Can You Come Up With an Experiment to Prove There is a Soul?

[jimmydasaint]

This is why I posted this in Pseudoscience. The vague nature of the subject goes with the territory. However, there are accounts of 'Out of Body' experiences when pilots were subjected to centrifugal forces as training prior to flying fighter jets.

 

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/triggers06.html

 

Nevertheless, I still maintain that there are experiences and anecdotes that science would be hard-pressed to explain and that the OP experiment can still be performed in a rigid scientific environment. The falsification hypothesis is a tough cookie and I have no answer for that one.

 

i-Now, I will check out your interesting Thread although there is a lot of reading involved.

 

Thank you to all those who contributed.

[Moontanman]

Why cannt you measure the change in a person after they die but who are then revived?

 

I'd like to know what you mean by this, I've never heard of a corpse being brought back to life. I would think such a thing would have been in the news at least once.

[Mr Skeptic]

They do it all the time. As the saying goes, "You're not dead until you're warm and dead."

[Moontanman]

They do it all the time. As the saying goes, "You're not dead until you're warm and dead."

 

I think it would more accurate to say you have been brought back from near death, death is final.

[GutZ]

The soul would need a medium to communicate between the material and immaterial. The issue I have with that is at one end, the physical end....the soul would have to be constantly updated...even further has to be instanteously updated (unless is like windows and can update it self later). I don't know any other method besides quantum entanglement that can do that....and if I am correct, there is no daily operations that deal with quantum mechanics with information transfer. Even if there is; you could test for it BUT....I doubt you will find anything though.

[Mr Skeptic]

I think it would more accurate to say you have been brought back from near death, death is final.

 

Ah. Then only people who are dead and rotten and there is no detailed scan of them are dead. But if you define death to be final, why do you wonder that no one has come back from the dead, since by your definition that would be a logical impossibility?

[Sisyphus]

Yeah, defining death is surprisingly arbitrary. I've heard doctors say, "Death is a process, not an event." Certainly people who are clinically dead are revived all the time, and the legal definition of death varies from place to place.

[Glider]

Death is a process. It's not like a light being switched off. Things shut down at different rates, it just usually begins with the heart.

 

'Clinical death' is just a term, usually referring to suspension of respiratory and (or more usually) cardiac activity that, without intervention, will result in everything else shutting down within a few minutes.

 

When a person dies, not all their organs are ready to die at the same time, but when cardiac activity ceases, the other organs will die of ischemia within minutes (different times for different organs). The brain is the important thing to protect as it only has three to four minitues before it begins to suffer irreversible damage as it dies.

 

People who go into cardiac arrest will begin to suffer cerebral ischemia very quickly. They will pass out within seconds (if they were conscious to begin with), but even then, it takes a little while for the brain to die completely. If the circulation is not restored, neurons begin to fire randomly as they begin to die. This has been proposed as the source of the 'bright tunnel of light and seeing dead relatives' near death experiences people sometimes report.

 

if the neural firing during ischemia is random, why do so many people report such similar experiences? Because all humans brains and the relative oxygen demands of respective neurons and nuclei are also remarkably similar. The process of ischemic death in all human brains is the same and is therefore likely to have the same effects.

 

By intervening with CPR, adrenaline (epinephrine) etc. at the point of 'clinical death', the process can be interrupted, sometimes.