If the soul exists, is it detectable?

[tonyrey]

What about with the aid of extremely advanced scientific instrumentation?

Instruments only detect quantities - not qualities like delectable love and happiness…

 

[greylorn]

A question with regards to the soul.

If it exists, should it not at least in theory be detectable. My reasoning is as follows.*

As I understand it, in catholic theology (and please correct me if I’m wrong here) - “I” (as in the me who is saying “I”) am a soul which inhabits this body and will after it dies go on to an afterlife? This soul is immaterial and as such cannot in itself be detected. Is this correct?*

Now, “I” as far as I am able to detect control this body and can direct it. The body is physical, so in order for me (the soul) to be in control of it. “I” must be in some way interacting with the physical properties of this body.*

In other words there must be a point at which the “soul” interacts with the physical world and at least in theory that point must be detectable. For example if we developed a sufficiently advanced machine which could simultaneously monitor all brain functions we’d have to find things happening which didn’t have a physical cause.

Thoughts?

Your core argument is correct. You have come tantalizingly close to the deduction that if the soul interacts with the brain, the soul must, by definition, be itself physical. (And obviously, that argument can be extended to include God.)

However, like most people, you mistakenly confuse the words physical and material, which leads to a lot of confusion. The words are not synonyms!

Everything in the universe is physical, but only a small part of it (4.6% is the last formal estimate, I believe) consists of regular matter. And that’s what material means-- made from or composed of matter.

There is a lot of stuff which is part of the physical universe which is not material at all— such as light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation (heat, radio waves, etc.) and immaterial energy forms (gravitational energy, voltage, motion, electric and magnetic fields, etc.).

The core definition of physical includes everything which interacts with things known to be physical. The mother of all sciences, physics, is the study of these things and their many interactions with various physical forms.

Soul detectors have been around for a long time. We call them, human brains. Most are selectively tuned to connect to only a single soul (like a TV set with a broken tuner that can only receive channel 12).

You were clearly wondering about some kind of electronic device capable of detecting the soul. Lots have been attempted, and I am certain that several could be found in the deep secret laboratories of clandestine government agencies. I doubt that they work very well, because the effective development of such a device would require a very good theory about the physical nature of soul.

For example, radio waves were not discovered until about 20 years after the brilliant theoretical physicist James Maxwell wrote a set of four equations which predicted their existence.

The general nature of your proposed machine is too complex to be effective. Monitoring all brain functions is not possible. Any such detector must be localized to a particular subsection of the brain and would need to be tuned in favor of specific energy forms and actions.

For example, your TV set is a perfectly fine EMR (ElectroMagnetic Radiation) detector, but if you’re looking for information within the EM bandwidth allocated to Channel 8 with a TV tuned to Channel 12, you will not find it. Soul detectors must be precisely tuned to the specific energy forms of the entities they are trying to detect.

Compared to the brain, soul is a simple, primitive mechanism which can be more easily detected via interactions outside the brain, where there is less spurious information to be managed, Contrary to the wording in your final sentence, any such experiment must look for something which is physical.

There are, of course, quite a number of experiments which provide an inferential basis for the soul’s existence. My favorites have been around since the sixties. These are not correctly interpreted for lack of a paradigm which integrates a soul concept with physical reality. Moreover, there is some neurological research which indicates that the brain is internally sensitive to wave-based, rather than neuronal-triggered information.

The Church is supposedly science-aware these days. I’ll bet they’ve not funded a single attempt to identify the soul. Alas.

 

[yppop]

For example, radio waves were not discovered until about 20 years after the brilliant theoretical physicist James Maxwell wrote a set of four equations which predicted their existence.

GL,
Not to nitpick too much, but in the interest of accuracy, you might want to include a footnote in your book that elaborates on your statement about Maxwell’s FOUR? equations, which I believe you may include in your book. Here is an entry from Wikipedia about Oliver Heaviside, a guy you probably would admire since he is self educated.

"*Heaviside did much to develop and advocate vector methods and the vector calculus. Maxwell’s formulation of electromagnetism consisted of 20 equations in 20 variables. Heaviside employed the curl and divergence operators of the vector calculus to reformulate 12 of these 20 equations into four equations in four variables (B, E, J, and ρ), the form by which they have been known ever since (see Maxwell’s equations). *

Heaviside doesn’t get much mention in the regular textbooks that I have read.

Yppop.

 

[greylorn]

GL,
Not to nitpick too much, but in the interest of accuracy, you might want to include a footnote in your book that elaborates on your statement about Maxwell’s FOUR? equations, which I believe you may include in your book. Here is an entry from Wikipedia about Oliver Heaviside, a guy you probably would admire since he is self educated.

