Before starting today's topic, let me ask you a question, what is the soul? Is it a substance? Conscious? Electromagnetic wave? Energy? Dark matter? Different people will give different answers, and there are different interpretations of "soul" in different fields of today's diverse world, and the earliest definition of the word "soul" on the mainland comes from the I Ching.
Most of the world's religions hold the "dualistic" view of the soul and the body, believing that human beings have an "eternal soul" and that the body is the temporary residence of the soul.
The soul out of sight of the ancients
Taoism refers to the soul as "Yuan Shen" and "Neidan", which is divided into yin and yang, and after cultivation, the soul can be controlled in and out of the body, which is called "Yuan Shen out of the box"; When human life comes to an end, the seven spirits disperse first, the three souls leave again, the heavenly soul returns to the heavenly road, the earth soul goes down to the earth, and the human soul wanders in the human world; Until the rebirth, the three souls are reunited, and the seven spirits are reborn with the flesh.
Buddhism advocates the "law of dependent birth" and "self-nature, emptiness", and believes that everything is "dependent on origin and extinction", the material world is so, the spiritual world is also the same, everything is born and destroyed, there is no immutable soul, that is, there is no eternal soul, and naturally there is no soul.
Christianity divides the soul into two parts: "spirit" and "soul", "soul" is flesh and blood, all living things have, "spirit" is from God, only human beings have, so the West believes that "human beings are the spirit of all things", Catholicism believes that the soul of the individual inherits from the parents.
In order to prove that there is no "soul" in the world, human beings have done different verifications according to different hypotheses, and scientists have also done various experiments, and today Xiaobian will collect information from all over the world as much as possible to present to you.
First, energy detection experiments
Britain is one of the countries with the most ghost legends in the world, incomplete statistics, the United Kingdom has more than 300 haunted places, and there are many kinds of ghosts, from hell knights to headless ghosts, a variety of ways, so the British ghost hunting industry is also illegally developed, there are more than 500 light and spirit associations.
British scientists hypothesized that ghosts are composed of matter, as long as it is matter, there will be energy, then ghosts are no exception, so the use of particle accelerators to the tomb of Highgate and the British "haunted" holy land of Polileidori haunted house for particle energy fluctuation detection, but the results show no trace of energy fluctuations.
There are more than 300 haunted places in the United Kingdom
The Polileidori Haunted House, known as the most murderous haunted house in Britain, was burned down in 1939 and the ruins that were burned down in 1943 were completely destroyed, so the experiment should have been carried out before 1943, and the first particle accelerator in human history, Cockroft-Walton, was born in 1932, a time right.
LHC
Now, through the unremitting efforts of human beings, in 2022 human beings have created an accelerator in Belgium in Europe that can detect dark matter - LHC, if the soul belongs to dark matter, if the LHC accelerator is used to detect the above two places again, I don't know if there will be new discoveries?
Second, the soul weighing experiment
In 1901, in Massachusetts, a doctor named Duncan McDougall, who identified 6 patients who were about to die in a nursing home, and then, when these patients were about to die, put them on a Fairbanks scale (the scale could be accurate to 0.1 grams) to observe the weight changes before and after their deaths, and found that after death, weight loss would be 21.3 grams. So, he believed, this is the weight of the "soul" and published the results in the journal American Medicine. The doctor then conducted a similar experiment on 15 dogs, and found that the dogs all weighed the same before and after death, so he concluded that dogs have no "soul".
After looking for half a day, this is the Fairbanks scale
For his experiments, the conclusion given by the scientific community is that it has no scientific value.
Here's why:
1, the sample size is too small, 6 human experimental samples, plus a total of 21 dogs, which is too small compared with the number of thousands of samples in the laboratory, and it is not representative at all;
2, non-dominant loss, that is, weight loss caused by sweat evaporation and breathing water vapor, after the death of the human body, the lungs stop working, and the blood in the body cannot rely on the lungs for cooling, resulting in increased sweating, which is just in line with the reduction of 21 grams;
3. The dog does not have sweat glands, and the dog cannot rely on sweat glands to cool down after death;
4. Duncan himself said that of the six trials, only the first one suddenly lost 21 grams of weight, and the other five either died at an inaccurate time or the results were inaccurate, for example, after the death of the second trial, there was no change in weight within fifteen minutes.
Non-dominant loss experiment
Third, God's helmet experiment
The "God Helmet Experiment", also known as the "Coren Helmet Experiment", was jointly developed by neuroscientists Michael Possinger and Stanley Colon of Laurenson University in Canada, the actual object is not complicated, the motorcycle helmet is equipped with a coil, through the coil to release low-intensity complex electromagnetic waves to stimulate the temporal lobe of the brain (the temporal lobe is responsible for feeling the state of the body's existence), and then stimulate the human body to have a "near-death experience" (also known as "in vitro experience"), it is said that some participants saw the bright light and strangers and relatives who have died for many years during the experiment , God, the sea of fire, etc.
