The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine. The following debate between Deepak Chopra and Michael Shermer came about after the widely read and referenced debate the two had last year on the virtues and value of skepticism. Deepak has a new book out on the subject, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof (Harmony, 2. ISBN 0. 30. 73. 45. Michael has written extensively about claims of evidence for the afterlife, so the two of them thought it would be stimulating to have a debate on the topic. Michael read Deepak’s book and goes first in the debate, offering his assessment of the “proofs” presented in Deepak’s book, then Deepak responds.

• Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. Easily share your publications and get.
• In Greek mythology, a phoenix (Ancient Greek: φοῖνιξ phoînix; Latin: phoenix, phœnix, fenix) is a long-lived bird that is cyclically regenerated or born again.
• This debate between Deepak Chopra and Michael Shermer came about after the widely read and referenced debate the two had last year on the virtues and value of skepticism.
• Bhogar receiving instructions from his teacher, Kālāngi Nāthar: Bhogar, traversing the sky, observes faraway places like Arabia, Rome, and China.

Shorter blog- length versions are published on www. Huffington. Post. Blog. com. Hope Springs Eternal: Science, the Afterlife & the Meaning of Life. Michael Shermer. I once saw a bumper sticker that read: Militant Agnostic: I Don’t Know and You Don’t Either. This is my position on the afterlife: I don’t know and you don’t either.

Philippe Caroit, Actor: R.I.S. Police scientifique. Philippe Caroit was born on September 29, 1959 in Paris, France. He is an actor and director, known for R.I.S.

I. NAME The word "Matins" ( Latin Matutinum or Matutinae), comes from Matuta, the Latin name for the Greek goddess Leucothae or Leucothea, white goddess, or. At the beginning of this month, when I realized that there were going to be five Wednesdays in August rather than the usual four, I asked readers of this blog what. Kurdish (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is a collection of related dialects spoken by the Kurds. It is mainly spoken in those parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Define curse: a prayer or invocation for harm or injury to come upon one : imprecation; a profane or obscene oath or word — curse in a sentence.

If we knew for certain that there is an afterlife, we would not fear death as we do, we would not mourn quite so agonizingly the death of loved ones, and there would be no need to engage in debates on the subject. Because no one knows for sure what happens after we die, we deal with the topic in diverse ways through religion, literature, poetry, science, and even humor.

The perpetually anxious Woody Allen has this workaround: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Steven Wright thinks he’s figured out a solution: “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.”.

Humor aside, since I am a scientist and claims are made that there is scientific evidence for life after death, let us analyze the data for that doubtful future date, and consider what its possibility may mean for our present state. Grams: The Nature of the Soul. What is it that supposedly survives the death of the physical body? The soul. There are about as many different understandings of the nature of the soul as there are religions and spiritual movements. The general belief is that the soul is a conscious ethereal substance that is the unique essence of a living being that survives its incarnation in flesh. The ancient Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, or “life” or “vital breath”; the Greek word for soul is psyche, or “mind”; and the Roman Latin word for soul is anima, or “spirit” or “breath.” The soul is the essence that breathes life into flesh, animates us, gives us our vital spirit. Given the lack of knowledge about the natural world at the time these concepts were first formed, it is not surprising these ancient peoples reached for such ephemeral metaphors as mind, breath, and spirit.

One moment a little dog is barking, prancing, and wagging its tail, and in the next moment it is a lump of inert flesh. What happened in that moment? In 1. 90. 7 a Massachusetts physician named Duncan Mac. Dougall tried to find out by weighing six dying patients before and after their death. He reported in the medical journal American Medicine that there was a 2. Even though his measurements were crude and varying, and no one has been able to replicate his findings, it has nonetheless grown to urban legendary status as the weight of the soul. The implication is that the soul is a thing that can be weighed.

Is it? In science we define our terms with semantic precision. I define the “soul” as the unique pattern of information that represents the essence of a person. By this definition, unless there is some medium to retain the pattern of our personal information after we die, our soul dies with us. Our bodies are made of proteins, coded by our DNA, so with the disintegration of DNA our protein patterns are lost forever.

Our memories and personality are stored in the patterns of neurons firing in our brains, so when those neurons die it spells the death of our memories and personality, similar to the ravages of stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, only final. Because the brain does not perceive itself, it imputes mental activity to a separate source — hallucinations of preternatural entities such as ghosts, angels, and aliens are perceived as actual beings; out- of- body and near- death experiences are sensed as external events instead of internal states. Likewise, the neural pattern of information that is our memories and personality — our “self” — is sensed as a soul.

In this sense, the soul is an illusion. Can Science Save Us? There are many scientistic scenarios for how we might cheat death that I have evaluated in my books and columns, but here I wish to focus on the latest claim for evidence of an afterlife presented in Deepak Chopra’s 2. Life After Death: Burden of Proof. According to Chopra, there are six lines of evidence that convince him that the soul is real and eternal.

Near- Death Experiences and Altered States of Consciousness. There are thousands of people who have been pronounced dead, usually from heart attacks, who are subsequently resuscitated and report experiencing some aspect of the afterlife — floating out of their bodies, passing through a tunnel or white light, and seeing loved ones or witnessing God, Jesus, or some manifestation of the divine on the other side. If these patients were brain dead, then their conscious “self,” their “soul,” must survive the death of the body. ESP and Evidence of Mind.

Here Chopra relies on psi research in remote viewing and telepathy, in which subjects locked in a room alone can apparently receive images from senders in another room without the use of the five senses. The Chase Full Movie Part 1 on this page. Quantum Consciousness. The study of the actions of subatomic particles through quantum mechanics produces what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” where the observation of a particle in one location instantaneously effects a related particle at another location (which could theoretically be in another galaxy), in apparent violation of Einstein’s upper limit of the speed of light. Chopra takes this to mean that the universe is one giant quantum field in which everything (and everyone) is interconnected and can influence one another directly and instantly. Deepak and others also apply quantum mechanics to the study of consciousness to explain how the brain represents the entire tangible world through biochemical signals. Watch The Subjects Online Hulu.

Through quantum consciousness “we may find out how the brain might create subtler worlds, the kind traditionally known as heaven. If the secret lies not in brain chemistry but in awareness itself, the afterlife may turn out to be an extension of our present life, not a faraway mystical world.”. Psychic Mediumship and Talking to the Dead. Deepak reviews the extensive studies on psychic mediums and their apparent ability to communicate with the dead, and then reveals that he participated in an experiment in which contact was apparently made with his father, whose recent death triggered his research and writing of this book. Prayer and Healing Studies.

Chopra discusses research on distant intercessory prayer, in which patients who are prayed for from a distance by strangers appear to get well faster and more often than non- prayed for patients. This implies that action at a distance through thought alone — whether through the intervention of a deity or through some cosmic force — is real, can be manifested, and connects us to the cosmos and everything in it.

Information Fields, Morphic Resonance, and the Universal Life Force.