"*Heaviside did much to develop and advocate vector methods and the vector calculus. Maxwell’s formulation of electromagnetism consisted of 20 equations in 20 variables. Heaviside employed the curl and divergence operators of the vector calculus to reformulate 12 of these 20 equations into four equations in four variables (B, E, J, and ρ), the form by which they have been known ever since (see Maxwell’s equations). *

Heaviside doesn’t get much mention in the regular textbooks that I have read.

Yppop.

YP,
This is excellent and welcome information. I did not know that. I was taught 4 equations, all attributed to J.C. Maxwell, and had never learned of this.

The only odd thing coming my way via physics lore was that Maxwell claimed to have awakened from a dream with his equations in mind, and then set down the mathematics behind them. More interesting was that a physics grad student researching Maxwell’s work in, I’d guess, the sixties, discovered two errors in JC’s derivation. He corrected them and proceeded with the corrected derivation, obtaining the same results.

One professor, in one advanced EE class, was fond of Heaviside and mentioned him in several lectures, so I’ve heard of him, and always in the sense that he was one extremely bright and innovative thinker whose ideas never found their way into the academic mainstream. I never learned why. I wondered about this way back when, but had not recalled O. Heaviside until your reminder.

The first mention of him that I can recall was of something called the Heaviside Theorem. My sense of it is that it had not been proven, but seemed to work. I’ll look that up, now that you’ve piqued my curiosity.

Not even that professor mentioned that O.H. was self-educated, and I definitely appreciate that. (I’d met one other EE/physicist who was self-educated in EE, got his B.S. by simply testing for it. He was trying to reformulate the fundamentals of early 20th century physics when I encountered him, and did at least succeed in showing that the Michelson-Morley experiment could not have detected the aether. I’m wondering if he was a reincarnation of Oliver H.— he certainly had the maverick-personality down. Do you happen to know if OH liked whiskey, women, and good cigars? Wish I’d made this connection before he died.)

Do you have any sources for more information that you would recommend?

So I conclude from this that the 4 equations I learned, which were attributed to Maxwell, were the consequence of Heaviside’s reductions of 12 of Maxwell’s original 20. What happened to the other 8 equations?

I cannot thank you enough for this insight! I’ll check the manuscript (finished Monday morning, 3am) for references and correct them as needed.

 

[GEddie]

What about with the aid of extremely advanced scientific instrumentation?

You can’t build instrumentation without knowing what it is you want to measure. Without any knowledge of what physical traces soul-activity might produce, no device can be made to track it.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Robert_Sock]

There’s no doubt that our bodies can sense electricity, possibly by it’s effect on the various nerve endings in our skin (hairs standing up on the back of neck, etc) and so we can probably learn to sense some radio waves, too, if body functions as an antenna. Consider those who have been able to hear radio signals through teeth fillings.

That still doesn’t have much to do with the soul. The soul is not electrical. If it were, we’d see sparks or coronae around the head whenever somebody died. The soul is nonphysical.

God Bless and ICXC NIKA

The human body sure does act as an antenna, and I’m wondering if we can detect not the soul, but spirit. Can the spirit be some type of wave or particle? I have often wondered about this. Also, can we perhaps sense the soul through a sixth sense, extrasensory perception? Finally, can we begin to sense the soul by killing the inner “self?” I also believe this to be true. The self is defined as “reflective consciousness” and disrupting this process seems to make one more in tune to sensing the spiritual. It’s important to note that the new testament speaks about killing the self in several passages.

 

[Jim_Baur]

If the atom exists, is it detectable?

 

[GEddie]

The human body sure does act as an antenna, and I’m wondering if we can detect not the soul, but spirit. Can the spirit be some type of wave or particle? I have often wondered about this. Also, can we perhaps sense the soul through a sixth sense, extrasensory perception? Finally, can we begin to sense the soul by killing the inner “self?” I also believe this to be true. The self is defined as “reflective consciousness” and disrupting this process seems to make one more in tune to sensing the spiritual. It’s important to note that the new testament speaks about killing the self in several passages.

As far as I can tell, soul and spirit are the same; or at least indistinguishable in the breathing human being.

The existence of ESP is not established, and not everybody has it. As such, we can’t use it scientifically. Science has tried and failed to do so for 200 years.

And whatever the “inner self” is, we cannot tell whether it involves soul, spirit or even subtler functioning of the conscious body.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[Candide_West]

Your core argument is correct. *You have come tantalizingly close to the deduction that if the soul interacts with the brain, the soul must, by definition, be itself physical. *(And obviously, that argument can be extended to include God.) *

I’m not sure how to infer that the soul must be physical. In any case the point here is that even if we assume the soul to be in itself totally undetectable. Then we can still detect it’s effects. So theoretically at least, soul detection should be possible.

