of the universe from space and land based telescopes. We also spend money on medical research, drug research, climatological research, and the list goes on and on. Surely, a bit of money could be spared to find something considered as fundamental as a soul? Especially since such a large segment of the population believes in one. With so many believers, you would think that it should be a politically popular project, like decoding the human genome or curing cancer.
Why doesn’ t it happen? Well there’ s an easy explanation, and you can verify it using a very simple example of game theory. What will people do when faced with the following situation? The purpose of the game is to have the most followers. You have 10 followers. If you take action A( verifying the soul), you will gain 2 adherents if A is positive, but lose 5 followers if it’ s negative. Or you take Option B, where you do nothing and neither lose nor gain followers. Which option do you choose?
Now, if you had a high degree of confidence in finding a soul, you would expect that course to be pursued. But it’ s not. Not by the Catholic Church or the Southern Baptists, not by the Mormons, not by the Hindus or the Muslims, not by anyone. When you ask a believer about it, you find the concept of the soul slipping into the same“ non-existence” realm as God now inhabits. There has been no change of religious doctrine, but religious believers don’ t even want to risk looking for something that might not be there. I can imagine a Christian or Muslim televangelist being asked about it, and responding something like this:“ I know a soul exists because the Bible / Koran tells me it does, so I don’ t need anyone to find it and tell me about it.” But for those for whom religion does not provide a livelihood, the response may be a bit different.
There is no reasonable argument against the proposition that if a soul exists, we should be able to detect it or its effect on the human brain when it collects information. It has to have some degree of physical interaction with the neurons in our brains; a way to download our memories and personality and store the information. Even if it were to be conceded that a soul existed outside of our three spatial dimensions, like God, there would still have to be
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