incorporeal as neutrinos, and there is something like a “soul,” we should be
able to devise a way to detect it.
How Would you Detect a Soul?
We know a soul has to be capable of storing information. It can’t be as small
as a single particle, like the hard-to-find neutrino, since the amount of
information that a single particle can “store” would probably be limited. The
sum of who we are, our memories of our lives and loved ones—all this
information is somehow retained after death (unless the soul is reincarnated,
in which case the memories are lost but karma is retained). Christian
doctrine (like classical and ancient Egyptian) envisages a resurrected body,
presumably which the soul would then re-inhabit. But in the meantime, it
would need to be somewhere, as a rotting brain cannot sustain the electrical
impulses necessary to sustain consciousness or memory. Death is like
having your computer’s hard drive and CPU melt.
So we know a soul must have mass/energy in order to preserve information.
It should be considerably smaller than the human brain, but how much
smaller is up for speculation. Many of our brain’s functions would not be
needed by a soul, like the need to regulate temperature, heartbeat and
respiration. I assume a soul would have some means of sensing things,
otherwise you would be blind, mute, deaf, and without the sensation of
touch or taste. That wouldn’t be much of an afterlife, frankly, so let’s
assume (as do our four major religions) that you get all those things back in
a new body (either through resurrection or reincarnation), and the soul only
needs the memories and personality (and/or karma). So until you get your
new body, you are like software without a computer: you can run a lot of
systems (your senses), but if there is nothing to run them on, you sit in the
box… maybe you mentally compose really boring poetry while you wait?
The average brain is about 1.5 kg, with a volume of about 1130 cm 3. How
much storage capacity this evidences is highly debated and frankly is very
uncertain as we still don’t understand how memories are stored within the
P a g e | 151