IDEAS ON SOUL-DETECTOR DESIGN

(First posted 3/12/08 6:34 PM)

IDEAS ON SOUL-DETECTOR DESIGN

by Jeffrey A. Corkern

Y'all wanna know something strange?

People have been arguing back and forth over the existence of souls for centuries. Writing tons of books and pamphlets, slaughtering thousands of trees, spending endless hours wrangling back and forth.

But one little thing NOBODY has ever done.

NOBODY has really, seriously tried to prove the truth of whatever side they're on in a science lab. Nobody has EVER gotten off his lazy rear end, gone into the lab, and actually done some nasty, filthy WORK to prove his point.

Nobody. Pro or con.

Oh, there was that worthless MacDougall experiment, (Duncan MacDougall (doctor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) but that was a lost cause from the word “Go.” Detecting souls by weight loss upon death? Even if MacDougall HAD picked up a weight loss, how does that PROVE the existence of souls?

It's like trying to prove the existence of electrons by putting a metal block on a balance, pulling out an electron, and trying to pick up the weight loss.

Even if you COULD pick up the difference (which you couldn't do, not even with the balances of today), how does that PROVE the existence of electrons?

Worthless.

Perhaps I should say nobody COMPETENT has ever tried to build a soul-detector.

Not even the simplest experiments have been done. Nobody has tried to do even the EASY experiments.

Ergo this post.

This post is a list of random ideas for either designing a soul-detector, or finding a way to design a soul-detector. I list them in case any scientist who is capable of building a soul-detector reads The Nine Point Five Theses and starts wondering how this could actually be accomplished. Some of these experiments are easy. Some are not.

If anybody has any ideas of his own for doing this, PLEASE post them in a comment. (PLEASE, man! I’m getting S-O-O-O tired of having to do ALL the thinking here!) Or post them in your own blog, and put the link in your comment. I’ll put up anything I judge to be credible.

To strictly define the experimental problem: The objective is to kill an experimental animal and detect its soul leaving its body. The problem is how to build an instrument that will do this. NOTHING ELSE. Anything not STRICTLY focused on this will be deleted and ignored.

I’m not saying other things aren’t legitimate. I’m only saying they are NOT the problem I’m trying to solve here.

Update added 2/25/09

There is experimental evidence indicating the presence of a soul in the brain. These scientists have monitored brain behavior and observed behavior that indicates there is a field permeating the brain. Here is the Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness

"This theory accounts for several otherwise puzzling facts, such as the finding that attention and awareness tend to be correlated with the synchronous firing of multiple neurons rather than the firing of individual neurons"

Man, ain't that a HELL of a statement!

On to the list.

THE BATTERY-DRAIN PHENOMENON

Added 12/02/09

The ghost-hunters tell me they have often have this one particular odd problem when they ghost-hunt. Their batteries, in areas of reported paranormal activity, sometimes stop working and then start working again. To be precise, suddenly the voltage on their batteries drops in whatever electronic equipment they're using, then a short time later starts working again as if nothing had happened.

The ghost-hunters have been reporting this as "battery-drain" because when the voltage drops close to zero in the normal operation of a battery it's because it's almost empty. However, the facts on the ground as reported only support the idea the voltage is being lessened. To prove the battery has been drained, it would be necessary to drain the rest of the battery and measure how much energy is left. To my knowledge, no ghost-hunter has ever done this.

This could be the solution to the problem. It would be easy enough to surround a dying animal with batteries and see if an interruption is observed.

The observed phenomena prompts me to speculate as to the detection principle. Batteries are a real-world approximation of the classic one-dimensional barrier problem in quantum mechanics.
The observed phenomena can be explained if ghosts have the power to change the value of h, Planck's constant, to a certain extent. A visit to the Wikipedia page on Planck's constant shows Planck's "constant" is perhaps not quite as constant as it could be.

MAKING A SOUL-DETECTOR FROM NERVES:

There must be some way the soul has of interacting with nervous tissue. Somehow, information has to be transmitted back and forth between the soul and the brain.

So somewhere in nervous tissue there is the equivalent of an antenna. It's GOT to be in there somewhere, man.

So that might be how a soul-detector could be built. Out of nerves. Wire up a network of nerves in the shape of a hollow globe, kill an experimental animal in the middle of it, and see if you get a signal. A coherent field leaving the body.

This is a neat idea because you don't have to know what the actual mechanism of the soul-brain interaction is, which could be something very exotic and weird and therefore hard to find, like the ability to vary the value of h over short distances.

I am told a practical problem with this is it is currently NOT possible to wire up human nerves in this fashion. I am also told it is not currently possible to keep human nerves alive long enough to be functional.

It should be possible to use other kinds of nerves. Some of the earliest research on nerves was on giant-squid nerves. (Squid giant axon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) In an odd fact of nature, giant squids have VERY large nerves that can be wired up.

Of course, that depends on whether or not squids have souls, too. (Sorry, people, but I'm going to have to digress into some real strangeness here for a minute.) If they've got souls, their nerves will have this antenna and might work in this experiment, if they don't have souls, they won't work at all.

Can we answer this question?

Yup. There's something that pops up in the analysis of this subject, over and over and over again.

The source of emotion is the soul---NOT the brain. You get angry, you get happy, you get sad, you get whatever, it started in your soul, man, not your brain.

