Do we have soul?

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In 1901, MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis in an old age home. It was relatively easy to determine when death was only a few hours away, and at this point the entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale which was apparently sensitive to the gram. 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. The determination of the soul weighing 21 grams was based on the average loss of mass in the six patients within moments after death.

MacDougall's results are also brought into question due to the extreme variability in what few human subjects he had. Of the six people used, two were discounted for technical reasons, two lost weight initially which then continued to fall, and one lost weight which was later regained. Only one of the six had a sustained, non-changing loss in weight of approximately 21 grams.

Nonetheless, MacDougall's finding that presumably the human soul weighed 21 grams has become a meme in the public consciousness, mostly due to its claiming the titular thesis in the 2003 film 21 Grams.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...oYGwAw&usg=AFQjCNHkFenv55S8mHWpu6KgjTDFnuZ6vA
 
In the bible, soul = spirit,
something like ghost, which can depart from ur body.
 
Considering that this so-called experiment was done once 112 years ago, it can hardly be called a scientifically valid finding.

If that was an attempt to scientifically prove the existence of a soul then we need to replicate the findings in multiple trials and with statistically significant numbers of test objects. I am also sure that we now have more accurate ways of measuring mass than an industrial scale. I also highly doubt that industrial scales at that time were capable of measuring mass rather than weight with an accuracy that measured in the grams. Seems to me that this was mostly an exercise in wish fulfillment.

If MacDougall's experiment were of any significance or had any truth value, i am sure religious pseudo-science would be all over it and replicating the findings just to prove their point that the supernatural exists.
 
I find it a silly notion that a soul should weigh anything at all.
 
Saint said:
Do we have [a] soul?

Has science proven it?
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Depends on what the word 'soul' means. (Isn't that annoying? It's how philosophers typically address questions.)

In the ancient world people understood 'soul' (or rather the equivalent words in their languages) to mean something like 'animating principle', whatever it is that gives life to living things. They didn't always agree on what that was.

Aristotle argued that the soul was simply the form of the body, in other words how the body behaves, and not something that can exist separate from the body. Modern physiology and molecular biology have expanded on that idea tremendously, and have gone a long way towards describing and explaining how life operates in the Aristotelian functional sense.

But most of the ancients imagined that the soul, the life-principle, was some kind of additional substance, a supernatural or even divine stuff whose presence animated flesh and made it sentient and alive.

It was often identified with the breath. What animated life was the presence of a vitalistic gas of some kind, something that could be breathed into material bodies to animate them and that those bodies breathed out again at death. That's why ghosts are traditionally pictured as spirits or vapors. We even see alchemists using crude chemical distillation apparatus in hopes of isolating these animating spirits.

Some of the Platonists, the patristic and medieval Christian theologians, and Descartes and much of modern philosophy that subsequently followed, have imagined 'soul' as some kind of immaterial stuff. Soul substance was a separate realm of substance distinct from and contrasted with physical substance. These kind of thinkers were more inclined to identify soul with mind, with the principle of human subjectivity, than merely with whatever made living bodies move. They imagined soul as only temporarily associated with material (in Descartes' view clockwork) bodies and fully capable of existing perhaps forever in its natural state, independent of matter.

The latter-day stages of these disagreements are still being fought out as we speak in the contemporary philosophy of mind, between those who seek to understand the mind in physicalistic functional terms, and those who argue that mind, consciousness and qualitative awareness ('qualia') can never be reduced to physicalistic terms and must therefore be a separate realm of being.
 
Syne said:
I find it a silly notion that a soul should weigh anything at all.
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Of course it's a silly notion, but there are apparently quite a few people out there who want to pretend that it is scientifically possible to prove that their concept of a divine actually exists. ANd so they come up with pseud-experiments that are created to make it look as if there is any validity to their claim. Let them play, the sand box is big enough.
 
Jan Ardena said:
You are the soul (''I am'').
It is the mind and body that ''does''.

jan.
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Perhaps in the same way that "pig" is the animal and "pork" is the meat.
I.e. it seems you are just using different names for the same thing but in different context.
And not describing any actual difference.

What do you see as the difference between "soul" and the "mind/body", other than the context in which the terms are used?
 
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