Who's got Soul?

I don’t know if anybody reads Dan Brown- I got the feeling the first day of class that John Z. doesn’t like his work so much, haha, which if fine! But anyways, if anyone has read his most recent book, The Lost Symbol, there is a part where this scientist is explaining that the human soul actually has a measurable weight. I don’t really feel like sifting through the pages to find it, but I remember thinking that it was really cool at the time, and looked it up to discover that there was actually legitimate research based around this idea. In class yesterday when we were talking about mind, body, and soul, and what each was, nobody really had an idea of what soul was. And I don’t think I can completely grasp what it is either, so I got to thinking about it, and I remembered what I had read a while ago.

So I did a little digging online again, and I actually found a New York Times article written about the research that had occurred. It’s from 1907, and is a little old and outdated, but it is very interesting. You can find it here if you want to read it. It’s a little morbid, but I’ll give you all the gist if you don’t want to read the whole thing. The researchers are observing a dying person, who is lying on a very large scale, which is extremely precise. There is another scale next to it, which has a weight on it that matches the dying person’s completely. Once the person passes away, the weight on the scale next to them drops, because it now weighs more than the person, who is now dead. Meaning that the dead person weighed less than when they were living only moments before! What does that mean? You can make up your own minds, but they are considering that the soul had left the person and took its weight with it! Therefore making the soul concrete!

Crazy! I don’t know if I completely believe it, but you have to admit it is definitely interesting, at the least! There are a bunch of other links you can check out. There is actually one about Noetic Science, which is the category that this experiment falls under and is also mentioned in Dan Browns book. Anyways, it’s a very cool website, and has a bunch of cool things that delve into philosophy, psychology, physics…they kind of all intertwine. It’s really fun to explore; I found it while trying to look up everything else didn’t know if you might be interested.

Anyways, I mine as well try to give my own opinion instead of loading this blog with links… However, I honestly can’t say whether or not I believe in a soul. Even though that sounds dishonest now typing it out. I guess deep down I do believe that it does exist. Maybe our mind and our body are what we know, and can physically acknowledge and so we believe. But I do believe that there is something else to us than just “a lump of carbon,” which includes our brains, and therefore our minds. If we didn’t have a brain, would we have a mind? I think the mind and the body being intertwined makes us who we are. And so if we were to do that thought experiment again, and have the mind enter another body, I still stand by it being a completely new person. The mind and body come together as one, to function and form a human being. But what drives both of those things? I think John made it clear in class: If we switched minds, we’d recognize it. If we switched bodies, we’d obviously realize it as well. If we gave away our soul, well we couldn’t even conceivably think how that would be possible. But maybe that’s because it’s impossible, because it’s who we are as a whole.

Maybe the soul is the meeting of the mind and body, which together makes the uniqueness of you. Maybe that meeting is what creates the spirit, which each and every one us possess, and lives within you, and “soul” is just the name for it. Does it physically exist? I really have no idea. It might not have a weight. It might not be any type of matter at all. It might not even live after we are gone. Maybe it dies, and that causes us to die. Or maybe it does just leave us and once it’s gone, our meeting of the mind and body is broke and we just stop physically functioning. Or maybe when our mind and body can’t connect in that union anymore, the soul is forced to leave, and we pass on.

In any case, I do believe that there is more to us than just our mind and body physically, something that drives both of those things together to keep us going. To make us who we are, the essence of us. Or maybe my mind is just full of crap and we are all just lumps of carbon. I don’t really care if I’m right or wrong; I think the idea is nice. Everybody should have a soul :)