November 23, 2010 • 32 mins
Humans have believed in the soul for millennia, and the evolution of science hasn't stopped the search for ghosts and the soul. In fact, modern scientists still search for proof of life after death. Tune in to learn more about the latest research.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Robert Lamb.
I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, tell me about the time you
met a ghost hunter. All right, if I must. It's
(00:24):
a painful memory, but I will tell you. This is
a ghost hunter you hired. No no, no, no, no
no no, no hiring of ghost hunters yet. But it
was someone that I interviewed for a weekly newspaper that
I worked for. And it was around Halloween, so we're
getting in on the Halloween action. And this is a
fairly well known ghost hunter who I shall not name.
(00:48):
And it was a sort of a It was an
interesting experience because I was just talking to him about
his methodology and in the middle of the interview he
just started laughing and kind of tossing his head around,
looking up in the ether. And I said, is there
something wrong? And he said, oh no, he said, I
just have this one ghost that kind of hangs out
(01:08):
with me. And you know, he he was just passing
some gas. Yeah, So I said, okay, And of course,
you know what this is doing. Inside of my head,
I'm sting, thinking, oh my god, any credibility is just
sort of flown out the window. I'm sorry, but I
just don't know why ghosts would come here from the
other dimension and then tell us that they were passing gas. Wells, yeah,
(01:29):
it sounds like he. I mean that conversation took like
two successive dives, like like the second that your your
interview suddenly involves a third person from the spirit realm,
and then when when it's revealed that that that said
spirit has some sort of a a gas problem as well,
then yeah, a flatulent disposition. Yeah, yeah, it was. It
(01:50):
was problem, but it got worse. I then asked about
the spirit, of course, and I said, can you describe
the spirit and he said, well, he's he's a bit
of a prankster. He's like just Jack from Will and Grace,
you know number two I guess another red flag. And
then he went on to try to say that there
was a spirit around me and she was really sad,
and he guessed about seven eight different names that didn't
correlate with any of my UM ancestors. So I have
(02:16):
to say it was. It was disappointing. It was any
kind of insulting because he's like, check out my my
ghost is awesome, he's funny and all you just you
got some sad ghost hanging around to I know, he
kept making a point that she held at a maternal sadness,
and I was like, well, what does that mean? I
don't understand that, But I thought it was interesting just
in the context of there was a small part of
(02:38):
me that was like, you know, hey, what if this
guy really did have an in line with a ghost?
How cool would that be? You know? And it could?
You know. Part of me was like, yeah, please tell
me something. Let this farting goes piece, you know, give
me some sort of information that's useful other than you
know that he's gassy. Um so. But I mean I
(02:59):
did think to my self, we all sort of yearned
for this, for some sort of explanation about what happens
to us after we die, and we I don't think
we can never quite divorce ourselves from this notion that
once we cease to exist as a living human, human
breathing thing, that you know, we don't somehow come out
(03:21):
in some other form. I mean, I think that we
have this wish fulfillment, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah,
at least I do. I shouldn't say that everybody does,
but it's it's definitely ingrained in our culture. Yeah. I
mean I remember, like, even like at a young age,
like there being a point where where, you know, I
was thinking, it's like, wow, what would it be like
if it's just like you know, when you when you die.
It's just that's there's nothing like what would nothing be like?
(03:42):
You know, And that's just that whole sort of mind
blowing area of trying to you know, to to realize,
you know, what that would be like. And then you
sort of grow bored with that, and you kind of think, well,
what would it be like if I, you know, became
a butterfly in the next life, you know, And that's
that's a little more exciting. So I choose to sort
of I kind of choose to to to throw all
my belief at areas that a little more interesting like that,
I guess. But yeah, yeah, because otherwise we there's nothing
(04:05):
right zip zero for and we don't have a context
for zero. So um, but that has not stopped scientists
throwing their minds at it. No, No, of course, it's
the human problem, right, And we're all sitting here saying
we've been we're here where you've been created. We're in
a universe that's been created or came into existence, is
probably the better way to say that. So what is
(04:28):
it all for nothing? Tell us science? Well, first, let's
back up a little bit and talk about some sort
of early scientific ramblings, if you will, having to do
with just the connection between But it basically comes down to,
like this spark that is who we are, like, does
it have any connection to anything outside ourselves? Right? That's
what a lot of it is. Because when you when
(04:49):
you're talking about a ghost, you're talking about a a
me that exists outside my body, that exists after my
body is gone. That there's something in my body, maybe
in permanent, but there's something permanent about me, right right,
your consciousness, I suppose. Yeah. So a lot of these uh,
a lot of the like scientific inquiries even have sort
(05:11):
of like you know, um, you know, poked at reality
a little to see if they can find those the
connecting threads, you know. Yeah. In fact, there's something called
the law of contagion, which is sort of magical thinking
that things that have once been in contact with each
other will continue to act on each other at a
distance even after physical contact has been severed. And this
(05:33):
is really um, this is what I was saying. It's
ingrained in our culture. I mean all sorts of um
cultures primitive and are our modern uh one. Now, if
you think about it, we all sit there and we
have these these thoughts connected to someone, whether or not
they're alive or dead, and this idea that we're all connected. Um.
(05:56):
Of course this is magical thinking. So bear with me.
I mean this and and more primitive culture might translate
to I have roberts tonil cuttings, and so I'm gonna
put it in a magical spell and use it against
them because I have something of his. Yeah, it's sympathetic
magic like some of the oldest, Like it's the whole thing,
Like I just cut my hair. I better hide this
(06:17):
stuff because of a sorcerer gets ahold of it. You know,
I'm totally boned. Yeah, I'm toastman. And so then there's
this this other idea that UM, that this person, this
connection could exist well beyond us, even in death. UM.
And so that law of contagion really helps us to
understand I think, why we have these notions of what
(06:40):
happens after death, and why we even have the burial
rituals that we have with our dead. Now. I mean,
you'd like to think that we bury people because you know,
we want to be nice and we'd like to remember them.
But some people would say that we do it because
we've got the connection to them, and if we just
were to throw them over a boat or throw them
in a ditch, they might come after us. Yeah, I
(07:01):
mean you see this, uh, this law of contagion in
like like you know, different like heirlooms that are tied
to you know, the people that are still living there
dear you know, or people that have died. You see
it in the whole you know, the whole phrase like oh,
I'll never wash this hand again. You know that. You know,
it's like you've had a physical connection with say, you know,
(07:21):
some minor celebrity that you ran into it a bus stop.
