Roman Latin word for soul is animal or spirit
Speaker 1: or breath. So in all of these variations on the
Speaker 1: word soul, you see how it is multilayered, and again
Speaker 1: this sort of ephemeral quality to it that's sort of
Speaker 1: like fog that you can't trap into a suitcase. Feeling right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot And we're not gonna get too deep
Speaker 1: into this, but I mean, obviously he has is. We're
Speaker 1: we're dealing with our ephemeral lives and the ephemeral lives
Speaker 1: of everyone else around us, Like it's it's it's very
Speaker 1: tempting to to fall into that line of thinking and
Speaker 1: to or even you know, to to embrace that line
Speaker 1: of thinking where when you look at the dead body
Speaker 1: of a loved one and there's something like the spark
Speaker 1: has gone, the life has gone out of them. To
Speaker 1: think about that spark being somewhere else. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: thinking about that with the law of contagion. We've talked
Speaker 1: about that before. It's it's magical thinking that things that
Speaker 1: have once been in contact with each other will continue
Speaker 1: to act on each other at a distance even when
Speaker 1: physical contact has been severed. And in this sense, the
Speaker 1: soul is part of that contagient, this idea that the
Speaker 1: persistence of the individual soul u continues after life ends. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so again you come down to you have the physical world,
Speaker 1: and you have this world of the spirit, this world
Speaker 1: of the unseen. Right. Uh. And I'm not and I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not like a hardcore skeptic who's going to say,
Speaker 1: all right that you know only the scientific side of things,
Speaker 1: don't you know, don't even entertain the idea of the unseen.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the unseen has it has a
Speaker 1: place in my life. I recognize it has an important
Speaker 1: place in other people's lives. The inevitable conflict, though, is
Speaker 1: when you have scientific understanding of the world butting heads
Speaker 1: with ideas about the unseen and and and magical thinking
Speaker 1: and uh and at times elaborate metaphysical ideas about what
Speaker 1: is happening to some immortal part of ourselves. The problem
Speaker 1: here is that you cannot prove the soul. You cannot
Speaker 1: disprove it. And yet it's one of the maybe the
Speaker 1: largest looming questions that we have as humans because it
Speaker 1: involves the sort of beginning and ends of things that
Speaker 1: we've talked about before. You've even tied this back to
Speaker 1: the Big Bang. We know the Big Bang began, that's
Speaker 1: when time be in. What was before it, you know
Speaker 1: what is after it. So it all sort of circles
Speaker 1: back into this idea of it's culmination of atoms that's
Speaker 1: organized in our individual bodies. What is there some sort
Speaker 1: of fate for that that we don't understand or we
Speaker 1: don't know or they're not Yeah, I think skeptic Michael
Speaker 1: schermer Uh puts it perfectly over on skeptics dot com
Speaker 1: excellent website. Um He says, I define the soul as
Speaker 1: the unique pattern of information that represents the essence of
Speaker 1: a person. By this definition, unless there is some medium
Speaker 1: to retain the pattern of our personal information. After we die,
Speaker 1: our soul dies with us. Our bodies are made of
Speaker 1: proteins coated by our DNA, so that the disintegration of
Speaker 1: d n A, our protein patterns are lost forever. Our
Speaker 1: memories and personality are stored in the pattern of neurons
Speaker 1: firing in our brain, So when those neurons die, it
Speaker 1: spells the death of our memories and personality, similar to
Speaker 1: the ravages of stroke and Alzheimer's disease, only final. And
Speaker 1: this underlying the fact that it's really difficult to try
Speaker 1: and use science to create a working model of of
Speaker 1: of what a soul would even be. Yeah, the soul
Speaker 1: problem is very similar to the immortality problem and the
Speaker 1: consciousness problem. And I would even say that, um that
Speaker 1: in some ways consciousness is we've talked about it, and
Speaker 1: we do talk about it is kind of a stand
Speaker 1: in for the soul, and that maybe in these more
Speaker 1: modern times we talked less about the soul and more
Speaker 1: about consciousness because we have this idea of consciousness about being,
Speaker 1: this awareness and it existing inside of time, and the
Speaker 1: big question is can it exist outside of time? And
Speaker 1: if you say consciousness arises from the electrochemical process of
Speaker 1: the brain and nothing more than you could take the
Speaker 1: hard line and say that when the lights go out
Speaker 1: in the brain, so too does consciousness, so too does
