Conversations: On existence of soul and those two 'scientific' experiments that prove one!

Waking up to conversations is a great way to start your day provided what the topic is and where it leads. “Do you believe in the concept of soul?” - I was asked by a friend of mine who had just woke up from his sleep. For a moment I thought he was still asleep or in a dream or attempting just plain mischief which we do most of the times. Nevertheless it put me into thoughts; not that I had not thought of this before but have never arrived to any conclusion to state anything on this matter of fact. So I was silent for sometime and was trying to indulge in some buffoonery. “I'm not sure of any side but I do believe there exists something more complex than DNA to which we all attribute life. As far as I can tell science doesn't deny nor agree the existence of soul but do believe that there is something that we all call life; nobody knows what exactly makes us ‘living’ beings, what is that which gives us life.” For instance if we dissect a man into his constituent pieces (say heart, lungs, stomach, liver, brain etc.) making sure that we lose no drop of blood in a sanitized environment devoid of any infection and then join him again, will he be speaking or living like he did before? Let us assume we have such and such technology to stitch him into his exact replica before but will he have life? When we dissect him into those individual pieces he is essentially dead, can we bring him back given we have all his pieces with us? I believe you are with me to believe that we won't be able to recreate him, right? So although we had secured all his parts with us, we missed something in process, there was something that gave him 'life', something (Was it a 'thing'?) that made him human, a living being!

In between an hour long conversation I understood from where this was coming. My dear friend has entered into a verbal battle last night with his office colleagues and was essentially cornered with arguments which have least to do with science. Now I know there are readers who question science every now and then. So before going to the experiments that 'prove' existence of soul, let us revise our knowledge of science, what it stands for and what are the basics to believe or deny anything according to scientific methodologies. Now I promise you this won't be long and that this is absolutely necessary before we speak about those experiments.  

Wiki says, Although scientific procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features are frequently shared in common between them. The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions.  

Courtesy: Wikimedia

The defining experiment people quote time and again to prove existence of the soul is one from 1901 by Duncan MacDougall. 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, at which point the entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale which was reported to be sensitive to "two-tenths of an ounce". He took his results (a varying amount of unaccounted-for mass loss in four 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 loss of mass in the first subject at the moment of death.

MacDougall later measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances and reported the results as "uniformly negative," with no perceived change in mass. He took these results as confirmation that the 'soul' had weight, and that dogs did not have 'souls'. MacDougall's complaints about not being able to find dogs dying of the natural causes that would have been ideal led one author to conjecture that he was in fact killing the experimental animals, as is standard practice in scientific experiments.

Researchers have revealed that MacDougall's experimental results were flawed, due to the limitations of the available equipment at the time, a lack of sufficient control over the experimental conditions, and the small sample size.

According to the psychologist Richard Wiseman:

When MacDougall’s findings were published in the New York Times in 1907 fellow physician Augustus P. Clarke had a field day. Clarke noted that at the time of death there is a sudden rise in body temperature due to the lungs no longer cooling the blood, and the subsequent rise in sweating could easily account for MacDougall’s missing 21 grams. Clarke also pointed out that dogs do not have sweat glands (thus the endless panting) and so it is not surprising that their weight did not undergo a rapid change when they died.

Science writer Karl Kruszelnicki has noted that out of MacDougall's six patients only one had lost weight at the moment of death. Two of the patients were excluded from the results due to "technical difficulties", a patient lost weight but then put the weight back on and two of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death but a few minutes later lost even more weight. MacDougall did not use the six results, just the one that supported his hypothesis. According to Kruszelnicki this was a case of selective reporting as MacDougall had ignored five of the results.

The physicist Robert L. Park has written MacDougall's experiments "are not regarded today as having any scientific merit" and the psychologist Bruce Hood wrote that "because the weight loss was not reliable or replicable, his findings were unscientific."

So this experiment doesn't prove the existence of soul. That doesn't mean it states otherwise either. The experiment just doesn't adhere to scientific methodology. It is more like you want so and so results and you somehow make yourself arrive at it. This my friend, is not scientific way of arriving at things.

Bottom-line of all this is not to prove whether soul exists or not but how we have made ourselves believe things that suit our stand and how we close ourselves to questioning anything otherwise. Science is not some magic potion or wonder machine but methodology, a way of arriving at or explaining things which relies on reason and experiments, repetitive experiments that provide similar proofs and vast test cases. There is another experiment which most quote to prove existence of soul, airtight glass container one where a dying person was kept and when he died the glass broke, and bingo! We came to our 'conclusion' that it was soul that while passing broke the glass! This experiment in all its goodness is vaguely defined, not properly stated how and in what conditions it was performed, sample size, most of the parameters unknown. We do know how a glass window can break if we achieve enough decibels of sound in that closed room, now whose soul did pass from there? There could be many factors that led to the breaking of that glass, to attribute it straightforward to soul is insult to the premise of reasoning and thought on which science stands.  The standard argument now from the other side is how not all things can be explained by science. Well, point taken. But what is science? It is but questioning, stating hypothesis and proving it with vivid test cases and ample sample size. Science is nothing more than what stands to test of the time, to questions that are raised and to people who perform the tests. It is not hearsay, science has nothing to do with who says it or where it was stated. If one can prove it then well he has it!

On final note, soul is a huge concept and hugely loaded without the context you are talking about. Hebrews had five words for soul, Indian philosophers have lot many terms to dissect the psyche or self; so the clarity or precision is all important. For some soul is but consciousness, for some it is mind, for some it is heart. Different religious beliefs have different concepts of soul. Science asks for the definition of it which we still have none. And without that definition, hardly could there be any hypothesis or sample size or tests!

P.S. This ‘conversations’ will continue further on soul and many things we talk about and are interesting enough. The above piece couldn’t have been possible without my friend Signor Arshad who started it with his first question and further insights, and of course Wikipedia!