I don't know how the celebrity will be taking the bush,
maybe the airport, Uh, you know, at the airport, You're like,
I'll never washed his hand again, because there's like the
society that there's a connection has been established, you know,
and uh, and and therefore the the object of that
connection must be maintained and honored so that that that
(07:41):
connection can still be there, right yeah, and the and
the best in the best world that connection with via talisman,
and the worst of worlds that would be uh, you know,
some sort of stink eye against you, right, I guess
going back to the Toni and clippings. So this is
definitely ingrained in us um and whether or not we
realize that we all have been sort of operating, at
(08:01):
least in the Western world under this context. And so
if you look back at what we used to think scientifically,
you can see how when spiritualism came up in the
nineteen hundreds, people got really excited about that because they thought, oh, ectoplasm,
there's all there's all sorts of things that are representative
of from the beyond um, and this ectoplasm is gonna,
(08:23):
you know, prove it. And here's this medium and we're
all going to raise a table. Yeah. And she's totally
not just pulling out like damp cloths and one yeah.
Yeah is that from spook? Yeah yeah, Mary roach Yeah
gets into it a lot. Yeah, in some detail that
you would make you shut her a little bit. Some
(08:43):
of the antics that they pull. We'll leave it to
you your imagination. But so you can see science trying
to trying to grapple with this question. And in fact,
she even covers someone named Duncan McDougall, McDougal, excuse me,
his twenty one Grahams theory, Yeah, which is, here's this guy.
He's trying to substantiate the existence of a material soul
by weighing a corpse just after it ceases to live.
(09:08):
And um, you know he does it. He I think
he does like maybe eight corpses or something. Yeah, and
it's like each one it's like this was hardly like pristine,
like you know, control environment. There's like nobody makes corpse
weighing scales for for this purpose. First that's the first problem.
And uh and it's like it was in a barn
(09:30):
or something, right, I mean it was yeah, yeah, And um,
and I think that the time of death wasn't always accurate,
so someone might have expired and then oops, yeah it
was ten minutes too late. Yeah, it's not like he
like weighed eight corpses and each one they were like,
you know, definite measurements of twenty one right, right, So
(09:51):
maybe one of those I think in marriages research that
maybe one of those wings was sort of meeting the
criteria of sort of but he's getting this and it
was like, hey, this what this body now always twenty
one grams less and the soul is gone. So therefore
the soul weighs twenty one grahams and just flew out
(10:11):
the window. That's right. And here we have evidence of
the soul. So you can see science and yesteryear reaching
for against some sort of idea that there's this existence,
there's this law of contagion extending itself beyond the realm
that we know. So what do we know for sure? Though? Well,
(10:32):
one thing we know for sure is the I mean
as much as we know anything for sure. But the
first law of thermodynamics, and that's the energy can neither
be created or destroyed. And and uh and and this
is another thing that Mary Rock goes into a little
bit in the book, and that's that if energy, energy
can can neither be created nor destroyed, well you can
(10:53):
if you really get some fine measurements, you can measure
the the energy of consciousness of thought. You know, Um,
and where does it go? Is it? Can it just
turn off? Or does it go somewhere? Yeah, that's the
fact that we that matter still how it contains energy, right,
(11:14):
energies matter, and I mean that just doesn't change after
you die as far as we know, right, we can't
necessarily track it. We don't know where it goes, and
that becomes the grand problem or the mysterium tremendum. Yeah,
and unlike the people are looking at this, they're not
all saying like, oh, this definitely means that this tiny
little this tiny little bit of energy that was human
(11:34):
consciousness or or just the thoughts rambling around in the
you know, the in the the head meat up there
that it you know, shot up to heaven or we know,
went to the next life or jumped into a mouse
that was hanging out in the hallway. You know, it
might just be you know, diffusing into the you know,
the surrounding area or something of that nature. But still
it's interesting to think, uh, you know about it applying
(11:56):
the law of thermodynamics, the first law thermodynamics um to
you know, thoughts, and think, well that it can't end.
It has to go somewhere. That energy goes somewhere, you know.
So even if it's not a you know, a survival
of me or a survival of my thoughts, it's kind
of interesting to think of like the survival of that
energy in the same way that like the body that
you leave behind. I mean that if that is energy,
(12:19):
and you know, if it's planted in a garden, that
energy is going to transfer onto other organisms, right. Or
if you happen to leave your body to science and
you end up in a body farm right rotting away
for for for for data, um, then yeah, then you're well,
I guess it's the same thing. You're still going to
(12:40):
have matter transferred over to a little shred of grass
or to another cadaver. Yeah. Yeah, Which it's kind of
actually a lovely thing when you think about, or at
least in my mind, is that you're dispersing your manner. Yeah,
I mean it's it's I like to think like when
I go to the grocery store. I like to think
of it, um, especially them being really like judgmental about
what other people are putting into their shopping I like
(13:00):
that I do that, Yeah, but I also try and
be judgmental about what what we're putting in our shopping cart.
And I think of I tend to think that like
I am going to build a new body out of
the things I buy at the store today. So I
want to build things that are not disgusting. You know.
It's like like, oh, I'm going to build a new
body out of some you know, some nice vegetables and
(13:21):
not cheetos and not cheetos and tombstone pizzas, you know,
tombstone Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of like I've built
my body out of these things this, out of these
you know, stored energy items, and now I'm done with
the body. So the body is going to become energy again.
So it's you know, it's kind of you know, you're
just borrowing everything, wow, from body farms to tombstone pizza. Yeah. Yeah,
(13:45):
all right. So I think that when you think of
it this way, then you you understand matter that it's
not just a static thing. Right, So we obviously we
have no idea where it goes what it does when
you die, but plausibly it could disperse itself um and
then you have the problem of quantum physics, or you
(14:05):
could some would say you could have the solution with
quantum physics and multiverse. So with quantum physics, there's a
non nonlinear dimension of life, assuming that some of the
tenets of quantum physics are applicable and correct. Namely, the
observations can't be predicted absolutely. Okay, Okay, so I there's
(14:26):
the road number two. So what we're saying is that
there may be a range of possible observations with different
probability in an infinite number of universes where time and
events aren't behaving in the way that we experience them
or the way that we expect them to behave, which
is that another big question mark? Yeah, Well, that that's
the thing I think a lot of people begin to
(14:47):
sort of shut off when you when when when quantum
physics come up, and especially when like the idea of
of multiple universes come up, because it's you can almost
explain anything with quantum physics if you really want to,
and and it's actually it takes off a lot of
scientists out there too. We were both looking at sources
from this guy, John Horgan, and he discounted a lot
(15:12):
of some of the things we're talking about. When when
quantum is getting get involved as a quote scientific theology,
which it's kind of like we talked about in the
Tropic Principle Um podcast, is that is that you kind
of end up building some of the same like trying
to answer unanswerable things, except instead of throwing like folk
(15:33):
tale at it, and uh, you know, in in in
religion or or even you know, necessary or even philosophy,
you're you're throwing like scientific ideas and trying to build
something that can't really be proven. Man. And I guess
the problem with quantum physics is because h is that
it's sort of used as a placeholder sometimes. She said,
(15:53):
So it's like, well, okay, you'd have to have this condition,
this condition, this condition, and then the gel of all
this is is quantum physics. So which and I'm that's
not to say that you can't prove out some things
in quantum physics. You can obviously. Well, well, one interesting
thing is the idea of quantum entanglement, and that has
actually been observed. University of Geneva and Switzerland did that
(16:16):
earlier this year, I believe, at least the published earlier
this year. Okay, is this what Einstein called spooky matter
at a distance? Uh? Yeah, I believe. So, Like basically
it comes down to um. You have photons, tiny, you know,
little little particles, photons whose quantum properties are so intimdently
linked that one always knows what the other knows what
(16:37):
the other one is doing. They don't actually they're not conscious.