Speaker 1: this sense of soul. Yeah. Indeed, hearkens back to our
Speaker 1: episode on reincarnation where you had scientific xplory of reincarnation
Speaker 1: and they referred to it as UH survival of of
Speaker 1: of consciousness. Now that doesn't mean that that some intrepid
Speaker 1: UH explorers out there in the world couldn't try to
Speaker 1: quantify the soul UH qualified even And there is one
Speaker 1: person in particular named Duncan McDougall who was a respected
Speaker 1: turn of the century surgeon in Massachusetts, and he was
Speaker 1: occupied with a very particular question which maybe even started
Speaker 1: out as a thought experiment, but then became an actual
Speaker 1: experiment that he tried to do. And according to Mary
Speaker 1: Roach in her book Spook, McDougald wrote, quote, it is
Speaker 1: unthinkable that personality and consciousness can be attributes of that
Speaker 1: which does not occupy space. And if they occupy space,
Speaker 1: he reasoned, they must have weight. He says, quote the
Speaker 1: equal the question arose in my mind, why not weigh
Speaker 1: a man at the very moment of death? This he thought,
Speaker 1: would give you the exact weight of the soul, and
Speaker 1: not just the weight of the soul of like, hey,
Speaker 1: I wonder how much this wul ways, but more like
Speaker 1: the soul exists. Yeah, he's going into it with the
Speaker 1: preconceived notion there's a soul. Uh. The open question is
Speaker 1: how much does it weigh? Now. This led to McDougall
Speaker 1: hanging around a consumptive's home around nineteen o one, chatting
Speaker 1: up the gravely ill tuberculoisis patients and, according to McDougal's
Speaker 1: writings in the Journal of the American Society for Physical Research,
Speaker 1: obtaining consent from a few of them to weigh their
Speaker 1: bodies at the moment of their death and side note, uh,
Speaker 1: he chose this particular illness advanced stages stage of tuberculosis
Speaker 1: because quote, a consumpt of dying after a long illness,
Speaker 1: wasting his energies, dies with scarcely a movement to disturb
Speaker 1: the beam means that the beam that is on the
Speaker 1: scale their bodies are all a very light and we
Speaker 1: can be for a warned for hours that a consumptive
Speaker 1: is dying, because you need that window in which to act,
Speaker 1: and he's not a complete crazy person. So he's not
Speaker 1: gonna go around killing people. No, no, I actually thought
Speaker 1: this was a very a logical way to hone in
Speaker 1: on the person who's dying, that you would the ideal
Speaker 1: dying person, right, is going to be quiet about it
Speaker 1: and easily transported. Indeed, so he transports him in. He
Speaker 1: puts him on the bed on the scale, and uh.
Speaker 1: In on April tenth, nine oh one, Uh, he you
Speaker 1: could say, treats his first patient. Assisted by two physicians,
Speaker 1: they watch a man die upon a cot placed upon
Speaker 1: a customized industrial scale scale for weighing silk. Yes, and
Speaker 1: for three and a half hours, they watch his every
Speaker 1: single movement, his chest going up and down, to try
Speaker 1: to determine the exact moment that he dies so that
Speaker 1: they can hopefully record a lowering of his weight, which
Speaker 1: would uh give them some sort of clue that the
Speaker 1: soul had escaped the body. And low and behold he
Speaker 1: dies in the scale lowers to three quarters of an
Speaker 1: ounce or about indeed. Uh. And so that's where you've
Speaker 1: ever heard the twenty one Grahams. It was the name
Speaker 1: of a film several years ago. And and and in
Speaker 1: naming the film that they probably helped substantiate this, uh,
Speaker 1: this idea that the solways twenty one ground. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: in fact, right before he published his results in American Medicine,
Speaker 1: he had a paper that he was um publishing. The
Speaker 1: New York Times got wind of this, and they pretty
Speaker 1: much just reported it as fact, like, hey, by the way,
Speaker 1: the soul when it departs twenty one grams, and that
Speaker 1: kind of cemented this idea in popular culture that this
Speaker 1: was indeed a thing. Yeah. I mean despite the fact,
Speaker 1: as we'll get into that, it's not like everyone was like, oh,
Speaker 1: that sounds great, I buy that. No, there was plenty
Speaker 1: of scientific minds out there criticized this after it came out,
Speaker 1: but um, McDougal repeated this experiment five times. Um. His
Speaker 1: his findings appeared in American Medicine nineteen seven, and uh,
Speaker 1: that's when the well deserved criticisms began to roll in
Speaker 1: regarding these experiments. In their findings, findings that were there
Speaker 1: were crude, varying, and unreplicated in subsequent experiments. And naturally,
Speaker 1: that's a major red flag about any experiment out there.