"Octopus" helmet
The strength of this magnetic field is the same as the magnetic field generated by the fixed telephone or hair dryer we usually use, in order to shield from the interference of other magnetic fields, the environment is carried out inside the Faraday cage, and later experimental improvements have developed a device called "octopus", unlike the Coren helmet, which only installs a coil on the temporal lobe, and the "octopus" helmet installs a coil throughout the brain.
Coincidentally, when the Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanco was treating an epilepsy patient, in order to determine the cause, the electrode was implanted in a suspicious position in the patient's brain, and during the probing, he found that when the electrode was implanted in the angular gyrus region of the right temporal lobe, the patient would have an ex vivo experience, and as the current increased, the patient began to feel that the body became lighter and slowly sinking, and then felt that he was lying on the bed from above.
Dr. Michael Pessinger
For this phenomenon, scientists give an explanation, the temporal lobe of the angular brain gyrus region is mainly responsible for receiving and processing their own tactile, visual, body balance and other signals, when this area is overstimulated, the visual signals about the body and balance signals and skin tactile signals can not be properly integrated, and then will produce an ex vivo experience.
Fourth, Philip's experiment
Phillip's experiment belongs to the category of parapsychological experiments, conducted by the Toronto Parapsychological Research Association, led by mathematical geneticist Dr. AR George Owen, and recruited eight people, including his wife, to form an experimental team, supervised by psychologist Dr. Joel.
Eight people together imagined a virtual character, and gave him the name "Philip Ayersford", in order to make the character more real, eight people made a portrait of him standing in the middle, and also constantly improve his specific information, such as home address, the name of three generations of grandchildren, where the primary school is, what the first love is called...., eight people talk about him every day around the table, some time has passed, all the topics about him have not appeared any supernatural phenomenon, Owen In order to be more realistic, they decorated the indoor environment of the laboratory into the style of Philip's era, the electric lights were replaced by candles, the tableware was replaced by wood, and the dress was changed to linen, at this point, the participants began to feel a sense of presence, table vibrations, breezes, unexplained floor sounds, and even they used the way to knock on the table to ask and answer with Philip, but Philip never appeared in front of the participants.
Portrait of Philip Aylsford
The experiment aims to determine whether subjects can communicate with imaginary ghosts through the expectation of human will, for this experiment, the scientific community gave the answer is not to recognize, because the experimental evidence lacks reliability, the main thing is that eight people are from the Séance, an unpopular religious organization, their leader is called "Lingbo", the organization often plays a game similar to the domestic "disc fairy" to try to communicate with the deceased.
5. Electrophotography
Electrophotography, also known as Killian photography, is named after the invention of the technique, Semyon M. Kirlian named after a photographic technique used to capture corona discharge phenomena, he accidentally found in 1939 that if the object on the photographic negative is connected to the high-voltage source, the photographic negative will produce a fantasy image, and the small partner who knows more about photography should be familiar with it, the principle is as follows.
Keyrian Photography Technology Schematic
Approximate process: first place the sheet film on the top of the metal discharge plate, and then place a glass plate, and then place the object to be photographed directly on the glass plate, the high voltage current is applied to the object instantaneously, and the corona discharge phenomenon caused by high voltage between the object and the plate produces exposure, and the film after development produces a Kirian photo of the object.
Leaves under Kirian's photography
Later experimenters (such as Konstantin Korotkov, a professor at St. Petersburg University in Russia), applied this technology to medicine, using the technology to take a series of photos of people who are about to die, and as the time of death progresses, the photos show different colors, and the experimenters believe that this is because after death, with the departure of the soul, the change of the energy field causes different corona discharge phenomena in different time periods.
Leaf phantom experiment
But the rebuttals don't think so, they use leaves as experimental subjects, take a complete leaf the first time, then tear off half of the leaf, and then take a second shot of the leaf, and find a faint image of the leaf tearing off the part in the second photo. However, if contaminants and residual moisture on the imaging surface are removed before the second shot, the missing part of the image will not appear.
The rebuttal argues that the phenomenon of different corona discharges at different times after death is not caused by the so-called departure of the soul, and that changes in oil, sweat, bacteria and other ionizing contaminants on the surface of the object also affect the resulting image.
Ordinary objects under Kirian's photography
At the same time, they use this technology to shoot ordinary objects (such as coins, metal blocks) will also produce corona discharge, does the coin also have a soul?