But but the idea is that when one one photons
quantum state is measured, the other photon changes. So it's
kind of an interesting you know, it kind of lines
up with a whole law of contation we're talking about,
all right, shape shifting. Yeah, And so that's an example
(16:57):
of something where they can say, hey, we've actually have
served this um you know, we we can you can
actually observe it with the human eye under correct um
you know conditions, right, But but not everything. There's a
whole lot of other stuff in quantum physics, especially if
you use quantum physics to build some sort of out
their theories. That is, it's a lot harder to to
build a case for Okay. So that's what we're saying
is that, yes, there are some ways that you can
(17:18):
apply it, but wholesale and not necessarily. But it's an
intriguing question, right because we just don't know the answers
to this. So that brings me to, okay, that the
whole thing about having a parallel universe that makes me
think about near death experiences and this sort of m
duplicity of self or not even duplicity, but this idea
(17:42):
of yourself being outside of yourself. Right, And if for
anybody who ever watched Unsolved Mysteries as a as a child, um,
this is like you know, the basic thing where it's
like the persons on the operating table or they're in
the emergency room and they have that sensation where they're
they're they're rising up from the table and then they're
looking down at themselves on the operating table. Do they
(18:02):
also see the tunnel and the light and yes, people
start coming to get them from from the afterlife. Yeah.
That maybe the same episode or multiple I don't know.
It's like Unsolved Mystery started out being about like crimes
and then like later it was just all like aliens
and and lost time and other world experiences. Scared me
a lot as a child. It definitely shaped you. Yes,
(18:27):
hence the preoccupation with our topic today. Yes, so what
I thought was interesting and this is uh. This is
from a article by Josh Clark about has science explained
life after death? He talks about r m intrusion rem intrusion,
which um is this conclusion that there is a disorder
(18:51):
in which a person's mind can wake up before the
body does, and hallucinations occur during that time, including the
feeling like you're detached from your body. And so the
thought is that these intrusions are triggered by traumatic events
like cardiac arrest, and it occurs in the brainstem, where
this intrusion can still occur even though your higher brain
may be occupied or may even be shutting down. And
(19:15):
so I think this is interesting is that it came
out of a study from the University of Kentucky and
they're basically saying, here, we've got it. We've got a
solution to this whole near death experience. It may not
just be you, you know, traveling outside of your body
astually because you know you've experienced or you you are
about to experience death. So you know, we we can
(19:37):
kind of poke holes in that this presentation is brought
to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow, and we know
it's so important to scientists that they're actually uh conducting
even more studies and something that just came out in
(19:59):
the Street Journal or pretty recently did oh this is
the one with the pictures, right, yeah, yeah, So you
know about this. Tell me a little bit more. Well,
the idea is basically, like I said, as we've all
seen unsolved mysteries the Purse or any number of paranormal
um you know, documentary type shows. The ideas of the
person is raising up off the table and they're seeing
themselves from above. So what if you were to you know,
put a little picture, a little photograph, or or it's
(20:22):
like even you could even do it with like a
like a playing card, like is this your card, sir?
You know, lay it next to the person's head, and
then after they've had the the out of body experience,
say what card did you see next to your head
laying on the table. And if they're like, what are
you talking about? I didn't see a card, then you
would know that nothing happened, or if they couldn't guess
the correct card. Okay, So these are researchers who have
(20:45):
suspended pictures face up from the ceiling in in emergency
care areas to test whether or not patients who are
brought back to life after cardiac arrest are able to
see these pictures or these photos which okay, so which
automatically I start to think, like what sort of pictures
are they even using, like you said, it could be
(21:07):
a playing card. I mean, the dark side of me
wants to think that there are pictures of clowns just
to scare them. I was picturing horses for some reason, horses,
but maybe like kind of like like you know, snarling horses.
Certain they don't really snarl, but you know where there
was dripping, Yeah, where their lips pull back and they're
all like teeth for horsemen of the apocalypse ish yeah, okay, alright,
(21:30):
so we both have like these really snugly ideas of
what the researchers should put in, what it needs to
be memorable, Like you don't want it to be like
there's a picture of some kid. I guess I thought
one of the surgeons just takes that out when he's
working to inspire it. Well, see, that's why I thought
the clowns would be really funny, because if you're having
out of body experiencing, you indeed can't see the photos.
Oh my god, it's the clowns. Yeah, yeah, you know,
(21:51):
which actually that's it's kind of awful. It's sort of mean, Well,
unless they really love clowns, and it would be like
what am I? I should go back to my body.
They are clowns in this life where I'm going there,
there may be no clowns, or there may be lots
of clowns. It depends on your your definitions of the
afterlife goodness the clown I have to say, that's it's
not my it's not my idea of a perfect afterlife.
(22:13):
I think, isn't it one of the afterlives in Buddhism,
Like there's a clowns. Yes, yes, yes, you you reach
clown status. I think. Yeah. But uh, what I think
is really cool about the study is that we should
find out what they've learned round March April or so.
(22:35):
That should be publishing, So should be fascinating. Okay, So
Susan Blackmore's who makes it her job to study this stuff.
She basically has said that she thinks that near death
experience is a particularly dramatic consequence of our cognitive tendency
to construct models of ourselves as though observed from the outside. Okay,
(22:56):
so this is like I'm standing at the train station
waiting on the train and I can't help but imagine
what other people are seeing exactly. Yeah, Okay, so it's
not just me that right, no, no, no, right, like
you have that you know in your database, you've you've
got all these images built up, so you can obviously
imagine yourself, um looking at yourself and that's that. This
(23:20):
is just really the consequence of that, so that near
death experience isn't necessarily something that people are actually experiencing.