*However, like most people, you mistakenly confuse the words physical and material, which leads to a lot of confusion. *The words are not synonyms! *

Ok, whichever words work better. Makes little difference to the point here.

*The general nature of your proposed machine is too complex to be effective. * Monitoring all brain functions is not possible. *Any such detector must be localized to a particular subsection of the brain and would need to be tuned in favor of specific energy forms and actions. *

That’d work too, monitor any one part of the brain and identify a point where there is spontaneous activity. Or more accurately - activity which is not caused by anything which we can detect. If such a thing could be reliably found we could then start trying with different mental states and mapping how the “soul” interacts with the brain.

It’d make great science and would provide some truly hard evidence for something claimed by the religion.

*The Church is supposedly science-aware these days. *I’ll bet they’ve not funded a single attempt to identify the soul. *Alas.

Indeed, this is really the trust of the thread I suppose. The church has spent millions investigating prayer and trying to prove objectively that it works (unsuccessfully to date). Perhaps another valid area of research for them would be to seek to identify the point at which an unknown something (which we can call a soul) appears to interact with the brain. That way we’d have some real evidence for something from the religion and unlike prayer it isn’t subject to God being shy.

 

[Candide_West]

You can’t build instrumentation without knowing what it is you want to measure. *Without any knowledge of what physical traces soul-activity might produce, no device can be made to track it.

Ah but we know at least roughly how the brain works. Otherwise doctors wouldn’t be able to monitor brain activity etc. This thread is just about tracing that activity back to it’s source. If we found that brain activity could be traced repeatably back to sources which appear to be spontaneous then you could argue that you have found soul / body interactions. Seems like a good way of finding solid evidence to me.*

 

[Candide_West]

If the atom exists, is it detectable?

Perhaps you didn’t mean to post this here? In any case, yes atoms are detectable. Indeed we can measure their properties too.

The aim of this thread is to discuss the idea of finding suitable ways to detect the soul (if it exists). Would also be interested if there have been any attempts by the church to achieve such detection.

 

[GEddie]

If the soul is physical, it would be part of the human body; therefore a philosophical contradiction.

Also, if it is physical, it cannot be immortal. True, physical and material are not synonyms. But energy is also subject to entropy. If light strikes a black cloth, it reverts to heat, and loses any visual information it carries.

But if the soul is not physical, there is no way of detecting it using physical senses or instrumentation. Brain scanners are not the answer. Scanning somebody’s head while they lie on an MRI slab does not show how the soul directs the brain and “leads the limbs” while the person lives his or her life.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[davidv]

Ah but we know at least roughly how the brain works. Otherwise doctors wouldn’t be able to monitor brain activity etc. This thread is just about tracing that activity back to it’s source. If we found that brain activity could be traced repeatably back to sources which appear to be spontaneous then you could argue that you have found soul / body interactions. Seems like a good way of finding solid evidence to me.*

So, what instrument would you propose that is able to detect and measure that which is not made up of matter or energy, and does not occupy space? It other words, what instrument is able to detect the spiritual?

 

[Candide_West]

If the soul is physical, it would be part of the human body; therefore a philosophical contradiction.

Also, if it is physical, it cannot be immortal. *True, physical and material are not synonyms. But energy is also subject to entropy. *If light strikes a black cloth, it reverts to heat, and loses any visual information it carries.

Right, that’s why I’ve assumed the soul is non-physical / undetectable etc.

But if the soul is not physical, there is no way of detecting it using physical senses or instrumentation. *Brain scanners are not the answer. *Scanning somebody’s head while they lie on an MRI slab does not show how the soul directs the brain and “leads the limbs” while the person lives his or her life.

Er, yes that’s the point. Assuming we CANNOT detect the soul. We must at least in theory be able to detect the boundary point between the physical and the soul. It will be the point at which the physical causality will end and there will be a spontaneous event.

 

[Candide_West]

So, what instrument would you propose that is able to detect and measure that which is not made up of matter or energy, and does not occupy space? It other words, what instrument is able to detect the spiritual?

Er, perhaps you didn’t read the text you were replying to? The thread is about detecting the point that the “soul” (if it exists) interacts with the brain. The brain is quite distinctly detectable, as is it’s activity. Thus your question is not relevant.

To be clear I have assumed the soul is undetectable.

 

[Jim_Baur]

I did mean to post my question.

I did it poorly.

Has any person on this thread ever saw, tasted, heard, smelled, or felt an atom?

This question is really serious, even if the question is incomplete or wrong.

It is genuine because I want to know.

I have never consciously saw, tasted, heard, smelled or felt an atom.

