Soul searching PART 2

The search for the soul has found succour with Near Death Experience (NDE) crew.  I thought that I would this time look at a piece of research that was on the souls of rats that was summarised in this article from The Economist  The NDE is a widely documented phenomenon reported by those who are dying, but cheat the coffin and return to life.  In their joy and gratitude at survival TWO claims of some (almost) post mortal perceptions are made.  These two perceptions enjoy remarkable consistency around the world despite different circumstances, dispersed locations, varied causes of extremis and diverse cultures/beliefs of the nearly dead.  This constancy of image does lend credit to the argument that the soul is emerging from the corpse.  The two NDE perceptions are illusions of either walking towards a bright light or floating above the room the nearly dead are nearly dying in and observing what goes on.  So there are two distinct figments but each has a global fan base.  

"The soul finds it's way home"by Alex Grey

 These two NDE images are used to justify the existence of the disembodied soul or one that departs the body upon death and then resumes a fairly human type existence outside the host body.  The last blog looked at a refutation of this form of soul. How could this disembodied soul see the light or the perspective as it floats above the room when it does not possess eyes to see the visions?  But these sorts of arguments are never really addressed by believers.  It is just assumed that the disembodied soul has the characteristics and advantages of residing in a live body with all of the miraculous cognitive and perceptual things a brain and body can do without the pains and aches that ordinarily accompany physical embodiment. 

The godless, sceptics and doubters see these visions in a very different light. We are medical materialists who see the NDE as merely the last, convulsive neurological symptoms of a traumatised or oxygen starved body and brain. The fact that people have visions often leads to a religious moment.  There was the famous psychological experiment colloquially known as the “Miracle of Marsh Chapel” when seminary students on LSD reported religious encounters.  The hallucinations were mistaken for the divinity. Similarly, the figments of the NDE cause similar claims of the numinous or divine and seem similarly bogus. 

And so we come to the experiment on the souls of rats by University of Michigan’s Jimo Borjigin.  Sadly, in the cause of godlessness, the researchers killed the rats and measured their brains as they died.  The small sample involved showed some neurological activity as death approached.  This sounds analogous to the sort of brain activity that might drive the NDE.  The brain reacts to the demise with a burst of activity and that activity creates illusions of floating or light.

Now of course, rats and humans are different.  It was a small sample.  But this is the first of many similar experiments I hope will come that explores the neurological activity of a dying animal, whether human or not, and this will shed light on the veracity or otherwise of the existence of the soul.  I expect that the materialists will triumph over the spiritualists as the science progresses.

What is your view?

Can the soul, when it departs the body, see or perceive and if so, how?

Where would such souls end up – transmigrating to other bodies or in an invisible heaven?

What do you think of the medical type explanations of a traumatised brain shooting out images with no evidence of a soul at all?

Over to you guys...