Monday, October 11, 2010

Weight of a Human Soul (TLS 1)


by Dan Brown.


As a young girl, Katherine Solomon had often wondered if there was life after death. Does heaven exist? What happens when we die? As she grew older, her studies in science quickly erased any fanciful notions of heaven, hell, or the afterlife. The concept of 'life after death', she came to accept, was a human construct...a fairy tale designed to soften the horrifying truth that was our mortality. Or so I believed..
A year ago, Katherine and her brother had been discussing one of philosophy's most enduring questions - the existence of the human soul - specifically the issue of whether or not human possessed some kond of conciousness capable of survival outside the body.
They both sensed that such a human soul probably did exist. Most ancient philosophies concurred. Buddhist and Brahminical wisdom endorsed metempsychosis - the transmigration of the soul into the new body after death; Platonist defined the body as a 'prison' from which the soul escaped; and the Stoics called the soul apospasma thou theu - 'a particle of God' - and believed it was recalled by God upon death.
The existence of the human soul, Katherine noted with some frustration, was probably a concept that would never be scientifically proven. Confirming that a conciousness survived outside the human body after death was akin to exhaling a puff of smoke and hoping to find it years later.
After their discussion, Katherine had a strange notion. Her brother had mention the Book of Genesis and its description of the soul as Neshemah - a kind of spiritual 'intelligence' that was separate from the body. It occured to Katherine that the word intelligence suggested the presence of thought. Noetic Science clearly suggested that thoughts had mass, and so it stood to reason, then, that the human soul might therefore also had mass.
Can I weigh a human soul?
The notion of impossible, of course....foolish even to ponder.
It was three days later that Katherine suddenly woke up from a dead sleep and sat bolt upright in bed. She jumped up, drove to her lab, and immediately began work designing an experiment that was both startlingly simple......and frighteningly bold.
...........
For those who haven't read the book, do you think she managed to conduct the experiment, to weigh a human soul?

And for those who have read the book, do you think this is real?

The study of this phenomenon is in Noetic Science, a quite newly discovered branch of Sciences. It is a multidisciplinary field that brings objective scientific tools and techniques together with subjective inner knowing to study the full range of human experiences. It is more to the study of invisible forces, unseen process which involve human and another power. It studies the efficacy of prayers, feelings, intuition that can hardly be proven yet are absolutely real.

The reality is, yes. Human has managed to prove that soul has mass. They conducted the experiment to nearly 200 ill-to-death person to finally measure the human soul to be approximately 1/3000th of an ounce.

To my astonishment,

First, this is amazingly true, that Allah has said, we all will be weighed. But who are we on that resurrection day? That will determine our next journey, to either one destination? Human soul carries the weight. And our soul is highly affected by our deeds. But there's one frailty that limits human capability in this discovery; to differently measure a good soul and an evil one - a crystal clear distinction of the balance that human can never make a similitude of it.

or have we yet discovered, any kind of atomic particle that makes up a good and evil deeds? Immeasurable.


"Allah understands the finest mysteries, (and) is well-acquainted (with them)."
(Luqman:16)

"It is Allah who has sent down the Book of Truth, and the Balance
(by which to weigh conduct)."
(AsSyura:17)

"Then shall anyone who has done an atom's weight of good, see it! And anyone who has done an atom's weight of evil, shall see it.
(AzZalzalah:7-8)


Second, they are so dedicated to prove that this unseen things are real, for them to have a firm belief. Eager to find reasons. This is good enough, that they finally came up with a result; an expected one. What if they fail? The theory is there, that we are dependent on an unseen power, which is so powerful, far to be a human being, which we will be returned to (I see this discovery as a door to believe the afterlife). To us, the theory is indeed a fact, as it comes from our guide; the Quran. We can try to justify, but anyhow, it is as what it is explained - agree to the limitation of how the brain has been programmed. To them, it remains as theory. A theory to be proven as an established fact, it needs reasons. Evidences. Proofs. This is another crystal clear distinction of faith, ours and theirs.


"They ask thee concerning the Spirit (of inspiration;ruh).
Say: The Spirit (cometh) by command of my Lord:
of knowledge it is only a little that is communicated to you, (O men!)."
(AlIsra':85)


I wonder, how these people find it very hard to belief something unseen; heaven, hell, life after death; and desperately need proofs. And from this, I wonder how powerful our faith is. In any way, when Allah says; The Spirit by command of my Lord; we believe as it is, with or without proof.

Wallahua'alam.

Only a piece of information to be shared, reflected and pondered over~


p/s: Thanks to aeisyulillah, I added some explanation after realizing that this could be misunderstood. Read comments.
http://www.noeticsciences.co.uk/weighting-the-human-soul/
http://www.noetic.org/about/what-are-noetic-sciences/


3 comments:

  1. Good one.

    I have read the book. and some other compilation of his.

    I also learn philosophy, due to my astonishment, We cant just simply affirm what Dan Brown convey in his book. And below are merely my opinions.

    First, philosophy is not a surface matter, no matter how good the theory sounds, it does not guarantee that the theory is real. So as in this matter, if soul can be weighed, it proves that any other things supposed to have mass, which means they can be measured quantitatively and empirically - so this would bring to conclusion that things which cannot be measured/observed quantitatively and empirically is not real - and as God is one of those thing, so God is not real.

    This is the case for materialism.

    I realized that Al-Quran enjoins us to let the soul thing to be one of His errand, so let it be.

    be careful, Dan Brown is seemingly injecting some doctrins of global theology by portraying out the single brotherhood union - Freemason - which we aware that it can corrupt our faith. And also there are many statements which lead to pluralism: a notion where all religion brings to the same reality.

    One more thing, noetic science has been explained so brief in this book, unlike any other of his work.. he explained it in a great length. that would be caused by the limited amount of info for noetic science itself, and also maybe because he is desperately trying to convince the readers.

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  2. Yep. What I meant by 'amazingly true' is because these human are so eager to prove it. The book is saying something real, experiment of weighing human soul is happening for real in our life.

    The theory that they have mass, is true because Allah has said so. But the mass is not measurable by human-made balance, and is not capable to exist as mass like we know, that can be measured as it is abstract. As I said, this is the distinction that we have to put as a boundary.

    Even though they can prove this, it is not the same as what Allah has said. It is merely an experiment to celebrate their eagerness. There goes my 2nd astonishment; obessively experimental-based belief. And the distinction, is our way of belief, conforming your statement, that soul, is one of His errand. We believe as what it is explained.

    Yeah. Pluralism. I intended to write about that too :)

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  3. salam. Sorry, I was totally oblivious that I posted the comment, until my friend, Asif, reminded me that I had commented on your post before.

    By the way, I have read a book by Mary Roach entitled Seven Feet Under : a book which is about the search for the soul. And the kind of exp you mentioned (although I am not sure that we are talking about the same one. Nevertheless the kind of experiment is somehow the same) and there are many accountable errors which can compromise the result.

    Btw, i am totally agree with your deduction - that their skepticism fired back their civilization. They are to afraid to do any leap of faith by asking some inappropriate questions.

    and my opinion, this skepticism is due to the harshness of Church exercising their authority during the Dark Age. Christians or basically the westerners became somehow allergic to the word God itself because they were afraid, by ethics unfounded by reasons (read: divine command/church authority), one can establish a master-slave relationship (the master-slave proposition is just one of the proposition posed by Hegel, a philosopher in Social Philosophy, and of course there are many other such of Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkgaard which I admired the most - because of the incidental synchronization with islamic philosophy)

    I am sorry, I am just too eager to discuss this with someone and you seem to provide a perfect platform for it :)

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