And to boot, there's something called ketamine, which is a
drug that can induce the same sort of sensations that
you get. So another piece of evidence to sit there
and say, Okay, a near death experience really interesting, but
(23:42):
it may not be what we think it is in
terms of linking uh, the afterlife to our own experiences
here in north because they can they can produce similar
effects with a drug artificially. Yeah, exactly right, So which
begs the question can our consciousness ext this apart from
the brain? Yeah? This is uh, this is one that
(24:04):
I that gets a lot of play just you know
throughout like science fiction and fantasy. I think like the
idea of digitized consciousness, as you know, comes up a lot,
the idea that that I can like maybe make a
like a digital copy of my brain and it could
it exists somewhere and think but it's it gets really
complicated when you when you start wondering about that. For starters,
(24:27):
we're not really sure. We're have a really hard time
to finding consciousness anyway. So the idea of like can
we replicate something that we don't even we don't even
really know what it is, it's it gets kind of difficult,
Like I do you have to like create a machine
that has all these pieces and then fools itself into
thinking that it has free will, and then just you know,
(24:48):
it's just it gets really really muddy, really fast. Yeah,
And I can't think about it um from any perspective
other than the biological structures. So you've got your your
nerve of cells, and you've got your firing of neurons,
and you've got your synaptic nectivity. So I can't imagine
that in some sort of disembodied state, right, and then
(25:10):
our our heads too, I mean, and it's it's it's
easy to, in a very idealistic way, say say I
want you know, I want me, you know, my mind
to you know, exist in a machine somewhere, But then
you start thinking like all the different, weird and often
unpleasant things that make our mind what it is. And again,
how they're all tied to biology and uh and and
(25:30):
and like the whole like sort of like you're throwing
the ego in there too, and you have all these
sort of these weird forces kind of pulling at each other,
and it's like, why would you even want to replicate that?
Why not build something better? You know? Yeah? I agree,
And and you say the ego, and it makes me
think about Buddhism and and and all comes razor um
and Buddhism just says, well, self is an illusion, so
(25:53):
why do you think it could replicate itself outside of
self essentially? Or I'm saying that actually Buddhists and saying that,
And I think a lot of times what we think
of another idea that you encounter in and I think
some in Buddhism, but also a lot of like New
Age kind of stuff where people talk about like what
we think of as self isn't really self. It's like
(26:14):
there's us, and then there's this kind of like fake
you that you kind of create that's kind of mashed
together out of ego and everything. It's kind of lumped
in there as well. So and again you're kind of
so you're kind of like lying to yourself constantly about
who you are and like marching around this little ego
puppet in your head. Yeah, and if you apply the
Marxist theory to that, then you're just a product that's
(26:38):
been signified. I know it's not even you didn't really
who cares about your consciousness? Go make us something? But
that doesn't mean that that people haven't tried to actually
look into our consciousness existing outside of our brain. You've
got something called ORC theory, which is orchestrated objective reduction.
(26:58):
So it's O r C A yes, or I guess
you could say ORCH like work too. But you've got
sir Roger Penrose and Stuart hammer Off and they're basically
saying that consciousness is a sequence of quantum computations inside
brain neurons, and the idea is that each neuron isn't
(27:20):
just flipping a switch, but actually a complex computer of
its own. I'm not going to pretend to be uninterestand
I mean, my brain is hanging on a thread with
this one. But I did find this really cool website
called edge dot org and it's basically a bunch of
missive missives between scientists theorists, and they're all batting about
(27:40):
their own ideas and they're taking heat and they're giving
it back. And I dig that so um with Stuart
hammer offf he actually posted something as a rebuttal to
Lee Smullen and Stuart Kaufman and he about ORC. He
has said, the two main points I want to make
is the flow of time is a future feature of
cons aousness, and outside of consciousness, there may not be
(28:02):
a flow of time. Okay, consciousness provides the clock, alright, Okay,
so that's that's interesting. And then the second thing is
that the or OR model suggests consciousness is a sequence
of self organizing rearrangements of space time geometry at the
level of quantum spin networks. Well, that makes perfect sense.
(28:24):
That's what I was thinking. I was just thinking that
the other day. You know. No, but that's that's uh yeah,
that's really complicated. Yeah yeah. So I just put that
out there because people are thinking about this and they're
writing down their thoughts about it, about the quantum spin networks.
And that made me go to Freeman Dyson, who is
(28:45):
a physicist and he was contributed to all different fields.
Oh yeah, he seems to have had his hands and
just about everything I mean from you from dreaming up
things like the Dyson's sphere to to you know, his
involvement with the with Theryan project. If the list goes on,
he's amazing, amazing guy. Yeah, and he's really an optimist
because he feels like the Earth first of all, I
(29:08):
should say, rather the universe is going to be expanding
at a pretty steady rate. So he's not someone who
thinks that, you know, it's all going to end very soon.
That's that's the first deal with him. So he likes
to imagine us as um as beings who can adjust
to that and who can actually start to conserve energy.
And in an article and with Slate he was actually asked,
(29:31):
you know, what could our descendants possibly look like a
trillion years from now, when the stars have disappeared and
the universe is dark and freezing and so diffuse, that
is practically empty. And ever the optimist, he finds like
a like a bright way of looking at this, at
our existence in this universe of death. Yes, yes, he says,
the most plausible answer is that conscious life will take
(29:54):
the form of interstellar dust clouds. So for him, consciousness
is just a bunch of charged particles hanging out in
a dust cloud, and he actually thinks that there's that
our consciousness is will merge into one great mind and
actually be able to transcend this locality of where we
are now. That's interesting. That kind of flows back into
(30:15):
some of the anthropic principle theories that were being thrown around,
you know, about the the idea that once once consciousness
comes into being, it can't really be stopped and will
eventually become like Godlike, Oh, that's right. Is that the
final Anthropic's final anthropic? Yeah? Yeah, And that's that was
one that always kind of through me because I was thinking, well,
was the matrix? What are you talking about? Is this
(30:36):
our intelligence is being construed as a computer program. But
basically he's thinking that will become these organisms that are
free floating and and just hanging out as clouds. Which
but that that would be a situation where you would
have consciousness existing without a physical body in a way,
(30:57):
kind of a ghost. I guess if you want to
go there, ghost clouds, ghost clouds. Yeah, I like it,
um chilling years from now check it out? Yeah, so
can can has science explained life after death? No? Not really? Sorry,
If you were looking for a definite answer on that,
then we're not gonna be able to deliver it at
this time. But if you're interested about whether or not
(31:20):
scientists has uh debunked some myths about ghosts, all the
information is available. So if you know about e v
P the voice recordings, yeah, voices and all that. Yeah,
Jonathan and Chris a tech stuff did a really cool
podcast on ghostbusting technology. Yeah, and they go into all
of this. So that's that's definitely worth checking out. Yeh ectoplasm,
(31:42):
ray guns or and such. And of course be sure
to check out Jeff Clark's article Has Science Explained Life
After Death? Which you know, just a two pager, but
Josh covers a some of the ground that we we
cover in this and does it in a nice concise manner.
To find Josh in articles. Yes, I think that's a
wrap for science in the Afterlife? All right, check us
(32:03):
out next week. And if you haven't already read Josh
Clark's article Has Science Explained Life after Death? Or? Do
parallel universes really exist? Why don't you take a look
see at them at how stuff works dot com. The
how stuff Works dot Com I phone app is coming soon.