I have been taught by authority that atoms exist. I believe them.

I have been taught by authority that we have indirect evidence of atoms.

Honestly, I do not know, but have authorities consciously experienced atoms with their bodily senses?

I am not asking for indirect knowledge and then drawing conclusions from that indirect knowledge that an atom exist.

Have they direct experience of an atom?

I am not trying to be rude or sound stupid.

I really do not know.

If I should know, I do not know.

THANKS!!!

 

[shoe]

The soul is not something that people can detect scientifically because science deals only in the physical world of matter and energy, and the reality of the soul is in the realm of the spiritual. Although science is able to observe the effects of the spiritual realm in the physical world, it cannot actually physically observe the spiritual.

 

[tonyrey]

I did mean to post my question.

I did it poorly.

Has any person on this thread ever saw, tasted, heard, smelled, or felt an atom?

This question is really serious, even if the question is incomplete or wrong.

It is genuine because I want to know.

I have never consciously saw, tasted, heard, smelled or felt an atom.

I have been taught by authority that atoms exist. I believe them.

I have been taught by authority that we have indirect evidence of atoms.

Honestly, I do not know, but have authorities consciously experienced atoms with their bodily senses?

I am not asking for indirect knowledge and then drawing conclusions from that indirect knowledge that an atom exist.

Have they direct experience of an atom?

I am not trying to be rude or sound stupid.

I really do not know.

If I should know, I do not know.

THANKS!!!

We **infer **the existence of **everything **from our perceptions except our thoughts, beliefs, intuitions, emotions, desires and decisions from which we infer the existence of God and our souls!

 

[Jim_Baur]

This is from Shoe
“The soul is not something that people can detect scientifically because science deals only in the physical world of matter and energy, and the reality of the soul is in the realm of the spiritual. Although science is able to observe the effects of the spiritual realm in the physical world, it cannot actually physically observe the spiritual.”

Our intellect uses math. Math has no physical properties. Does science believe math exists?

Or, our intellects created logic and math. It has no volume or mass, etc. Do scientist believe math exists?

Or, what is the being of math?

Or, is math immaterial?

 

[Candide_West]

I did mean to post my question.
*
I did it poorly.

That’s ok, I’ll do my best to answer even though this is waaaaaay off topic and I’m not a physicist (although I take a casual interest).
*

*Has any person on this thread ever saw, tasted, heard, smelled, or felt an atom?
*
This question is really serious, even if the question is incomplete or wrong.

Depends what you mean by your question. If you mean can we detect atoms, then yes. Everything you see around you is made of atoms. Everything you hear is movements in atoms in the air, everything you smell and taste are chemical reactions with atoms in the air / food and the atoms in the sensitive on board measuring gear you have on your body, your sense of touch is down to displacement of atoms in your skin. So yes, we do sense atoms with our senses continuously.

If you mean can we look at an individual atom directly, then the answer is no. Atoms are far too small to be seen individually with visible light. Instead we use high speed electrons. Which unfortunately our eyes cannot detect, but fortunately we can make instruments which can.
*

*It is genuine because I want to know.
*
I have never consciously saw, tasted, heard, smelled or felt an atom.

You have. In fact you have seen, tasted, heard smelled and felt billions upon billions of them. You just couldn’t tell they were atoms.
*

*I have been taught by authority that atoms exist. *I believe them.
*
I have been taught by authority that we have indirect evidence of atoms.
*
Honestly, I do not know, but have authorities consciously experienced atoms with their bodily senses?

As described, we experience billions of them per day with our bodily senses. But each individual atom is far, far, far too small to be detected individually.

If it is difficult to think of things only being detectable in large numbers. Maybe a correlation would help - an attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second. We cannot even imagine such a tiny devision of time because it would take much much longer that that for an electron to move across a nerve in your brain.For context, an attosecond is to one second what one second is to about 31 billion years.

So you live through billions upon billions of attoseconds every day. But could you actually identify any one individually? No, nobody could, but we know that seconds pass, and those seconds are made up of milliseconds, those are made up of microseconds… And so on… So we know that the attoseconds happen and I believe we can even measure time on that scale now, although that’s just a vague recollection.
*

*I am not asking for indirect knowledge and then drawing conclusions from that indirect knowledge that an atom exist.

Then I’m afraid as Tonyrey said the only thing you can know to exist is your own mind. Everything else is indirect knowledge.*
*

*I am not trying to be rude or sound stupid.
*
I really do not know.
*
If I should know, I do not know.
*
THANKS!!!

No worries, if you’re interested there’s interesting articles on wikipedia and hundreds of other sources around the Internet about how we detect atoms, how we weigh them, etc etc.*