Speaker 1: If if, if no one else can follow your steps
Speaker 1: and come to the same result. Now, Mary Roach in
Speaker 1: her books Books says there are two ways of looking
Speaker 1: at mcdougald's findings. One is that he was pretty much
Speaker 1: like a nutter. That's that's actually the word she uses
Speaker 1: for him, um. And the other is that his experiment
Speaker 1: protocols were weak sauce, essentially lacking rigor and uniformity. And
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about that. So the not a question
Speaker 1: is interesting, why why might he have been a nutter? Well,
Speaker 1: he wrote his thesis on the law of similars, this
Speaker 1: idea that like cures like and this is a homeopathic
Speaker 1: approach to medicine. Now, back in his day, homeopathy was
Speaker 1: not something that was fringe. UM. McDougald was just kind
Speaker 1: of following the lead at the time. So it may
Speaker 1: not be that he was so much a nutter, but
Speaker 1: maybe just trying to rack up some accolades and some
Speaker 1: status where he could. Now I was pointed out by
Speaker 1: mcdougald's contemporary critics, um and and this may have come
Speaker 1: to the mind of people listening as well. Um. There
Speaker 1: are other things that leave the body over the course
Speaker 1: of death, um, such as a theces and urine and uh.
Speaker 1: And so this was one instant critic criticism where people say, well,
Speaker 1: the body died urine, THECES came out, maybe that had
Speaker 1: something to do with the loss. McDougal was quick to
Speaker 1: insist that the bed on the scales would have caught
Speaker 1: all of this, so it wouldn't be an issue. But still,
Speaker 1: there's something called insensible loss. This is body weight that
Speaker 1: is continually lost through evaporating perspiration, through water vapor in
Speaker 1: your breath, and just throughout a normal day, and daily
Speaker 1: loss really can't be measured, but we're probably talking like
Speaker 1: between forty and six hundred UM mill of leaders in
Speaker 1: an adult under normal circumstances, and certainly death is not
Speaker 1: a normal circumstance, right, So you have that criticism going
Speaker 1: on about what the loss actually consists of, and then
Speaker 1: you have the criticism again of the scientific rigors or
Speaker 1: the lack of them. So let's consider that first, six
Speaker 1: dying patients is not a large enough sample size. Just
Speaker 1: the outset like this is not, you know, something that
Speaker 1: draw a bunch of conclusions upon. Second, the time of
Speaker 1: death is a really tricky thing. Even now, it's a
Speaker 1: tricky thing. So when you look at McDougal's work, you
Speaker 1: have to wonder what he did he mean by the
Speaker 1: time of death, are we talking about cellular death, brain death,
Speaker 1: physical death, heart death, legal death? And the fact that
Speaker 1: at that time they didn't really have all of the
Speaker 1: technology available to even try to determine any of those. Third,
Speaker 1: his data in his sample size was all over the place.
Speaker 1: Two of the results had to be excluded because of
Speaker 1: technical difficulties. For instance, when it came to patient number four,
Speaker 1: McDougald wrote, quote, our scales were not finally adjusted, and
Speaker 1: there was a good deal of interference by people opposed
Speaker 1: to our work. And he doesn't say, like, what what
Speaker 1: do you mean? What people? What kind of interference? I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't help the picture people with pitchforks, like out
Speaker 1: of franky, Yeah yeah right. Um. And then one patients
Speaker 1: death did show a drop in weight of about three
Speaker 1: eighths of an ounce, but this later reversed itself. Two
Speaker 1: of the other patients registered and immediate loss of weight
Speaker 1: at the moment of death, but then their weight dropped
Speaker 1: again in a few minutes later, so that that led
Speaker 1: uh some people that say, well did that person tied twice? Um,
Speaker 1: And only one of the six patients showed a sudden
Speaker 1: and non reversible loss of weight of three four s
Speaker 1: of an ounce of course our twenty one Graham, So
Speaker 1: that's one and as you had said in follow up studies,
Speaker 1: this could not be replicated. Now fil this under the
Speaker 1: the realization that McDougal again is probably not a complete
Speaker 1: crazy person like he He knew that he lacked concrete findings.
Speaker 1: He didn't say case closed, just the soul. He wanted
Speaker 1: to do more, including placing an electric chair on the
Speaker 1: scale so as to measure the sole loss of an
Speaker 1: executed prisoner, but there was already objection from from local officials.