Get access to our content in a new way. Articles, videos,
(32:26):
and more all on the go. Check out the latest
podcast and blog post, and see what we're saying on
Facebook and Twitter. Coming soon to iTunes,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Robert Lamb.
I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, tell me about the time you
met a ghost hunter. All right, if I must. It's
(00:24):
a painful memory, but I will tell you. This is
a ghost hunter you hired. No no, no, no, no
no no, no hiring of ghost hunters yet. But it
was someone that I interviewed for a weekly newspaper that
I worked for. And it was around Halloween, so we're
getting in on the Halloween action. And this is a
fairly well known ghost hunter who I shall not name.
(00:48):
And it was a sort of a It was an
interesting experience because I was just talking to him about
his methodology and in the middle of the interview he
just started laughing and kind of tossing his head around,
looking up in the ether. And I said, is there
something wrong? And he said, oh no, he said, I
just have this one ghost that kind of hangs out
(01:08):
with me. And you know, he he was just passing
some gas. Yeah, So I said, okay, And of course,
you know what this is doing. Inside of my head,
I'm sting, thinking, oh my god, any credibility is just
sort of flown out the window. I'm sorry, but I
just don't know why ghosts would come here from the
other dimension and then tell us that they were passing gas. Wells, yeah,
(01:29):
it sounds like he. I mean that conversation took like
two successive dives, like like the second that your your
interview suddenly involves a third person from the spirit realm,
and then when when it's revealed that that that said
spirit has some sort of a a gas problem as well,
then yeah, a flatulent disposition. Yeah, yeah, it was. It
(01:50):
was problem, but it got worse. I then asked about
the spirit, of course, and I said, can you describe
the spirit and he said, well, he's he's a bit
of a prankster. He's like just Jack from Will and Grace,
you know number two I guess another red flag. And
then he went on to try to say that there
was a spirit around me and she was really sad,
and he guessed about seven eight different names that didn't
correlate with any of my UM ancestors. So I have
(02:16):
to say it was. It was disappointing. It was any
kind of insulting because he's like, check out my my
ghost is awesome, he's funny and all you just you
got some sad ghost hanging around to I know, he
kept making a point that she held at a maternal sadness,
and I was like, well, what does that mean? I
don't understand that, But I thought it was interesting just
in the context of there was a small part of
(02:38):
me that was like, you know, hey, what if this
guy really did have an in line with a ghost?
How cool would that be? You know? And it could?
You know. Part of me was like, yeah, please tell
me something. Let this farting goes piece, you know, give
me some sort of information that's useful other than you
know that he's gassy. Um so. But I mean I
(02:59):
did think to my self, we all sort of yearned
for this, for some sort of explanation about what happens
to us after we die, and we I don't think
we can never quite divorce ourselves from this notion that
once we cease to exist as a living human, human
breathing thing, that you know, we don't somehow come out
(03:21):
in some other form. I mean, I think that we
have this wish fulfillment, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah,
at least I do. I shouldn't say that everybody does,
but it's it's definitely ingrained in our culture. Yeah. I
mean I remember, like, even like at a young age,
like there being a point where where, you know, I
was thinking, it's like, wow, what would it be like
if it's just like you know, when you when you die.
It's just that's there's nothing like what would nothing be like?
(03:42):
You know, And that's just that whole sort of mind
blowing area of trying to you know, to to realize,
you know, what that would be like. And then you
sort of grow bored with that, and you kind of think, well,
what would it be like if I, you know, became
a butterfly in the next life, you know, And that's
that's a little more exciting. So I choose to sort
of I kind of choose to to to throw all
my belief at areas that a little more interesting like that,
I guess. But yeah, yeah, because otherwise we there's nothing
(04:05):
right zip zero for and we don't have a context
for zero. So um, but that has not stopped scientists
throwing their minds at it. No, No, of course, it's
the human problem, right, And we're all sitting here saying
we've been we're here where you've been created. We're in
a universe that's been created or came into existence, is
probably the better way to say that. So what is
(04:28):
it all for nothing? Tell us science? Well, first, let's
back up a little bit and talk about some sort
of early scientific ramblings, if you will, having to do
with just the connection between But it basically comes down to,
like this spark that is who we are, like, does
it have any connection to anything outside ourselves? Right? That's
what a lot of it is. Because when you when
(04:49):
you're talking about a ghost, you're talking about a a
me that exists outside my body, that exists after my
body is gone. That there's something in my body, maybe
in permanent, but there's something permanent about me, right right,
your consciousness, I suppose. Yeah. So a lot of these uh,
a lot of the like scientific inquiries even have sort
(05:11):
of like you know, um, you know, poked at reality
a little to see if they can find those the
connecting threads, you know. Yeah. In fact, there's something called
the law of contagion, which is sort of magical thinking
that things that have once been in contact with each
other will continue to act on each other at a
distance even after physical contact has been severed. And this
(05:33):
is really um, this is what I was saying. It's
ingrained in our culture. I mean all sorts of um
cultures primitive and are our modern uh one. Now, if
you think about it, we all sit there and we
have these these thoughts connected to someone, whether or not
they're alive or dead, and this idea that we're all connected. Um.
(05:56):
Of course this is magical thinking. So bear with me.
I mean this and and more primitive culture might translate
to I have roberts tonil cuttings, and so I'm gonna
put it in a magical spell and use it against
them because I have something of his. Yeah, it's sympathetic
magic like some of the oldest, Like it's the whole thing,
Like I just cut my hair. I better hide this
(06:17):
stuff because of a sorcerer gets ahold of it. You know,
I'm totally boned. Yeah, I'm toastman. And so then there's
this this other idea that UM, that this person, this
connection could exist well beyond us, even in death. UM.
And so that law of contagion really helps us to
understand I think, why we have these notions of what
(06:40):
happens after death, and why we even have the burial
rituals that we have with our dead. Now. I mean,
you'd like to think that we bury people because you know,
we want to be nice and we'd like to remember them.
But some people would say that we do it because
we've got the connection to them, and if we just
were to throw them over a boat or throw them
in a ditch, they might come after us. Yeah, I
(07:01):
mean you see this, uh, this law of contagion in
like like you know, different like heirlooms that are tied
to you know, the people that are still living there
dear you know, or people that have died. You see
it in the whole you know, the whole phrase like oh,
I'll never wash this hand again. You know that. You know,
it's like you've had a physical connection with say, you know,
(07:21):
some minor celebrity that you ran into it a bus stop.
