[jedaisoul]

Originally Posted by MegaManiac

Thanks for the URL. Wiki is actually the first place where I had originally gotten my info and read up on MacDougall's experiments & basic theory. Wiki is generally one of my first stops when I'm looking for answers.

I just can't help but to think there has got to be something to this theory.

Just incase my point(s) got lost among my palabar, I'm looking to hear what has not already been written on sites like wiki and thought I'd at least get the benefit-of-the-doubt that I already know the basics. And I'll always try to know the basics before looking to our members for answers.

This thread started out as an apparently naiive, but legitimate, question. From the above it is clear that MM is already aware of the "strange claims" made on the subject, to which he is giving credence.

Furthermore...

Originally Posted by MegaManiac

Freeztar, lets say you're the guy that works out the physics behind an action. I'm they guy that can walk up and apply the physics without ever having to work out the formulas.

A bank shot in basketball is a great way to illustrate my point. You would work out the entire shot in physical math or whatever. I walk up and look at the shot, be the shot and make the shot (in 1 shot). All the while everyone else is mapping out the shot on paper and checking their calcs, I am already celebrating with the cheerleading squad in the shower room .

...is just un-scientific clap trap. We all wish science was that easy, it isn't.

**** This thread belongs in Strange Claims ****

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by MegaManiac

I'd like to hear some member opinions on this subject (the soul having mass).

I'm not the science or physics geek the everyone else seems to be. But that's why I'm here.

Strive not to disappoint, here’s some physics geekery, followed by some religion studies geekery:

Heat is a form of kinetic energy, so a cold body has less total energy than the same warm one. From this, we can calculate the difference in energy when a 75 kg (typical) human body cools from 37 C (the usual human body temperature) to 20 C (typical room temperature). Assuming a human being is thermally equivalent to a bad of water (not a bad approximation, IMHO),



From ,

That’s not much mass, unless you count it in something really small, like nitrogen atoms, in which case it’s the mass of about 2,000,000,000,000,000 nitrogen atoms. This is a physical real prediction, however – if you sealed a human body up really well so it could couldn’t leak anything, and cooled it down from normal to room temperature, an very, very sensitive scale would in principle detect this change in mass.

As lots of folk have previously noted, though, without an objective physical definition of the soul, we can’t really get at the “what’s the mass of a soul” question. It’s a pretty safe bet, I think, that nobody thinks it’s a body’s heat.

If you go back to some of the earliest religious writings about souls, you’ll find they equate soul with the air a person inhales and exhales (pneuma), so you could make a case that the human soul masses the same as 2 lungs full of air. Not to many modern religionists hold with the old belief that breath is the same thing as soul, though, so I doubt many people would agree with you.

Originally Posted by MegaManiac

Not sure if this is the right forum to post this in …

This original post of thread seems neither scientific theory (it doesn’t make any predictions) nor theology (it’s not noticeably religious), so I’ve moved it to the watercooler, a good forum for threads intended to just feel out people’s ideas on a vaguely defined subject.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by MegaManiac

I walk up and look at the shot, be the shot and make the shot (in 1 shot). All the while everyone else is mapping out the shot on paper and checking their calcs, I am already celebrating with the cheerleading squad in the shower room

On the other hand, while you’re off celebrating with the cheerleaders, I’m the guy meeting the really cool, brainy girls who find math/science skills hot. All a matter of taste, I suppose.

Formal math/science skills don’t interfere with strength, speed, or coordination. Though I never was much at basketball (something about that coordinated jumping and shooting never quite came together for me, though I was a savage rebounder), my best 440 yd time was 47.3 s – not good enough to make an major country’s Olympic team anytime in my lifetime, but pretty winning on a regional highschool level. Age (I’m 48 this year) has de-elasticised my muscles and tendons so that even sub 60 quarters are for me but a fond memory, though by several accounts, I’ve improved at the fun sport of whacking similarly armed folk with rattan and other sorts of sticks.

Also, unless you’ve some experience at it, it’s hard to appreciate how zen-y math actually is. Though there’s a lot of literature searching to it, intuition is very important. Athletes may have moves, but nothing IMHO to compare to the math moves of someone like Kurt Gödel. In addition to turning the math and philosophy world every which way but loose, was, by credible accounts, a total love machine. Unfortunately, he was also, in the end, literally too insane to survive.

All that needs be said to sum up my mood in this post can be found in the lines of Bladerunner:

Sebastian: Ah, I knew it. 'Cause I do genetic design work for the Tyrell Corporation. There's some of me in you. Show me something.
Roy: Like what?
Sebastian: Like anything.
Roy: We're not computers Sebastian, we're physical.

and

Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You're the prodigal son. You're quite a prize!

[Thunderbird]

The only two ways I know is to die or do some out of body experiments.

Here is something on the subject, for what its worth.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall was an early 20th century doctor in Haverhill, Massachusetts who sought to measure the mass purportedly lost by a human body when the soul departed the body upon death.

