Hi beep. A lot of people here debates veemently. You'll feel at home. Go and pick a topic.

Welcome!

Matter is just energy in a different form, so I'm not sure there's a significant point to the argument. If thoughts arise from matter, they still originate in energy.

Beyond that, I think AIGS put it very well.

Welcome to the forum OP, you will like it here.

I have had a few debates with theists that have touched on this subject.  Mine were centered around fundamental epistemology but concluding that inner narrative symbols and concepts are arrangements of electrons in your brain is one of the starting points for such a debate.  Ultimately, the difficulty of quantifying a pattern comes down to incommensurability of concepts.  One cannot agree that pattern A, corresponding to the concept of BEAUTIFUL relative to a painting and pattern B, corresponding to the concept of BEAUTIFUL relative to the same painting 10 minutes later after having thought about it in depth are identical.  Taking snapshots of the brain with an MRI scan will likely yelled mixed scientific results, and is missing the point.  Our empirical perception is strictly subjective and heavily influenced by the context.

The question of whether or not thoughts are material is a category error in the sense that thought is a process, not a thing.  If you want to get some answers as to how much thought your teachers have put in this, ask them what is thought if not material?  In other words, everything we know of  in nature is material, therefore thoughts are material.  

If any of them are alluding to the whole 21 grams weight of your soul thing, I think you should immediately lose all intellectual respect for that individual.

 

That is where the additional category - information - comes  in.

Doesn't it depend from the definition? What I care is, anyway, that music resides in the physical world, whatever it is.

Without thinking, an immediate definition for me would be "a particular configuration of energy in time". Try to outline the properties that music has:

-sound; it doesn't matter if it comes from acoustic instruments, from a speaker, from a tesla coil , it's matter that moves; (to be honest, we could say "vibrations" because some of the lowest, and above all, big, waves are not percepted by ear but by "skin&quot

-humans; I mean, when aliens will come we'll listen to their music, but for now music is music because it's judged by us. I don't think that every noise is considered music a priori, no?

In the end every music is categorized so slowly while humans listen to it, and so we learn what music is by experience, then we try to generalize the concept searching something that every piece of music considered "music" has. Right?

If that's true then music is something that provokes emotions, that "tells something", only it does so by hearing. I don't know what more general (in this aspect) there could be.

So this bring another question, for me: if we take the result of the music, what it stimulates in our brain, and we remove the sound, do we have music? I think not, but on another hand we don't need a material waveform, an electric one (to the nerves of the relative sense) is required, that's why at the beginning of the post I wrote that stuff, because energy/movement is needed, although it's a definition sa vague that it's almost useless.

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I have to burst your bubble on this one. 21 grams is the title of a movie where the characters briefly discuss the idea that the experiment has actually been done.

 

As it happens, it was done back in 1907. Under non scientifuc conditions and in a really bizarre manner.

 

There was a doctor who reasoned that if he could prove the existence of a soul, that would prove the existence of god. So he went to a sanatarium (place that poor people with tuberculosis were stuck so that they would not spread the disease). He put an army cot on an industrial scale and badgered six dying men to let him do the measurement.

 

One of the measurments was “three fourths of an ounce” which is close enough to 21 grams. The others were various other numbers. Then, in order to back up his idea, he also tried it on fifteen dogs. To no great surprise, dogs clearly have no souls.

 

As there are no records of a serious fatal disease of dogs in the area at the time (and record keeping was good enough by then that they should exist if true), it seems that the good doctor was poisoning the dogs to get his measurments.

 

For over a century, nobody has been willing to repeat the experiment. One must wonder why...

 

Of course, three fourth of an ounce would be a terrible title for a movie, so it was changed to metric.

OK smarty pants, now tell the crowd what Ben Franklin's mistake was...

I honestly had no idea of the extensiveness behind this Weighing the soul idea before my teacher happened to mention it, and some of the research behind it is very interesting and before I get back to some of the papers, I was wondering about the dark matter idea though. I've heard from several locations that it's theororized that dark matter has an effect on gravity at the smallest scale. I haven't read anything necessarily against your idea yet, but wouldn't any minute measurement of weight possibly be effected at the time of death, if this dark matter stopped reacting. wouldn't the mass in a body seem to measure in at less by a given?

I understand that this is the exact idea behind the soul idea, but what if, like you said, it's just matter that exists alongside biological processes and compliments them. There isn't any idea of a soul that can really be attributed to it, unless we're simply calling anything that leaves the body a soul. I hate the connotation behind "soul".

In biology and medicine we have found out many of the things in a Human brain that is responsible for the consciousness we all have, and without the brain, or the death of the "feeling" body, what exactly would any material we find to be released after death actually be? It could be the biggest revolution in science, or it could be as simple as voiding your bowels. What makes anyone somehow add the intrinsic properties usually given to the idea of a soul, to any measurement of reduced mass at time of death, especially when it seems to be just a logic problem, without any tangible matter to test?