I don't know how the celebrity will be taking the bush,
maybe the airport, Uh, you know, at the airport, You're like,
I'll never washed his hand again, because there's like the
society that there's a connection has been established, you know,
and uh, and and therefore the the object of that
connection must be maintained and honored so that that that
(07:41):
connection can still be there, right yeah, and the and
the best in the best world that connection with via talisman,
and the worst of worlds that would be uh, you know,
some sort of stink eye against you, right, I guess
going back to the Toni and clippings. So this is
definitely ingrained in us um and whether or not we
realize that we all have been sort of operating, at
(08:01):
least in the Western world under this context. And so
if you look back at what we used to think scientifically,
you can see how when spiritualism came up in the
nineteen hundreds, people got really excited about that because they thought, oh, ectoplasm,
there's all there's all sorts of things that are representative
of from the beyond um, and this ectoplasm is gonna,
(08:23):
you know, prove it. And here's this medium and we're
all going to raise a table. Yeah. And she's totally
not just pulling out like damp cloths and one yeah.
Yeah is that from spook? Yeah yeah, Mary roach Yeah
gets into it a lot. Yeah, in some detail that
you would make you shut her a little bit. Some
(08:43):
of the antics that they pull. We'll leave it to
you your imagination. But so you can see science trying
to trying to grapple with this question. And in fact,
she even covers someone named Duncan McDougall, McDougal, excuse me,
his twenty one Grahams theory, Yeah, which is, here's this guy.
He's trying to substantiate the existence of a material soul
by weighing a corpse just after it ceases to live.
(09:08):
And um, you know he does it. He I think
he does like maybe eight corpses or something. Yeah, and
it's like each one it's like this was hardly like pristine,
like you know, control environment. There's like nobody makes corpse
weighing scales for for this purpose. First that's the first problem.
And uh and it's like it was in a barn
(09:30):
or something, right, I mean it was yeah, yeah, And um,
and I think that the time of death wasn't always accurate,
so someone might have expired and then oops, yeah it
was ten minutes too late. Yeah, it's not like he
like weighed eight corpses and each one they were like,
you know, definite measurements of twenty one right, right, So
(09:51):
maybe one of those I think in marriages research that
maybe one of those wings was sort of meeting the
criteria of sort of but he's getting this and it
was like, hey, this what this body now always twenty
one grams less and the soul is gone. So therefore
the soul weighs twenty one grahams and just flew out
(10:11):
the window. That's right. And here we have evidence of
the soul. So you can see science and yesteryear reaching
for against some sort of idea that there's this existence,
there's this law of contagion extending itself beyond the realm
that we know. So what do we know for sure? Though? Well,
(10:32):
one thing we know for sure is the I mean
as much as we know anything for sure. But the
first law of thermodynamics, and that's the energy can neither
be created or destroyed. And and uh and and this
is another thing that Mary Rock goes into a little
bit in the book, and that's that if energy, energy
can can neither be created nor destroyed, well you can
(10:53):
if you really get some fine measurements, you can measure
the the energy of consciousness of thought. You know, Um,
and where does it go? Is it? Can it just
turn off? Or does it go somewhere? Yeah, that's the
fact that we that matter still how it contains energy, right,
(11:14):
energies matter, and I mean that just doesn't change after
you die as far as we know, right, we can't
necessarily track it. We don't know where it goes, and
that becomes the grand problem or the mysterium tremendum. Yeah,
and unlike the people are looking at this, they're not
all saying like, oh, this definitely means that this tiny
little this tiny little bit of energy that was human
(11:34):
consciousness or or just the thoughts rambling around in the
you know, the in the the head meat up there
that it you know, shot up to heaven or we know,
went to the next life or jumped into a mouse
that was hanging out in the hallway. You know, it
might just be you know, diffusing into the you know,
the surrounding area or something of that nature. But still
it's interesting to think, uh, you know about it applying
(11:56):
the law of thermodynamics, the first law thermodynamics um to
you know, thoughts, and think, well that it can't end.
It has to go somewhere. That energy goes somewhere, you know.
So even if it's not a you know, a survival
of me or a survival of my thoughts, it's kind
of interesting to think of like the survival of that
energy in the same way that like the body that
you leave behind. I mean that if that is energy,
(12:19):
and you know, if it's planted in a garden, that
energy is going to transfer onto other organisms, right. Or
if you happen to leave your body to science and
you end up in a body farm right rotting away
for for for for data, um, then yeah, then you're well,
I guess it's the same thing. You're still going to
(12:40):
have matter transferred over to a little shred of grass
or to another cadaver. Yeah. Yeah, Which it's kind of
actually a lovely thing when you think about, or at
least in my mind, is that you're dispersing your manner. Yeah,
I mean it's it's I like to think like when
I go to the grocery store. I like to think
of it, um, especially them being really like judgmental about
what other people are putting into their shopping I like
(13:00):
that I do that, Yeah, but I also try and
be judgmental about what what we're putting in our shopping cart.
And I think of I tend to think that like
I am going to build a new body out of
the things I buy at the store today. So I
want to build things that are not disgusting. You know.
It's like like, oh, I'm going to build a new
body out of some you know, some nice vegetables and
(13:21):
not cheetos and not cheetos and tombstone pizzas, you know,
tombstone Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of like I've built
my body out of these things this, out of these
you know, stored energy items, and now I'm done with
the body. So the body is going to become energy again.
So it's you know, it's kind of you know, you're
just borrowing everything, wow, from body farms to tombstone pizza. Yeah. Yeah,
(13:45):
all right. So I think that when you think of
it this way, then you you understand matter that it's
not just a static thing. Right, So we obviously we
have no idea where it goes what it does when
you die, but plausibly it could disperse itself um and
then you have the problem of quantum physics, or you
(14:05):
could some would say you could have the solution with
quantum physics and multiverse. So with quantum physics, there's a
non nonlinear dimension of life, assuming that some of the
tenets of quantum physics are applicable and correct. Namely, the
observations can't be predicted absolutely. Okay, Okay, so I there's
(14:26):
the road number two. So what we're saying is that
there may be a range of possible observations with different
probability in an infinite number of universes where time and
events aren't behaving in the way that we experience them
or the way that we expect them to behave, which
is that another big question mark? Yeah, Well, that that's
the thing I think a lot of people begin to
(14:47):
sort of shut off when you when when when quantum
physics come up, and especially when like the idea of
of multiple universes come up, because it's you can almost
explain anything with quantum physics if you really want to,
and and it's actually it takes off a lot of
scientists out there too. We were both looking at sources
from this guy, John Horgan, and he discounted a lot
(15:12):
of some of the things we're talking about. When when
quantum is getting get involved as a quote scientific theology,
which it's kind of like we talked about in the
Tropic Principle Um podcast, is that is that you kind
of end up building some of the same like trying
to answer unanswerable things, except instead of throwing like folk
(15:33):
tale at it, and uh, you know, in in in
religion or or even you know, necessary or even philosophy,
you're you're throwing like scientific ideas and trying to build
something that can't really be proven. Man. And I guess
the problem with quantum physics is because h is that
it's sort of used as a placeholder sometimes. She said,
(15:53):
So it's like, well, okay, you'd have to have this condition,
this condition, this condition, and then the gel of all
this is is quantum physics. So which and I'm that's
not to say that you can't prove out some things
in quantum physics. You can obviously. Well, well, one interesting
thing is the idea of quantum entanglement, and that has
actually been observed. University of Geneva and Switzerland did that
(16:16):
earlier this year, I believe, at least the published earlier
this year. Okay, is this what Einstein called spooky matter
at a distance? Uh? Yeah, I believe. So, Like basically
it comes down to um. You have photons, tiny, you know,
little little particles, photons whose quantum properties are so intimdently
linked that one always knows what the other knows what
(16:37):
the other one is doing. They don't actually they're not conscious.