So this gives us a rock-solid indicator of whether or not a particular species of animal has a soul.

If it displays emotion---IT HAS A SOUL. In particular, if it can love, it has a soul.

(My cat-soul-diving-through-my-chest experience suddenly makes a whole lot more sense. Waddya know, it fits!)

So, if giant squids display emotion, we can try their really HUGE nerves out as a soul-detector.

Worth a shot.

THEORETICAL EXAMINATION OF NERVE CELLS:

This one is for you theoretical physicists out there.

As I stated above, somewhere in nervous tissue is Nature's soul antenna.

Go find it.

Take a nervous system cell, take it apart and throw the things away that are obviously not soul-antennae. Things like the mitochondrion, the DNA strands, the various enzymes, and so forth.

Now poke through what's left and see what could possibly be a soul-antenna. When you find the structure, examination of how it works will tell PRECISELY how a functioning soul-detector can be built.

I suggest you look VERY closely at the structures involved in cell-to-cell communication. One of those things receives information DIRECTLY from the soul, man.

You might compare the nerve-cell structure of organisms that don't exhibit emotional behavior---like ants----with the structure of those that do. One of the differences between the two will be a soul-antenna.

Good luck, and good hunting.

Note added 5/20/08:

Some digging into this subject (not by me) has revealed there are a number of physicists trying to solve "the problem of consciousness" by examining nerve cells. (In fact, the study of consciousness is a deep undercurrent of theoretical physics at the moment. Their work is far more important than they know.)

And they keep talking about these things nerve cells have called "microtubules." Why they've focused on this structure, I don't know, but they have.

Here is a paper that illustrates my point. (Be warned. Unless you're a cross between a cell biologist and a quantum physicist like these guys are, you're not going to be able to understand this.)

http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0505080v1

Now, the "problem of consciousness" is a lot simpler than these people think, but that's not my point here. My point here is to find the soul antenna nerve cells MUST have. This is certainly the most likely candidate at the moment.


Note on "GHOST HUNTERS":(added 6/29/08)

There is this reality-TV show here in the States put on by the Sci-Fi Channel, "GHOST HUNTERS." This bunch of Roto-Rooter plumbers have formed this organization, TAPS, "The Atlantic Paranormal Society", that goes around investigating haunted-house claims. The Sci-Fi Channel records what they do and makes a program out of it.

(Yeah, the most important research in history is being done by Roto-Rooter plumbers. It's a sad commentary on the state of science today, it really is.)

The stated purpose of TAPS is to find evidence of life after death. It's not quite clear what is to be done with this evidence. These guys are just, like, you know, collecting "evidence", man. The truth is out there.

The truly strange thing is they succeed. On a ROUTINE basis.

I've known this show existed but discounted it. I figured it would be a bunch of "believers" who would go into a house waving antennas around and claim every little static burst and stray shadow was a ghost.

But they're not like that. They try to take as scientific attitude as they know how. They're definitely not trained scientists, and it shows, but they do the best they know how. They go in with the goal of debunking the reports (which is the scientifically correct thing to do), and they do a pretty good job, although not a perfect one. I've seen them throw away evidence that was actually perfectly good.

I saw this one episode where they totally blew the lid off for about ten minutes.

They were investigating a haunted house located in the middle of Wright-Patterson Air Force base. There was a short stretch where, for unknown reason, they actually appeared to be communicating with a disembodied soul. They would ask a question, and get one tap for "Yes" and two taps for "No." It was an astonishing thing to hear. I could the taps, which came only after a question was asked, quite clearly. One, two and even three taps you could discount as coincidence, but six, seven, eight? You're stretching the laws of probability all out of shape, man.

Then one of the plumbers blew the lid off.

Communication was going so well one of the plumbers decided to try something he had tried before, without success. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket, held it up and explained how to turn it on. He then asked the ghost to turn it on. He put it on the floor and backed away.

The damned light came on.

Now, man, THAT was insane.

The definitive experiment to prove people have souls would be to communicate with a disembodied soul.

This goal may have ALREADY been accomplished!

I say "may" because, while I don't think these guys are committing fraud, they don't have, in my opinion, sufficient safeguards against it. They don't seem to realize their TV's show's success can create a VERY strong temptation to commit fraud.

This experiment they ran needs to be repeated, and it needs to be repeated with VERY tight safeguards against fraud.

There have actually been a number of incidents close to this. They recorded a ghost pushing a sheet back once, for example. No fuzziness when that happened. This EVP thing the paranormal people are pushing is apparently a genuine phenomenon. They play back what they record. Yeah, you can make out real English words, entire sentences.

Some smart technician out there somewhere really needs to figure out a way to pick up a cleaner EVP signal, either through better equipment or better signal-processing or both.

Just thought I'd mention this to any potential researchers who drop by here. I really can't endorse this because of the lack of proper fraud controls, but just thought I'd mention it.


IR DETECTION:

"Cold spots" are often reported in association with ghosts.

Well, okay, test this. Surround a test animal with the most sensitive IR detectors you can find and see if you can pick up a soul by the temperature drop it causes by absorbing heat from the air.

Worth a shot.

CLOUD-CHAMBERS:

Cloud chambers can pick up teeny-tiny elementary particles and cosmic rays. ( Cloud chamber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Why not try this for souls?

Worth a shot.

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"