Has science explained life after death?

getting in on the Halloween action. And this is a fairly well known ghost hunter who I shall not name. 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 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,

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 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

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 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 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 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? 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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 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. 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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

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, 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,