But but the idea is that when one one photons
quantum state is measured, the other photon changes. So it's
kind of an interesting you know, it kind of lines
up with a whole law of contation we're talking about,
all right, shape shifting. Yeah, And so that's an example
(16:57):
of something where they can say, hey, we've actually have
served this um you know, we we can you can
actually observe it with the human eye under correct um
you know conditions, right, But but not everything. There's a
whole lot of other stuff in quantum physics, especially if
you use quantum physics to build some sort of out
their theories. That is, it's a lot harder to to
build a case for Okay. So that's what we're saying
is that, yes, there are some ways that you can
(17:18):
apply it, but wholesale and not necessarily. But it's an
intriguing question, right because we just don't know the answers
to this. So that brings me to, okay, that the
whole thing about having a parallel universe that makes me
think about near death experiences and this sort of m
duplicity of self or not even duplicity, but this idea
(17:42):
of yourself being outside of yourself. Right, And if for
anybody who ever watched Unsolved Mysteries as a as a child, um,
this is like you know, the basic thing where it's
like the persons on the operating table or they're in
the emergency room and they have that sensation where they're
they're they're rising up from the table and then they're
looking down at themselves on the operating table. Do they
(18:02):
also see the tunnel and the light and yes, people
start coming to get them from from the afterlife. Yeah.
That maybe the same episode or multiple I don't know.
It's like Unsolved Mystery started out being about like crimes
and then like later it was just all like aliens
and and lost time and other world experiences. Scared me
a lot as a child. It definitely shaped you. Yes,
(18:27):
hence the preoccupation with our topic today. Yes, so what
I thought was interesting and this is uh. This is
from a article by Josh Clark about has science explained
life after death? He talks about r m intrusion rem intrusion,
which um is this conclusion that there is a disorder
(18:51):
in which a person's mind can wake up before the
body does, and hallucinations occur during that time, including the
feeling like you're detached from your body. And so the
thought is that these intrusions are triggered by traumatic events
like cardiac arrest, and it occurs in the brainstem, where
this intrusion can still occur even though your higher brain
may be occupied or may even be shutting down. And
(19:15):
so I think this is interesting is that it came
out of a study from the University of Kentucky and
they're basically saying, here, we've got it. We've got a
solution to this whole near death experience. It may not
just be you, you know, traveling outside of your body
astually because you know you've experienced or you you are
about to experience death. So you know, we we can
(19:37):
kind of poke holes in that this presentation is brought
to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow, and we know
it's so important to scientists that they're actually uh conducting
even more studies and something that just came out in
(19:59):
the Street Journal or pretty recently did oh this is
the one with the pictures, right, yeah, yeah, So you
know about this. Tell me a little bit more. Well,
the idea is basically, like I said, as we've all
seen unsolved mysteries the Purse or any number of paranormal
um you know, documentary type shows. The ideas of the
person is raising up off the table and they're seeing
themselves from above. So what if you were to you know,
put a little picture, a little photograph, or or it's
(20:22):
like even you could even do it with like a
like a playing card, like is this your card, sir?
You know, lay it next to the person's head, and
then after they've had the the out of body experience,
say what card did you see next to your head
laying on the table. And if they're like, what are
you talking about? I didn't see a card, then you
would know that nothing happened, or if they couldn't guess
the correct card. Okay, So these are researchers who have
(20:45):
suspended pictures face up from the ceiling in in emergency
care areas to test whether or not patients who are
brought back to life after cardiac arrest are able to
see these pictures or these photos which okay, so which
automatically I start to think, like what sort of pictures
are they even using, like you said, it could be
(21:07):
a playing card. I mean, the dark side of me
wants to think that there are pictures of clowns just
to scare them. I was picturing horses for some reason, horses,
but maybe like kind of like like you know, snarling horses.
Certain they don't really snarl, but you know where there
was dripping, Yeah, where their lips pull back and they're
all like teeth for horsemen of the apocalypse ish yeah, okay, alright,
(21:30):
so we both have like these really snugly ideas of
what the researchers should put in, what it needs to
be memorable, Like you don't want it to be like
there's a picture of some kid. I guess I thought
one of the surgeons just takes that out when he's
working to inspire it. Well, see, that's why I thought
the clowns would be really funny, because if you're having
out of body experiencing, you indeed can't see the photos.
Oh my god, it's the clowns. Yeah, yeah, you know,
(21:51):
which actually that's it's kind of awful. It's sort of mean, Well,
unless they really love clowns, and it would be like
what am I? I should go back to my body.
They are clowns in this life where I'm going there,
there may be no clowns, or there may be lots
of clowns. It depends on your your definitions of the
afterlife goodness the clown I have to say, that's it's
not my it's not my idea of a perfect afterlife.
(22:13):
I think, isn't it one of the afterlives in Buddhism,
Like there's a clowns. Yes, yes, yes, you you reach
clown status. I think. Yeah. But uh, what I think
is really cool about the study is that we should
find out what they've learned round March April or so.
(22:35):
That should be publishing, So should be fascinating. Okay, So
Susan Blackmore's who makes it her job to study this stuff.
She basically has said that she thinks that near death
experience is a particularly dramatic consequence of our cognitive tendency
to construct models of ourselves as though observed from the outside. Okay,
(22:56):
so this is like I'm standing at the train station
waiting on the train and I can't help but imagine
what other people are seeing exactly. Yeah, Okay, so it's
not just me that right, no, no, no, right, like
you have that you know in your database, you've you've
got all these images built up, so you can obviously
imagine yourself, um looking at yourself and that's that. This
(23:20):
is just really the consequence of that, so that near
death experience isn't necessarily something that people are actually experiencing.