Speaker 1: So definitely there was opposition to the prospect of executing
Speaker 1: people in his lab. So he didn't get to experiment
Speaker 1: on people anymore after these initial experiments. Now he did
Speaker 1: turn to dogs. He experimented on fifteen which he killed himself. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he saw no weight change, but he had an
Speaker 1: explanation for that, maybe dogs just don't have souls, which
Speaker 1: kind of underlines again the problem of taking the seen
Speaker 1: world of science and using it to investigate the unseen,
Speaker 1: that where so much of it is just based on
Speaker 1: on these these different metaphysical ideas of and these different
Speaker 1: constructs of how it's supposed to work. Um, does a
Speaker 1: dog have a soul? You know? Yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: have to say it's his? Is his? Uh? This is
Speaker 1: not for a lack of trying. I mean he once
Speaker 1: he cannot have access to humans, he's going to dogs.
Speaker 1: He's also inviting other people to try to replicate his results,
Speaker 1: to try to do these experiments. But of course, and
Speaker 1: the medical community isn't exactly embracing this. Luckily, ten years later,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Polytechnic High School physics teacher h. Laft Whining
Speaker 1: self published a book called The Physical Theory of the Soul,
Speaker 1: in which he decided to jump into this and you know,
Speaker 1: following the footsteps, the scientific footsteps of McDougal. Um, he
Speaker 1: didn't work on any people, but he did kill thirty mice,
Speaker 1: which he was convinced must surely have souls, which is
Speaker 1: again it's an interesting, colorful a deviation from from McDougall
Speaker 1: himself said the dogs probably don't have souls, is why
Speaker 1: he didn't register. But he's going into this saying, yes,
Speaker 1: mice have souls and therefore their perfect thing to experiment
Speaker 1: on in his soul weighing experiments using a varying UH
Speaker 1: and at times creative methods of execution resulted mostly with
Speaker 1: no loss. No possible weight loss that you could attribute
Speaker 1: to a soul, the only one save in the case
Speaker 1: of cyanide poison mice UH which he conducted may have
Speaker 1: lost weight via frantic death throw perspiration. So he drowned
Speaker 1: some mice after that in a sealed container and recorded
Speaker 1: no weight change. So this is probably our best exam
Speaker 1: ample of someone following up his work abbit with mice
Speaker 1: and in recording his results. Yeah, that is actually pretty
Speaker 1: rigorous testing and experimenting in comparison to the next person
Speaker 1: who takes on McDougal's legacy, and his name is Gilbert Carpenter,
Speaker 1: and in he publishes the online book Physically Wing the Soul. Now,
Speaker 1: he does not conduct any experiments himself, but he does
Speaker 1: a lot of tinkering with numbers, and he thinks about
Speaker 1: this deeply. And his idea was that the souls of
Speaker 1: the dogs and mice were so light that they just
Speaker 1: wouldn't register on the scale. That's why this this is failing.
Speaker 1: And according to Mary Roach and Spook quote using McDougal's findings,
Speaker 1: that the soul weighs about twenty Graham's Carpenter calculated the
Speaker 1: ratio of soul weight to body weight at birth one
Speaker 1: to forty. He then applied this to typical puppy birth
Speaker 1: weight and from there deduced the average dog soul weighs
Speaker 1: one gram, which it turns out is less than the
Speaker 1: sensitivity of the scale McDougal used to weigh the dead dogs.
Speaker 1: And I that's the rub right, because mcdougull's scale was,
Speaker 1: according to McDougald, accurate to one sixteenth of an ounce
Speaker 1: or one point eight grams. Therefore, dog soul to light.
Speaker 1: Now that seems like a convenient loophole. I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention that other features of a Carpenter's book is that
Speaker 1: he calculates the volume of the human soul, and this
Speaker 1: volume he uses them as a metric, dubbing it the
Speaker 1: MAC after McDougal. He puts forth the idea that one
Speaker 1: way to weigh the soul would be to weigh a
Speaker 1: pregnant woman at the moment that the MAC entered the
Speaker 1: fetus around forty three days, when the brain waves are
Speaker 1: first detected. He says, um, and if you have a pint.
Speaker 1: He even goes into this, This is a great Mary
Speaker 1: Rage goes into this in in her books book Um
Speaker 1: that he suggests that the best way to get rid
Speaker 1: of a ghost is to invite a pregnant woman over
Speaker 1: around that three day period and then use her as
Speaker 1: a portal to store the ghost away. Well that that
Speaker 1: makes the next perfect sense. It gets worse from there.
