The Weight Of The Soul, Or The 21 Gram Experiment
For centuries, Western culture has harbored, among its repertoire of ideas and beliefs about the afterlife, the assumption that the essence of human beings is found in an immaterial substance that we usually call soul
The soul is a concept as mysterious as it is imprecise and confusing, and that is why it is so disdained by science, in charge of describing nature based on small observations and prudent assumptions, and used by religions, which very ambitiously appeal to the great mysteries that from an immaterial world seem to guide the order of the cosmos.
However, at the beginning of the 20th century a doctor named Duncan MacDougall set out to break this logic by search for evidence about the existence of the incorporeal essence of human beings in a simple experiment based on the use of scales. The idea from which this researcher started was that if the soul left any type of trace in the body that had housed it, it had to be found at the moment of death, which is when it leaves the body to move to another plane of the universe. reality. For this reason, he maintained that the death of people not only entails the disappearance of voluntary movements and the cessation of mental activity, but also had repercussions on the weight of the body.
A body that lacked the essence that defined it as something human, with intentions and will: the soul.
MacDougall wanted to weigh the soul, to compress millennia of statements about the afterlife into the discreet movement of a needle. This was what led him to maintain that the physical embodiment of the existence of the soul could be found in, more or less, 21 grams of difference
How was the 21 gram experiment carried out?
Duncan MacDougall wanted to collect his evidence about the existence of the human soul using as an instrument a complex system of scales incorporated into a type of bed. In this way, he convinced six dying people to spend their last hours in that type of structure, which allowed him to record the weight of their bodies from a few hours before their deaths until just after
From these results, MacDougall concluded that the soul weighs approximately 21 grams, which is the variation he was able to observe through his research. This statement had a considerable impact on the press, which through New York Times The news was reported even before a version of it appeared in academic journals. Thus, the idea that the soul could weigh about 21 grams has taken strong root in popular culture, which explains why references to this experiment appear in musical pieces, novels and films the most notable being 21 Grams by director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
The controversy
While it is true that the New York Times article about Duncan MacDougall and the weight of the soul had a lot of impact, it is also true that it was not unanimously received positively. The scientific community at that time was already extremely distrustful of experimental forays into the realm of the supernatural, and the 21 gram experiment was based on ideas that directly violated the principle of parsimony, used in science to indicate that explanations to an objective fact should be as simple as possible. That is why The results obtained by this doctor divided the public into two polarized positions
To reinforce his results, MacDougall carried out a variant of the experiment using dogs, to reach the conclusion that there was no change in the weight of these animals before and after death, which would indicate that, as held by certain religious beliefs, Non-human animals lack souls. As expected, This only added fuel to the fire
Does this sound reasonable?
MacDougall hoped to take advantage of the (at that time) recent technological advances and the refinement of the scientific method to access a type of knowledge that for millennia had been unattainable for humanity, but that is related to a plane of existence associated with the eternal. , the essence of human beings and, in general, entities that inhabit what lies beyond the realm of the physical. Considering that, It is not surprising that the conclusions he reached were so incendiary
On the one hand, the 21 gram experiment talks about dogmas, questions of faith, the essence of humanity and certain elements related to the realm of the sacred On the other, it seemed to be an instrument for blurring the boundaries of what can and should be studied scientifically. The simple fact that MacDougall wanted to investigate the soul through the scientific method was provocative, and many researchers were quick to point out a host of methodological flaws in the procedures Duncan followed.
However, beyond the consideration of the many errors that were made during the experiments, other fundamental philosophical questions remained: Is not learning about the immaterial and mysterious world the most ambitious type of knowledge that science can achieve? Doesn’t the fact that the nature of the human soul has been discussed for millennia make this subject a particularly interesting topic for the scientific community?
The answer is no
In retrospect, and from what is known about the experiments carried out by Duncan MacDougall, it is evident that the large number of methodological flaws make We can’t even take seriously the claim that bodies lose about 21 grams when they die However, what makes these investigations only have value as historical curiosity are not these errors, but the objectives towards which they aimed.
The soul does not weigh 21 grams
To give an explanation about a process linked to the physical world, one cannot appeal to the immaterial world but rather look for answers in the nature that surrounds us.
This is what the doctor Augustus P. Clarke did, for example, who linked weight loss to increased sweating right after death , due in turn to the general heating of the body as the organs responsible for ventilation, that is, the lungs, do not function. In turn, Clarke pointed out the fact that dogs do not have sweat glands spread throughout their bodies, which would explain why there was no change in their weight after death.
Of course, the very definition of the concept of soul is very plural, conflictive and contains many contradictions (how can something incorporeal live inside the body of living beings?). However, what makes its study not the task of science is the fact that when we talk about the soul We are talking about something that has no physical entity and, therefore, it can neither be measured nor modified by what happens to the body.
If we assume that an extraordinary claim needs to be supported by equally extraordinary evidence, we will see that there is an obvious leap of faith that goes from the observation of a change in weight to the idea that this is due to the soul having left the body. . In fact, in the case of concluding that the 21 grams serve as evidence that there is a supernatural entity that inhabits people, rather than offering an explanation for the observed fact, we will be doing exactly the opposite: creating a practically infinite number of questions that do not exist. can be answered based on more empirical verifications.
After death, what are we left with?
The difference of 21 grams that Duncan MacDougall recorded was intended to be much more than a justification for what led to the experiment (detecting a change in weight before and after death) but rather It was proposed as a window to the world beyond The hypothesis that was to be tested could only be sustained on a system of religious beliefs accumulated over centuries, and it lost all meaning when separated from it to be placed under the magnifying glass of the scientific method.
However, while it is true that the 21 gram experiment has no scientific value, it has shown extraordinary robustness in surviving in the collective imagination of society. This is probably because the beliefs about the soul that MacDougall had a hundred years ago are still very valid today.
N Our cultural background makes us pay more attention to an apparently scientific article that confirms our beliefs than a 200-page book written decades ago that talks about why science is only concerned with talking about material-based processes. The scientific mentality may have many tools to perpetuate itself, but it is still not as seductive as certain ideas about the afterlife.