And to boot, there's something called ketamine, which is a
drug that can induce the same sort of sensations that
you get. So another piece of evidence to sit there
and say, Okay, a near death experience really interesting, but
(23:42):
it may not be what we think it is in
terms of linking uh, the afterlife to our own experiences
here in north because they can they can produce similar
effects with a drug artificially. Yeah, exactly right, So which
begs the question can our consciousness ext this apart from
the brain? Yeah? This is uh, this is one that
(24:04):
I that gets a lot of play just you know
throughout like science fiction and fantasy. I think like the
idea of digitized consciousness, as you know, comes up a lot,
the idea that that I can like maybe make a
like a digital copy of my brain and it could
it exists somewhere and think but it's it gets really
complicated when you when you start wondering about that. For starters,
(24:27):
we're not really sure. We're have a really hard time
to finding consciousness anyway. So the idea of like can
we replicate something that we don't even we don't even
really know what it is, it's it gets kind of difficult,
Like I do you have to like create a machine
that has all these pieces and then fools itself into
thinking that it has free will, and then just you know,
(24:48):
it's just it gets really really muddy, really fast. Yeah,
And I can't think about it um from any perspective
other than the biological structures. So you've got your your
nerve of cells, and you've got your firing of neurons,
and you've got your synaptic nectivity. So I can't imagine
that in some sort of disembodied state, right, and then
(25:10):
our our heads too, I mean, and it's it's it's
easy to, in a very idealistic way, say say I
want you know, I want me, you know, my mind
to you know, exist in a machine somewhere, But then
you start thinking like all the different, weird and often
unpleasant things that make our mind what it is. And again,
how they're all tied to biology and uh and and
(25:30):
and like the whole like sort of like you're throwing
the ego in there too, and you have all these
sort of these weird forces kind of pulling at each other,
and it's like, why would you even want to replicate that?
Why not build something better? You know? Yeah? I agree,
And and you say the ego, and it makes me
think about Buddhism and and and all comes razor um
and Buddhism just says, well, self is an illusion, so
(25:53):
why do you think it could replicate itself outside of
self essentially? Or I'm saying that actually Buddhists and saying that,
And I think a lot of times what we think
of another idea that you encounter in and I think
some in Buddhism, but also a lot of like New
Age kind of stuff where people talk about like what
we think of as self isn't really self. It's like
(26:14):
there's us, and then there's this kind of like fake
you that you kind of create that's kind of mashed
together out of ego and everything. It's kind of lumped
in there as well. So and again you're kind of
so you're kind of like lying to yourself constantly about
who you are and like marching around this little ego
puppet in your head. Yeah, and if you apply the
Marxist theory to that, then you're just a product that's
(26:38):
been signified. I know it's not even you didn't really
who cares about your consciousness? Go make us something? But
that doesn't mean that that people haven't tried to actually
look into our consciousness existing outside of our brain. You've
got something called ORC theory, which is orchestrated objective reduction.
(26:58):
So it's O r C A yes, or I guess
you could say ORCH like work too. But you've got
sir Roger Penrose and Stuart hammer Off and they're basically
saying that consciousness is a sequence of quantum computations inside
brain neurons, and the idea is that each neuron isn't
(27:20):
just flipping a switch, but actually a complex computer of
its own. I'm not going to pretend to be uninterestand
I mean, my brain is hanging on a thread with
this one. But I did find this really cool website
called edge dot org and it's basically a bunch of
missive missives between scientists theorists, and they're all batting about
(27:40):
their own ideas and they're taking heat and they're giving
it back. And I dig that so um with Stuart
hammer offf he actually posted something as a rebuttal to
Lee Smullen and Stuart Kaufman and he about ORC. He
has said, the two main points I want to make
is the flow of time is a future feature of
cons aousness, and outside of consciousness, there may not be
(28:02):
a flow of time. Okay, consciousness provides the clock, alright, Okay,
so that's that's interesting. And then the second thing is
that the or OR model suggests consciousness is a sequence
of self organizing rearrangements of space time geometry at the
level of quantum spin networks. Well, that makes perfect sense.
(28:24):
That's what I was thinking. I was just thinking that
the other day. You know. No, but that's that's uh yeah,
that's really complicated. Yeah yeah. So I just put that
out there because people are thinking about this and they're
writing down their thoughts about it, about the quantum spin networks.
And that made me go to Freeman Dyson, who is
(28:45):
a physicist and he was contributed to all different fields.
Oh yeah, he seems to have had his hands and
just about everything I mean from you from dreaming up
things like the Dyson's sphere to to you know, his
involvement with the with Theryan project. If the list goes on,
he's amazing, amazing guy. Yeah, and he's really an optimist
because he feels like the Earth first of all, I
(29:08):
should say, rather the universe is going to be expanding
at a pretty steady rate. So he's not someone who
thinks that, you know, it's all going to end very soon.
That's that's the first deal with him. So he likes
to imagine us as um as beings who can adjust
to that and who can actually start to conserve energy.
And in an article and with Slate he was actually asked,
(29:31):
you know, what could our descendants possibly look like a
trillion years from now, when the stars have disappeared and
the universe is dark and freezing and so diffuse, that
is practically empty. And ever the optimist, he finds like
a like a bright way of looking at this, at
our existence in this universe of death. Yes, yes, he says,
the most plausible answer is that conscious life will take
(29:54):
the form of interstellar dust clouds. So for him, consciousness
is just a bunch of charged particles hanging out in
a dust cloud, and he actually thinks that there's that
our consciousness is will merge into one great mind and
actually be able to transcend this locality of where we
are now. That's interesting. That kind of flows back into
(30:15):
some of the anthropic principle theories that were being thrown around,
you know, about the the idea that once once consciousness
comes into being, it can't really be stopped and will
eventually become like Godlike, Oh, that's right. Is that the
final Anthropic's final anthropic? Yeah? Yeah, And that's that was
one that always kind of through me because I was thinking, well,
was the matrix? What are you talking about? Is this
(30:36):
our intelligence is being construed as a computer program. But
basically he's thinking that will become these organisms that are
free floating and and just hanging out as clouds. Which
but that that would be a situation where you would
have consciousness existing without a physical body in a way,
(30:57):
kind of a ghost. I guess if you want to
go there, ghost clouds, ghost clouds. Yeah, I like it,
um chilling years from now check it out? Yeah, so
can can has science explained life after death? No? Not really? Sorry,
If you were looking for a definite answer on that,
then we're not gonna be able to deliver it at
this time. But if you're interested about whether or not
(31:20):
scientists has uh debunked some myths about ghosts, all the
information is available. So if you know about e v
P the voice recordings, yeah, voices and all that. Yeah,
Jonathan and Chris a tech stuff did a really cool
podcast on ghostbusting technology. Yeah, and they go into all
of this. So that's that's definitely worth checking out. Yeh ectoplasm,
(31:42):
ray guns or and such. And of course be sure
to check out Jeff Clark's article Has Science Explained Life
After Death? Which you know, just a two pager, but
Josh covers a some of the ground that we we
cover in this and does it in a nice concise manner.
To find Josh in articles. Yes, I think that's a
wrap for science in the Afterlife? All right, check us
(32:03):
out next week. And if you haven't already read Josh
Clark's article Has Science Explained Life after Death? Or? Do
parallel universes really exist? Why don't you take a look
see at them at how stuff works dot com. The
how stuff Works dot Com I phone app is coming soon.
Get access to our content in a new way. Articles, videos,
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