In 1907, MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying (no detail is given to how this occurred or at what intervals the patients were weighed). 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. Logically one must assume that MacDougall knew the patients were dying, and therefore waited for them to die of natural causes. 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. MacDougall's complaints about not being able to find dogs dying of the natural causes that would have been ideal have led at least one author to conjecture that he was in fact poisoning dogs to conduct these experiments.[1] In March 1907, accounts of MacDougall's experiments were published in the New York Times and the medical journal American Medicine.

Although generally regarded either as meaningless or considered to have had little if any scientific merit[1], MacDougall's finding that the human soul weighed 21 grams has become a meme in the public consciousness. It lent itself to the title of the film 21 Grams. In the end, however, his practices were considered fallible due to shaky methods and small sample size. Scientists disregard his research into this field due to allegations of bias (MacDougall was a fanatical Christian). Any reference to MacDougall in philosophical debates regarding the soul (see also Mind-Body Theories) are mostly for novelty or to ridicule his supposed "scientific experiment."

Duncan MacDougall (doctor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

Duncan MacDougall (doctor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I gave that same link in the second post of this thread to which MM replied:

Originally Posted by MM

Thanks for the URL. Wiki is actually the first place where I had originally gotten my info and read up on MacDougall's experiments & basic theory. Wiki is generally one of my first stops when I'm looking for answers.

I just can't help but to think there has got to be something to this theory.

Just incase my point(s) got lost among my palabar, I'm looking to hear what has not already been written on sites like wiki and thought I'd at least get the benefit-of-the-doubt that I already know the basics. And I'll always try to know the basics before looking to our members for answers.

[Pyrotex]

Calculating the equivalent mass of body heat may yield a number, but then you have to deal with the fact that dead dogs, dead trees, earthworms on a hot sidewalk, a baked potato, an ember, a rock sitting in the sun all day -- all these things will cool off and lose heat energy.

So, do they all have souls? If the mass equiv of heat energy means something for a human corpse, then what does it mean for a baked potato cooling to room temperature on the dining room table? It either means the baked potato is losing its soul, or it means that heat energy has nothing to do with souls.

This is an easy topic to abuse and tangentialize. [go off on a tangent] Because the word "energy" is so easily misunderstood. "What happens to all that life energy when someone dies? Isn't it conserved?" Uhhhh... what is "life energy"? And how do you measure it? If it physically exists at all, then it must be measurable and I assure you that our level of technology can indeed measure it. Arguements based on Universal Ignorance are as "real" as purple unicorns.

Getting non-scientific folks to realize that their usage of "energy" often makes no sense in any scientific way is pretty hard at times. Especially when they equate "energy" to "aura", "essence" and other "phlogistons" of the human imagination. Real energy is by its very nature definable, detectable and measurable.

Makes me wish sometime that physicists would coin a new word, realenergy, to distinguish it from all the new-age, holistic, woo-woo, romantic, notional street-versions of the word, energy.

Given the Internet and various professional search engines that have every magazine and scholarly article on tap, it is not that hard to verify that nobody, nowhere, nohow has ever detected a soul, let alone measured one.

Appealing to some vague wishful "lack of technology" is just appealing to Universal Ignorance. "We just don't know enough!" Sorry, but that dog just doesn't hunt. That flag just doesn't flap in the wind.

[paigetheoracle]

I remember some doctor in the Victorian Era measured dying patients and found a few ounces weight loss at the point of death. Now to me that doesn't indicate that the soul has mass but that it could in theory make an impression on the existence of the body, which is not the same thing (Like any force can effect a material body).

I also remember seance 'evidence' of a hand formed out of hot wax and the table rapping of the Fox sisters. You can take all this with a pinch of salt but again what it could show, if genuine, is that the soul can effect the material world as form of pressure, which would tie in with this (By the way before you hammer my logic on this, you might like to read my post of the same day, on 'Cats Purring' in this same forum of Alternative theories, second paragraph).

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by paigetheoracle

I remember some doctor in the Victorian Era measured dying patients and found a few ounces weight loss at the point of death.

I suspect you’re thinking of the same 1907 experiment by Duncan MacDougall that’s been referenced several times in this thread. Though technically 1907 is a few years late to be properly in the Victorian era (1837-1901), it’s close enough for me.

By monitoring 6 dieing men (4 successfully) on a specially constructed bed-supporting balance scale, MacDougal concluded that the human soul had a mass of about 3/8 to 3/4 oz. He stated that more experiments were needed to support his hypothesis, but neither he nor anyone else ever did such an experiment. Nonetheless, over the years, as the story was retold in various publications, the idea that the human soul massed precisely 21 grams (a bit less than 3/4 oz) became a firmly rooted folk myth, so these days, the phrase “21 grams” is recognized by many people as code-phrase reference to the soul.

Since MacDougal, a devout (some say fanatical) Christian was interested in demonstrating not only that humans have souls with measurable, physical qualities such as mass, but that only humans have souls, he repeated his test with 12 dogs, concluding that their mass was unchanged shortly after death.

[Brinnie]

Everything has a mass, except for the Church of Scientology.

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by Brinnie

Everything has a mass, except for the Church of Scientology.

Well, I'll just say that your wrong, and my only reference will be the word photon.


As well-respected member here likes to say, scientology is a mental disorder.