Speaker 1: There's there's talk about lepri cons too, Yeah, something about
Speaker 1: the like the human soul would take up the space
Speaker 1: of a lepricn because you want to start throwing lepricn
Speaker 1: into your study just to make yourself, no, make it
Speaker 1: seem like you know what you're talking about. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then there's some calculations about Jesus soul, which is I
Speaker 1: don't know, five hundred two hons. Uh. What I like
Speaker 1: about it is that he did do some reverse engineering
Speaker 1: with mathematics to try to get at the heart of this.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, this is where McDougal's legacy leaves off. Yes,
Speaker 1: indeed it does. UM. But you know, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna
Speaker 1: look at some some more modern uh cosmic uh and
Speaker 1: physics based ideas about what what this where this soul
Speaker 1: might be in and indeed how you might try and
Speaker 1: measure it in some way. All Right, we're back, and
Speaker 1: I bet you, just bet you that quantics is going
Speaker 1: to get wrapped up in all this whole wing. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, quantum physics is kind of a it's a
Speaker 1: handy place at times to sort of store these unknowns, right,
Speaker 1: because it's kind of it's kind of a wild frontier
Speaker 1: in many respects um. In Mary Roach's book Spook, she
Speaker 1: does talk to an individual by the name of Gary
Speaker 1: naum Um. He's a Duke University Medical School professor, uh,
Speaker 1: and he has done a fair amount of thinking in
Speaker 1: this now he's he's he's done a bit of writing
Speaker 1: on oh on on predicting the future via science, uh,
Speaker 1: into to what extent we can do it. And he's
Speaker 1: also done a lot of of of thinking and writing
Speaker 1: on consciousness. So he proposed, is that one interesting way
Speaker 1: to potentially measure or at least hunt for the weight
Speaker 1: of the soul, if you will, is to use hermetically
Speaker 1: sealed box a top hyper sensitive scales. Alright, so far
Speaker 1: that that pretty much lines up with some earlier notions
Speaker 1: we're discussing, But then he ads this you also surround uh,
Speaker 1: the box and the scales with various radiant energy detectors.
Speaker 1: Why well, because information, right, Because in Schermer's words that
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, we're talking about this unique pattern of
Speaker 1: information that represents the essence of a person, and that
Speaker 1: information is energy. There's always a weight loss with energy loss,
Speaker 1: and if the energy changes, then the mass must change
Speaker 1: in some minute, barely discernible way. So uh Nam's idea
Speaker 1: here is that if more mass dissipates they can be
Speaker 1: accounted for due to energy change, then perhaps perhaps that
Speaker 1: extra energy would be consciousness leaving the body. And since
Speaker 1: energy can neither be created or destroyed, it has to
Speaker 1: go somewhere, right, Um, now, that's somewhere. Uh is kind
Speaker 1: of trippy because uh In according to some of the
Speaker 1: names uh uh theories and in idea and ideas here
Speaker 1: he postulates that, based on the increase of black hole
Speaker 1: entropy in the region of event horizons, that similarly the
Speaker 1: negative entropy or post death ordered transformed consciousness may go
Speaker 1: through a type of extra dimensional parallel universe hyperspace in
Speaker 1: the regions of the plank length, where the energy of
Speaker 1: the departed consciousness goes into small types of singularities embedded
Speaker 1: within our own four dimensional spacetime world. In two thousand five,
Speaker 1: attempted to raise some money for experimentation, but nothing came
Speaker 1: to fruition. But again he's he's written about this, and
Speaker 1: it's at the very least it's some some very interesting
Speaker 1: thought experimentation in terms of again taking on that difficult
Speaker 1: task of trying to make create a working model how
Speaker 1: a soul and survival of the soul might work in
Speaker 1: our scientific world. But how do you suss out the
Speaker 1: electrochemical um changes in the brain that are part of
Speaker 1: death and part of consciousness and then just part of
Speaker 1: the rest of your body, Uh, you know, falling apart. Atomically,
Speaker 1: We're not falling apart, but you know, I'm saying like
Speaker 1: this is where it gets. At this point, you just
Speaker 1: you just want to call the ghostbusters proton PACs, you know.
