Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The Wizard of Oz: Does this new heart come with a soul?

Out of the two chapters in this section I found the first chapter to be more interesting. The main point of chapter eight is based on the discussion of how a dead person is classified, or deemed  dead or alive. I found that I agree with the legal definition that brain-death classifies as death. What interested me was the study done by Dr. Duncan MacDougall about the weight of the soul and how bodies of the recently deceased suddenly lose a significant amount of weight that is hard to contribute to an other cause. However, the study sheds no light on to whether a person who is brain-dead should be classified as dead. I believe that a brain-dead person is in fact dead because most of our soul comes from our mind and thought, and without the brain even the part of the soul that we attribute to the heart, such as gut feelings or unexplained compassion for people, is useless without the brain. The U.S. Army experiment brings up the possibility that the soul is connected through our cells no matter how far, which relates to the heart transplant patients with changed personalities, but I believe that to be a coincidence just like the patients who thought they were having some sort of soul assimilation with the previous heart owner, of whom Dr. Oz spoke about. Those patients turned out to be wrong most of the time. The mental trauma of having another person's heart is probably the cause of that.
 


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