Also, from the most recent topic, electrons? I'm under the idea that we never actually give a mass number to electrons, because of their relative size to say, a proton, but once someone dies, and their ceases to be an electrical current or drive, how much electron "matter" has technically left the body? Has it even left the body? High energy particles such as that might bond to lifeless parts of the body after death, or completely radiate away. If we are technically giving weight to supposed dark matter at a fraction of an ounce, even if it seems practically inane to do so, how are we not contriving weight from basically proven electrons?

No matter what way I cut it, it seems ridiculous to put someone on a cot at the time of death to look for something that would've left the body, considering I can't find a way that you would ever prove that anything leaving the body, dark matter, electrons, lungful of gutter air, etc, would ever be seen as a soul, since the very idea of this research, is whatever loss you're measuring, is literally lost as it is taken somewhere supernatural. How can any idea of this magnitude be called scientific, if the conclusion is that you're trying to measure something before it leaves the physical world?

You're rather correct, except that this is not supposed to be just an amorphous cloud of etheric matter that participates on the biologic processes. It is a full-fledged counterpart of our dense-material body, with complex structure and function, even capable of surviving alone for a limited time. Its health has also a great influence on our health, disease, sanity and clarity of thinking. 

Physicists say, that there may be seven superstring dimensions of material existence. Esotericists say, that humans possess a set of overlapping bodies of still subtler matter, one or two per dimension. When the first and second one dies, the consciousness shifts upwards, to the next one. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it also explains a lot with relatively little. This is the traditional ‘Many Bodies-Many Universes’ theory of metaphysics. 

The theory of successive set of subtle bodies does not contradict the current scientific findings. Physical brain, as the final outpost of our living, determines the outcoming quality of our physical awareness. That is, if the consciousness streams from "above". An occult idea of a soul as a source of consciousness is rather different than the popular idea. It is more similar to an external superconsciousness. A religious person would describe experiencing it as meeting our "divine father in heaven", except that it is just a higher part of ourselves. A Higher self, you know the term, if there are any New Agers lurking in your vicinity. There is no point in proving it now, it's too early. We're busy proving the existence of etheric body. And when there can be one more subtle body, why not a couple more?

As for the objective evidence I have available, please look below. 

Because we know electrons are not good candidates. Electrons do not leave the body, just as they do not leave the wire when you switch off the electricity. They just find a nice empty orbital of a nearest atom and sit down. AFAIK, electrons (and ions) fly freely around in vacuum, this is what CRT screen is about, also solar wind. So if the quick, sudden and equal decrease in weight wasn't the air, electrons, gases, fluids or anything else the scientists thought of as well, then we need to search for something new. 

Good thinking. It really gives no sense, unless you try to test if the etheric body is the next vehicle of consciousness. In which case the person's "ghost" wants to get out of the old meat bag. Just like you get out of a car if you crash it, to see what the damage is. So the berth gets lighter.

In science things typically aren't proven by one piece of evidence. They must explain or even predict hundreds or thousands of small pieces of evidence, to be taken seriously. So this weighing, even if it shows a positive anomaly, doesn't really prove anything by itself, it only says there is such and such sudden decrease in weight in the moment of death and it is not from this or that known cause. It is also one of many pieces of evidence, that point towards this theory of etheric body and world, or how it's called. 

The conclusions can not seem justified to you, unless you view the evidence first. I recommend to read at least a few chapters from the book Our Invisible Bodies by Jay Alfred. Don't worry, it's an interesting and reasonable read. There are a few conclusions which I think are a bit far-fetched, but other than that, we're on the same page. Then look at my five cents which I gathered from around the world, as an additional evidence. 

The book is officially free to download here, but I've uploaded it for you, so you don't have to register.

One of my favorite quotes:
If the universe consists of 1% visible and 99% invisible matter (both baryonic and not baryonic), it would be surprising if our body (in its totality) is not composed of both visible and invisible matter and energy. In fact, if it was not, we would need a good explanation for that!

So here's my 5 cents:
Firstly, there is professor James DeMeo from Oregon. (http://orgonelab.org/) He succesfully repeated many experiments of Wilhelm Reich. I personally appreciate most his work on making Reich's life energy detector portable and affordable. It exploits the fact, that etheric bodies absorb a displacement current field. So this device emits this kind of field and measures how much it is absorbed. (http://www.orgonelab.org/cart/ylemeter.htm) 
Another pioneer is my countryman, Miroslav Provod. His work is most similar to prof. DeMeo. (http://www.miroslavprovod.com/)
I should also mention Harry Oldfield and his Polycontrast Interference Photography. (http://www.electrocrystal.com/pip.html)
And very recently I discovered the work of dr. Kozyrev, who provides more ways to measure the etheric levels of matter. ( http://www.divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=95&Itemid=36 )

Of course I've got a lot of personal experiments and anecdotes, even some related/competitive theory, but the ready evidence goes first. (now that I have it)

Of course your brain is matter, unless you are Pat Robertson, his brain is merely hot air.

But you can think of "thoughts", not as things, but the manifestation of material processes. Much like running is the result of moving your legs faster, but, running itself is not a thing.

I hope that helps.

 

 

 

 

                         Were you molested by a capuchin priest?