Speaker 1: So this makes me think about Richard Kiman, who gave
Speaker 1: this talk about scientific rigor and about really trying to
Speaker 1: make sure that your processes were correct. And he talks
Speaker 1: about this experiment with rats in nine seven and it
Speaker 1: says it's a little known experiment, but as guy Paul
Speaker 1: Thomas Young had this long corridor with um doors on
Speaker 1: one side that the rats amen, and doors on the
Speaker 1: other side of those doors there was food, and he
Speaker 1: wanted to see if he could train the rats to
Speaker 1: go in at the third down, third door down from
Speaker 1: wherever they had started from. And this corridor, all of
Speaker 1: this was uniformly constructed, right, But the thing is is
Speaker 1: that the rats would keep going to the door where
Speaker 1: the food was previously, and this was driving him nuts,
Speaker 1: and he tried to figure out different things he could do.
Speaker 1: He painted the doors really carefully, arranging the textures on
Speaker 1: the faces of the doors exactly the same. But still
Speaker 1: the rats would go to the previous door where the
Speaker 1: food had been. And then he thought maybe the rats
Speaker 1: were smelling the food, so he changed the smell of
Speaker 1: the food with chemicals, and then the rats could still tell.
Speaker 1: And eventually he figured out that the rats could discern
Speaker 1: the previous door by the way the floor sounded when
Speaker 1: they ran over it. And so I bring this up
Speaker 1: because the story about this is that you have to
Speaker 1: discover all the things about something before you can discover
Speaker 1: what it is you're specifically going in to try to
Speaker 1: discover about the rats, right, like you have to discover
Speaker 1: everything you can about this process before you can actually
Speaker 1: get the results you want. And this is a kind
Speaker 1: of scientific rigor that you know, hopefully everybody is bringing
Speaker 1: to the table when they're conducting experiments, and it makes
Speaker 1: it this is something concrete, rats amazed, and now you're
Speaker 1: talking about something extremely abstract with souls and then trying
Speaker 1: to apply science to that. And then again this is
Speaker 1: where it all falls apart. And Adam Frank, who is
Speaker 1: a theoretical computational master physicists, he says, quote for myself,
Speaker 1: I remain fully, infirmly agnostic on the question of a
Speaker 1: natural life in the soul. If ever there was a
Speaker 1: place where firm convictions seemed misplaced, this is it. They're
Speaker 1: simply is no controlled, experimental, verifiable information to support either
Speaker 1: you wrought versus you go on positions. You know, I
Speaker 1: think I've made this analogy before, but when I when
Speaker 1: it comes to you know, science and religion or faith
Speaker 1: or metaphysics bumping heads. I've been think of it in
Speaker 1: terms of someone who has a pet um python and
Speaker 1: a pet rat, like they are both fine pets to have.
Speaker 1: It's it's you know, and you can you can gain
Speaker 1: a lot from that relationship with that that that rat
Speaker 1: a lot from that relationship with that that snake. But
Speaker 1: it would be foolhardy to keep them in the same case,
Speaker 1: Like it's they cannot live in the same enclosure without
Speaker 1: the inevitable occurring. And and I often feel like that
Speaker 1: with with these matters, like I can't have my pet
Speaker 1: rat and I have my pet snake, but I know
Speaker 1: that there are compatibility issues between the two. You know,
Speaker 1: we remember this keynotes speech we gave and it was
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis, and we were doing it at a confidence
Speaker 1: and we were talking about how science is not apart
Speaker 1: from us. And one of the points we were making
Speaker 1: is that science is storytelling, and uh, you you break
Speaker 1: it down to just like here, it is trying to
Speaker 1: be as pragmatic and objective and empirical as possible about
Speaker 1: your reality. And yet on the other side of all
Speaker 1: of those particulars is a story that comes out of it.
Speaker 1: And so I think that we are completely compelled. We
Speaker 1: can't help ourselves to try to put a story, even
Speaker 1: in scientific terms, to the two things that maybe we
Speaker 1: don't really have the understanding or the correct language to depict.
Speaker 1: And that's where trying to well the way a soul
Speaker 1: comes in and becomes like this problematic, really messy problem
Speaker 1: that we get into. Alright, today, you have it of
Speaker 1: the soul. What happens when science and religion come together
Speaker 1: and we try to prove the unseen world of using
Speaker 1: the tools of the scene. If you would like to
Speaker 1: hear more from us, check out all the podcast episodes
Speaker 1: that's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, along with
Speaker 1: blog post videos, links out to our social media accounts,
Speaker 1: you name it. And if you want to weigh in
Speaker 1: on the soul matters, well you can do so by
Speaker 1: sending us an email to blow the mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com.