Sixth, mouse experiments
During the French Revolution in the 18th century, those in power who executed prisoners liked to use the guillotine to behead them, believing that this method caused the prisoners the least pain and the most humane. According to reports at the time, in 1905 a doctor called out the prisoner's name after he was beheaded, only to see him open his eyes; There is also a story that in the French National Assembly, after two sworn enemies were simultaneously sent to the guillotine for beheading, their heads were put into the same bag, and as a result, they bit each other ...
The French most liked to use guillotines to execute prisoners
One of the more detailed accounts of two doctors recounting the immediate examination of a death row inmate on his body after he was beheaded, which they wrote into a paper published in the British Medical Monthly in 1886.
The paper describes it this way:
At the last moment before the execution, the face of the death row prisoner does not change color;
Two seconds after the decapitation, his cheeks were still rosy, his eyes were wide open, his pupils were slightly dilated, his mouth was tightly closed, and his face did not flutter at all;
Four seconds after the decapitation, the fingers touch his eyes or eyelashes and his eyes will close;
Six seconds after the decapitation, continue to touch the eyes, no response;
A minute after the decapitation, the face begins to pale;
Four minutes after the decapitation, the face is completely pale, the upper eyelids are semi-closed, and the mouth begins to loosen;
......
Soulists at the time regarded these cases as ironclad evidence of the existence of the soul.
Back in 2011, to explain the phenomenon, Dutch scientists experimented with mice (rats again, poor mice), picked 17 mice, implanted electrodes into the brains of mice, and then beheaded them while monitoring their EEG activity.
EEG measurements show that their levels of EEG activity begin to decline immediately after being decapitated, dropping to half of what it was before the decapitation after four seconds and disappearing completely after six seconds.
Clinical data shows that when the brain's blood is cut off for about 10 seconds, the brain loses consciousness.
Scientists believe that after a person is beheaded, life can indeed last for about ten seconds (how long it lasts depends on the physical and physical health of the beheaded person, as well as the amount of oxygen content and other compounds in the brain at the moment of beheading), and what causes the brain to die is not the head of the body, but the brain cells can not continue to obtain oxygen molecules and other compound qualities after the blood is cut off, and these ten seconds are just the limit that brain cells can hold on to without obtaining energy.
VII. Francis. Crick's "soul cell" experiment
To explain human consciousness (soul) from a scientific point of view, two scientists must be mentioned, one is the deceased Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine laureate Francis Crick, and his successor, Professor Christopher Koch of the California Institute of Technology.
Contrary to theological belief in the dualism of the soul body, both believe that the generation and control of human consciousness (the soul) arises from a specific cell in the brain, the soul cell, just as the frontal lobe is responsible for emotion and abstract thinking, the parietal lobe is responsible for language, and the occipital lobe is responsible for vision, there is also a region-headed consciousness (soul), which is located in a small area from the back of the cerebral cortex to the leading edge.
Crick's Amazing Hypothesis: A Scientific Study of the Soul
In his 1994 book, The Amazing Hypothesis: A Scientific Study of the Soul, Crick said, "Your happiness and your pain, your memory and your ambitions, your personal identity and the feeling of your free will are nothing more than the group behavior of a large group of nerve cells and their associated molecules." That is, the human soul (consciousness) is the activity of specific nerve cells in the brain.
In order to prove the theory, they did a large number of live experiments, probably divided into scanning method and electrode method.
1. Electroencephalogram (EEG)
electroencephalogram
Electroencephalogram is one of the oldest ways to study brainwaves, and the process is not complicated, that is, the electrodes are directly exposed to the scalp to capture the electrical signals generated by neurons.
But the human cerebral cortex has 100,000 nerve cells per square millimeter, and the entire cerebral cortex has about 100 million nerve cells, an electrode can capture the electrical signals of millions of neurons, which is equivalent to the rich man standing on the roof of a 300-meter-high building to eavesdrop on his wife and Lao Wang at the concert site, although the spatial resolution of the EEG is insufficient, but the time resolution can reach 0.001 seconds, which is very conducive to recording the rise and fall of brain waves.
2. Positron emission X-ray tomography (PET)
The experimenter's brain is injected with a chemical labeled with a radioactive atom (such as oxygen-15), usually water, which emits a positron when decaying, and the labeled chemical enters the bloodstream, and the outside world can obtain the activity state of the local brain through scanning. This method has two advantages, one is that the oxygen -15 decay with a half-life of only 123 seconds is very fast, and the second experiment can be done after ten minutes; Second, the life span of oxygen-15 is very short, and the total dose of radiation received by the experimenter is very small, and the damage suffered is negligible.
3. Microelectrode detection method
Fluorescence visible electrophysiological microelectrodes
After anesthetizing the experimenter (usually an animal), removing part of the skull, and then placing the microelectrode (usually less than 100 microns) in the nerve tissue, moving the microelectrode slowly closer to a cell, and then collecting its signal. Another technique is to obtain a thin slice of the subject's brain tissue directly and perform microelectrodes outside the body for probing.
