ABOUT THE SOUL: YOURS AND MINE

Thanks to Plato for the confirmation. I needed that!

I touched on the complex and little-understood subject of  the human "soul"  in a previous post when I stated: "We are left to accept/believe ancient Biblical pronouncements for where we go after our soul leaves our dead physical presence."

In many religious, philosophical, and mythological traditions, the soul is the incorporeal essence of a living being. Soul or psyche comprises the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, qualia, memory, perception, thinking, etc. Depending on the philosophical system, a soul can either be mortal or immortal.

Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, understood that the soul must have a logical faculty, the exercise of which was the most divine of human actions. In Judaism and in some Christian denominations, only human beings have immortal souls (although immortality is disputed within Judaism). 

The debate about the existence of the soul and whether it is immortal or dies with the person is an endless story that for centuries has occupied the time of the great thinkers of universal history. Its mysterious nature continues to fascinate different areas of science, but now a group of researchers has discovered a new truth about it: the “soul” does not die; it returns to the universe.

Since 1996, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an American Physicist, and Emeritus in the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, have worked in a Quantum Theory of Consciousness in which they state that the soul is maintained in microtubules of the brain cells.

Their ‘provocative’ theory states that the human soul is being contained by the brain cells in structures inside them called microtubules.

The two researchers believe the human brain is, in fact, a ‘biological computer’ and the ‘consciousness of humans’ is a program run by the quantum computer located inside the brain that even continues to exist after we ‘die.’

Furthermore, both scientists argue that what humans perceive as ‘consciousness’ is, in fact, the result of ‘quantum gravity’ effects located within the so-called ‘microtubules.’ This process is named after the two scientists as “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” (Orch-OR).

The theory indicates that when people enter a phase known as ‘clinical death,’ the microtubules located in the brain lose their quantum state but maintain the information contained within them. In other words – as experts explain it, after people die, their soul returns to the universe, and it does not die’.

Speaking to the Science Channel’s "Through the Wormhole" documentary, Dr. Hameroff said:

“Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing; the microtubules lose their quantum state. The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, and it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says 'I had a near-death experience.' If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

For me, this very scientific explanation comes as close as humanly possible to taking some of the mystery out of the subject. When we die our soul lives on universally in the form of microtubules from our computer-like brain that carry with them the critical essence of who we were in previous life.

That is really all I need to know.

I can now make realistic correlations to Biblical teachings.