This is one part of a 2-part video on the existence of the soul.
At the end of this video, make sure to check out the other bit.
If the soul is purely supernatural, how does it influence the natural world?
If it does exist, one would expect the soul to leave traces of its existence.
In 1901, a physician in Haverhill, Massachusetts attempted to prove just that.
His name was Dunctor Docan Mcd…
Doctor Doncan…
Dunctor Docan McDoo…
His name was Dr. Duncan MacDougall (say that ten times fast).
He performed an experiment to check for the existence of the soul - by testing to see
if it had weight.
He placed the beds of terminally ill patients on industrial scales.
Attempting to account for air in the lungs, bodily fluids, and sweat evaporation, Dr.
MacDougall determined that at the time of death, the soul loses 21 grams of weight - the
weight of the soul.
Or so he thought.
But there were a few problems with the experiment.
Dr. McDougal’s sample size was tiny.
Unlike modern-day clinical trials that examine hundreds or thousands of cases, McDougal only
studied six patients.
The 21 grams result occurred in ONE of the 6 patients - who he reported as losing three-fourths
of an ounce (on a scale that was only sensitive to within .2 ounces).
That means that 83% of the patients he studied yielded a different result.
Now two others did lose weight at the time of death, and then more weight shortly after.
Patient 2 lost 28 grams at the time of death then another 18 after they determined the
heart stopped, for a total of 46 grams.
While Patient 3 lost 14 grams at the time of death, then 28 grams several minutes later.
Did their soul-packets evaporate in chunks or something?
Lastly, patient 5 lost 11 grams of weight, and promptly gained it back.
A yo-yo soul!
They stayed dead though.
With results like that, if this was a highschool science project, it would’ve gotten a failing
grade.
Wait though, didn’t I say that he studied six patients?
Yeah, well according to McDougal, patients 4 and 6 died before he could properly adjust/calibrate
the scales, so he disregarded these results entirely… and the other three.
And selectively reported his findings based on the one data point that confirmed his bias.
Which brings out another flaw in the experiment.
Dr. MacDougall set out to prove a belief he held rather than to see if he could disprove
his hypothesis.
Which is how science works.
And it wasn’t a blind trial, meaning he could easily influence the results or selectively
report on whichever data points matched his bias - which is exactly what he did.
Not only that, but MacDougall didn’t even have an accurate way of determining the exact
time of death.
Does the soul leave when the patient breathes their last breath, when their heart stops,
when brain activity ceases?
But even if his scales were precise and accurate (which they don’t seem like they really
were) and his methodology was sound (which it wasn’t), the body losing weight at the
time of death is in no way confirmation of the existence of a soul.
If it’s ethereal, why would a soul even have weight?
Why would half the soul evaporate, delay and then the other half flitter…. on down to
hell?
Why the weight discrepancies?
If some souls are fatter than others, will you be chunky in heaven?
Why are some souls slower and others fast.
If a soul has weight at all and isn’t lighter than air, how can it float to heaven?
And speaking of heaven and hell: What if someone suffers a personality-altering brain injury
and also develops severe retrograde amnesia, forgetting everything that they know about
religion up to that point?
Previously they were a bit of an obstinate & self-righteous twat-waffle but now are pleasant,
selfless, and kind.
When presented with religious teachings, though, the beliefs they were raised with and once
held dearly now seem preposterous to them.
They reject them entirely.
Is their soul judged as pre or post amnesia them.
Do they go to heaven, hell, both, or neither?
Or, a severe brain injury leads a patient to develop anterograde amnesia and all of
their 50 years of memories as a godless heathen are preserved, but they’re no longer able
to form new memories.
Their procedural (working) memory is intact, allowing them to live in the moment and have
brief coherent conversations with someone.
Conversations that they promptly forget.
In several different conversations they enthusiastically accept several different religions presented
to them and then immediately forget their new-found faith.
If the soul is separate from the brain, does their soul forget its religion?
By this point, you may be questioning traditional concepts of the soul, but perhaps you or someone
you know had a spiritual experience.
Are these not a glaring example of the existence of something beyond this natural world, or
are spiritual experiences simply a concoction of our brains?
If spiritual experiences are a fluke of the brain, we would expect to be able to recreate
them by physically tampering with our cranial bologna.
And we’ve done just that - creating spiritual and even out of body experiences using magnets,
electrodes, centrifuges, and drugs (I cover all of that more in depth in my video on near
death experiences).
There are so many other neurological oddities and clinical cases (or even viruses) which
I could cover that affect the mind.
Strokes, temporal lobe seizures, brain injuries, or disease can alter people’s personalities
and impair any and every neurological capability we possess.
If the soul exists outside the physical world, why is it so prone to physical damage?
Where does the soul even reside?
And if the brain accounts for all functions previously attributed to the soul - functions
that can and are impaired by brain damage, then what’s left for the soul to do?
Some people argue that our internal monologue (that inner voice in our head we hear when
we think) is the communication of our soul.
Except that some people don’t have an internal voice at all and others have more than one!
Still others attribute our conscience to the soul.
But do psychopaths who lack a conscience lack a soul?
Psychopaths often have either have smaller than average amygdalas or amygdalas that don’t
function properly.
If you were to damage this region of a non-psychopath’s brain and it resulted in them losing their
conscience, did you just slaughter their soul but leave their physical body intact - operating
as a living soulless meatsack - demonstrating the superfluous nature of the soul?
Do animals have souls that live on after death?
If so, where do they go, heaven or hell?
If they go to hell, what a cruel god.
If they go to heaven, does god love animals more than humans to give them a blanket pass.
And if they don’t have souls, and are purely controlled by their physical brains, then
why do humans need souls to do largely the same things?
And if we are controlled by a soul - a man in the machine - a supernatural puppeteer
pulling the strings, what allows that little homunculus of a soul to think?
Does it have a mechanical chemical brain?
Or does it have a soul doing the thinking for it.
Which has a soul doing the thinking for it which has a soul doing the thinking for it…
and it’s an infinite regress of soul turtles all the way down!
Now some people will argue that we’ve mapped the brain and a few functions of the mind
have not been pinpointed to a specific brain region - therefore: souls!
But that’s about as ignorant as claiming that because we’ve mapped the human genome
and haven’t found THE height gene, that height isn’t influenced by our genes.
Just as, with genetics, where multiple genes can affect one trait, in neuroscience multiple
regions of the brain work together to give us each brain function.
Our knowledge of the brain is far from complete.
But that doesn’t mean you can fill those gaps with whatever the fluff you want.
Neuroscience itself is a very new field - and we’ve really only had the technology to
look under the hood for a few decades.
Filling the few remaining holes in our understanding of the brain with “We don’t know for sure,
therefore the soul does it.”
Is a soul-of-the-gaps argument that becomes vanishingly arguable as we fill the pieces
of the puzzle.
Now I’m not here to tell you what you should or shouldn’t believe about the soul - just
to urge you to think about the hard questions, dare to be curious, but don’t drink the
Koolaid.
Now don’t forget to check out the other part of this two part series on the soul - where
I explore the arithmetic of souls - there’s some really interesting clinical cases you
don’t want to miss.
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And as always, dare to be curious but don’t drink the Koolaid!