Science, Materialism, and Beyond

In the course of looking into a very curious corner of science, an examination of the “weight of the soul,” I became aware of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE), a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). Both SSE and JSE are serious entities, the latter a peer-reviewed and genuinely scientific journal in existence since 1987. SSE’s website is here, and a listing of publicly available articles from JSE (in pdf format) is here. Looking at many of the articles caused me to update my sense of trends in the area, meaning now the intersection between matters of the borderzone and serious science. But first about the weight of soul—and how I stumbled upon the JSE.

In 1907 a physician in Massachusetts, Duncan MacDougall, published results of a research study in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and shortly after that in American Medicine. He continuously weighed six terminal patients before and after their death. He rejected one of the six observations but used the other five and concluded that at or very near the point of death the body lost weight, very rapidly or in a very short time, ranging between half and three-quarters of an ounce. He also conducted tests on dogs and found that they did not lose any weight. What material I found on the web emphasized that nobody had been able to duplicate MacDougall’s results. This bare statement on repetition of the investigation intrigued me. I saw no citations of these studies. But in that process, lo and behold, I discovered a 2010 paper by Masayoshi Ishida titled “Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall’s Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death” in JSE Volume 24, No. 10, 2010. It turns out that people refuted but did not replicate the studies. So there you are. That issue is accessible here.

Now for me the fascinating issue here is that in an age of materialism, a doctor would have been inspired to try to find a material proof for the soul’s existence—which was MacDougall’s aim. The fact that nobody bothered to replicate his study did not surprise me. People like me who are certain of the soul’s existence, wouldn’t be interested in its weight—and those convinced of its non-existence would not bother organizing a technically and sociologically difficult venture like that. My own interest was, and is, in the conjunction, namely the attempt to link the transcendent back to the physical in some way—which to me testifies to the narrowness of the materially-focused mind. And in that context, the JSE turned out to be a gold-mine.

For decades now (certainly since the 1950s) I’ve watched with fascination both the astounding increase in genuine experiential evidence for the soul’s survival of death and a parallel development whereby some people have attempted to make use of the ambiguities of quantum theory to materialize these phenomena. The positive evidence arose from near death experience (NDE) studies on one hand and scientific studies of reincarnation on the other. The late Ian Stephenson of Virginia University, largely associated with the latter, was also involved with the former. Another development in this period, indeed arising from the very cumulation of evidence, is a delightful debate about the nature of science, or, rather scientism, led on the one side by those who’ve presented the evidence and work in these fields and the professional skeptics who feel themselves called to conduct an on-going inquisition to stamp out such heretical claims.

The JSE, like a good scientific journal should, presents papers on all sides of this issue. Not, I hasten to say, ideologically motivated debunkers who simply “refute,” but those who wish to explain the experiential using approaches like quantum physics. The general stance of the journal, however, is openness and objectivity. Those who have evidence to present are welcome—if they are, as it were, well-behaved. Therefore we find, in the JSE, the very best presentations of actual evidence favoring the reality of things beyond the border stripped of the attention- (and money-) seeking tendencies of virtually all popular sites on such subjects.

One of the genuinely interesting facets of this subject that I encountered in three days of reading journal articles is that the hard, ideologically-motivated scientism so seemingly firm in the saddle in the United States seems not at all to dominate science as practiced in Asia, India, and in the Near East. An example of that, reporting on some truly astonishing research in China, is Dong Shen’s article, “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness” in the same issue in which I found Ishida’s article.