I have been reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. I have finally reached Chapter 8, page 167, entitled How to Know If You're Dead: Beating-heart cadavers, live burial, and the scientific search for the soul. As I was reading, a section caught my eye about the search of (1) whether or not the soul of a human has any sort of mass and (2) where the soul is actually located in the body. Let me first begin with whether or not the soul of a human has mass.
"Macdougall's report of the experiment (whether or not the soul has mass) was published in the April 1907 issue of American Medicine.
'At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end (a special bed that sat upon a platform beam scale sensitive to two-tenths of an ounce) dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-forths of an ounce.
This loss of weight could not be due to evaporation of respiratory moisture and sweat, because that had already been determined to go on, in his case, at the rate of one-sixtieth of an ounce per minute, whereas this loss was sudden and large...
The bowels did not move; and if they had moved the weight would still have remained upon the bed except for a slow loss by the evaporation of moisture, depending, of course, upon the fluidity of the feces. The bladder evacuated one or two drams of urine. This remained upon the bed and could only have influenced the weight by slow gradual evaporation and therefore in now way could account for the sudden loss.
There remained but one more channel of loss to explore, the expiration of all but the residual air in the lungs. Getting upon the bed myself, my colleague put the beam to actual balance. Inspiration and expiration of air as forcibly as possible by me had no effect upon the beams...'"
After this experiment, Macdougall went on to dogs. 5 more human cadavers showed the same result as the one descrived above. According to his beliefs, animals do not have souls. Therefore, his experiments showed the same thing when there was no change in mass after the dog's death.
However, Macdougall's theory was shot down my a fellow Massachusetts doctor, Dr. Augustus P. Clarke.
"Fellow Massachusetts doctor took Macdougall to task for having failed to take into account the sudden rise in body temperature at death when the blood stops being air-cooled via its circulation through the lungs. Clarke posited that the sweating and moisture evaportaion caused by this rise in body temperature would account for both the drop in the men's weight and the dog's failure to register one. (Dogs cool themselves by panting, not sweating.)"
There is no substantial evidence stating whether or not the soul has a certain mass. This is just an experiment conducted by a man in his own office back in the early 1900's. Of course, the arguement against Macdougall's experiment was also given in the early 1900's. For the purpose of this blog, we will go on the assumption that the soul has no mass; Clarke is correct.
This brings me to my next point: Where the soul can possibly be stored IF it is truly existant. The next trillion paragraphs are quoted directly from the book. Some sentences might be paraphrased but the vast majority will be the same. If you don't believe me, buy the book. This quote starts on page 175; the very last paragraph.
"The seat-of-the-soul debate has been ongoing some four thousand years. It started out not as a heart-versus-brain debate, but as heart-versus-liver. The ancient Egyptians were the original heart guys. They believed that the Ka resided in the heart. Ka was the essence of person: spirit, intelligence, feelings and passions, humor, grudges, annoying television theme songs, all things that make a person a person and not a nematode. The heart was the only organ left inside the mummified corpse, for a man needed his ka in the afterlife. Cadaver brains were scrambled and pulled ou tin globs through the nostrils, by way of a hooked bronze needle. Then they were thrown away. (The liver, stomach, instestines, and lungs were taken out of the body, but kept: They were stored in earthen jars inside the tomb.)
The Babylonians were the original liver guys, believing the organ to be the source of human emotion and spirit. The Mesopotamians played both sides of the argument, assigning emotion to the liver and intellect to the heart. (paraphrasing) Some freethinkers thought parts of the soul could be found in the stomach or even in the walnut-sized pineal gland. (end paraphrase)
With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. Though Pythagorus and Aristotle viewed the heart as the seat of the soul-- the source of 'vital force' necessary to live and grow-- they believed there to be a secondary, 'rational' soul, or mind, located in the brain."
From that partial section, we are able to tell that there are many theories about where the soul can be located. They each seem to have a logical, somewhat thought through argument about the true location of the soul. However, there is no proof of where it can be.
"The early anatomists weren't able to shed much light on the issue, as the soul wasn't something you could see or set your scalpel to. Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy: What shows up first in the embryo must be important and therefore most likely to hold the soul.
According to Nutton, the man who came closest to actually examining a human embryo was an anatomist named Realdo Colombo who dissected a one-month-old fetus. Colombo returned from his lab-- which in all likelihood was not equipped with a microscope, as the device had barely been invented-- bearing the fascinating if flat-out wrong news that the liver formed the heart.
(A few pages later...)
Here is the deeply unnerving thing: The heart, cut from the chest, keeps beating on its own. So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. Oz told me that a human heart removed from its blood supply can continue beating for as long as a minute or two, until the cells begin to starve from lack of oxygen. If the soul was in the brain and not the heart, as many believed at the time, how could the heart keep beating outside the body, cut off from the soul?"
Earlier on in the chapter, it states how all of the organs are still functioning in a patient (technically it is a person who is no longer alive; the brain is dead and they only breathe while on a machine) even though the brain is no longer functioning. All of the organs are fuctioning ,except for the brain, including the heart. There is a LIVE heart in a dead person's body.
From my own thoughts, and people... don't kill me, I believe that the body has no soul. Every organ in our body has a purpose. Focusing on the ones that are thought to contain the soul, what else are the functions of them? The heart is the center for pumping blood throughout our body. Without it, our brain would not be able to send signals and / or messages to the rest of our body. Without blood flow, we would not be able to breathe. Without breathing, we would no longer exist. Our brain is practically the center to almost everything. It controls our movements, our blinking, our central nervous system, and just our overall knowledge and common sense. If we do anything to damage our brain severely, such as intense drinking, we can damage all of the cells in our brain and mess up the signals to our entire body. We could be completely, excuse my phrasing, retarded without it.
Why can't people just consider the fact that maybe humans don't have souls. Maybe all of the living humans made up this concept about how caring and loving a person can be; how well, or good, your soul is. Hoenstly, don't people realize that what you have experienced and when you experienced it has a huge impact on your personality; your "spirit, intelligence, feelings and passions, humor, grudges, annoying
television theme songs, all things that make a person a person and not
a nematode." How you're raised and any of the traumatic experiences you have been through effect you in a great way.
As for the quoting of the book, there is NO proof that a soul exists. There are only theories. You can not physically touch a soul, you cannot cut into a soul, and you sure cannot weigh this "soul" that humans have. I believe it is ridiculous that people are actually spending valuable time on whether or not a soul truly exists. Let people believe what they want. However, if there is ever solid proof found against a soul existing, can you imagine how much that can affect a person? Will you tell them that there is not such thing as a soul? I know, and it is very minor, that I STILL, to this day, consider Pluto a planet. With information that I have been told all throughout my life, it is very hard for me to alter my thinking. How are the other gazillion people in this world going to react if there is ever solid evidence presented to them about a soul being nonexistent?
My opinion. Do not bash me. I'll kill you.