Some friends will ask, will the microelectrode inserted into the brain tissue subjects will not feel pain? No, because there are no pain receptors in the brain.
4. Trace adjustment instrument
The use of trace regulators to monitor the neurons of the brain found that the anterior cingulate gyrus region of the cerebral cortex is crucial to the generation of consciousness, and this area of the mouse is excised, and the mouse cannot produce trace regulation.
Crick's experimental methods also include computer-aided X-ray tomography (CAT scanning), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), its advantage is that it can produce images with high resolution and contrast, the disadvantage is that the resulting image is static, due to space limitations, today will be introduced one by one, interested partners can understand privately.
In addition to the ones described above, there are many scientific experiments, such as:
Gary Schwartz, Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard University, and five well-known American psychics created "Soul Experiment";
Skohler experiment;
Harry Hodini's secret code experiments;
Paranormal electronic noise phenomenon (EVP);
Australian psychologist Peter Ramst's Reincarnation Experiment...
Let's mention here another very hot experiment - the blind box hanging by the British doctor Sam Parnier, Sam hangs an empty box on top of the emergency table, opens it, puts an item in the box, only from the ceiling to look down to see the items inside, after the experiment, 7 out of 100 near-death experiencers said that when their soul was detached from the body, it floated in mid-air, and saw what was inside the box, so Sam claimed that the soul existed.
After Xiaobian inquiry, the experiment is only described on the domestic website, there is no report on the foreign website, and there is no such experiment in all the records about Sam, so it should be a small editor to deceive traffic.
What is the soul?
Having said all this, back to the question that opened the question, what exactly is the soul?
The "soul" we refer to on a daily basis usually refers to some immortal image or spirit, as an idea or belief, belonging to the cultural and psychological category.
The "physical soul" that can both attach to the human body and detach from the human body after death has not been scientifically proven, at least not yet, because so far the scientific community has not collected any information that can be perceived by humans or instruments from known dead people.
But then again, does what has never been proven really non-existent? Think of infrared ultraviolet rays, didn't exist before science confirmed these rays?
In the process of calculating the gravitational force between celestial bodies, scientists found that the planet's own gravitational pull alone is far from enough to maintain a complete galaxy. In other words, if galaxies and planets were supported only by the gravitational pull of existing masses, the universe would be chaotic. The universe can only appear as it is now because there is other matter.
As Shi Yigong said in "The Nature and Limits of Life", "The mass of matter we know accounts for only 4% of the universe, and the remaining 96% of matter exists in a form that we simply do not know, we call it dark matter and dark energy." ”
Therefore, some scientists believe that the human soul is hidden in the microtubules of brain neurons, such as Dr. Stuart Khamerov of the University of Arizona in the United States and Roger Penrose, a 2020 Nobel Laureate, who believes that consciousness is a part of the universe and exists in a small structural unit in brain cells - microtubule structure, microtubules are extremely small and quantum, when the "microtubules" lose their original quantum state, the soul will leave the nervous system, and then the human body has a near-death experience, referred to as "microtubule quantum target reduction tuning." ”。
When calcium phosphate exists in the form of a cluster of Posner molecules, its quantum entanglement time can be up to 105 seconds!
Other scientists counter that although the microtubules inside nerve cells can form quantum entanglement, the time scale of microtubules is 10^(-20) seconds to 10^(-13) seconds, which is much smaller than the time for human memory and consciousness to form.
Lawrence Klaus, a physicist who was a former scientific adviser to O'Hei, said: "From a physical point of view, the 'microtubule quantum soul' theory is nonsense, maybe I'm too polite."
Looking back at the exploration process of human science, every major discovery is a process of breaking and reorganizing the old world view, and it is also a process of re-understanding of life.
The current scientific consensus is that consciousness (the soul) is the result of the highly developed brain, and scientists mostly agree with Francis Crick's theory of "soul cells" that the human soul (consciousness) is the activity of specific nerve cells in the brain.
Although human beings have created the artificial intelligence robot Alpha Go that can beat the world Go champion, and the artificial intelligence Mid Journey that can win the first prize of the art creation competition, they have no consciousness, the human brain is an extremely complex system composed of more than 86 billion nerve cells and more than 100 trillion nodes, such a huge number, directly the idea of artificial simulation of consciousness sentenced to death, have to admit that we are in the sea of stars in brain science, just started.
Finally, to borrow a phrase from John Hogan, "The last position that science holds is not in the realm of space, but in the conscious (soul) world of mankind."
If this article is reprinted, it must be noted at the end of the article: "From the headline: a scientific perspective on the world."