Perhaps it would be better if this article didn't exist at all. Not long ago, a relative of mine passed away 😞, and this sad event triggered the writing of this article.
Recently, I watched a video about modern medical capabilities 💉 and the revival of people after cardiac arrest. In addition to the states of a living person and a dead one, there was another intermediate state introduced, called clinical death. The period for saving people in this condition has been increasing every year 📈, and while it used to be just a few minutes, technology 🔬 has now allowed this time to be extended to several hours. Paradoxically, the channel is called "It Has Already Happened," implying that the technologies of the future are already at work. Perhaps this is true somewhere, but likely far away, and probably only in laboratory conditions. It was precisely these "arrived" technologies that my relative needed to stay alive, as the doctors arrived a bit too late 🚑, but certainly not by several hours.
This sad story led me to the conclusion that while girls 🙎♀️ are often too gullible and naive, men 👨💼 tend to overestimate the concept of the "stronger sex." Strong does not mean healthy. Guys won't go to the clinic due to their ego and unwillingness to take precautions at the first signs of trouble. It's not a royal 🤨 thing for men to visit clinics and hospitals.
I have never seen as many superstitions as at funerals 🕯. Similarly, I have never heard the word "soul" used as much as at funerals ⚰️. About ten years ago, I still had doubts and allowed for the presence of God in the universe, but as I studied space and physics, my faith gradually diminished. Although I am not a superstitious person, I won't comment on that, but I felt compelled to reflect on the concept of the soul 👤, which was often discussed during those days.
Does the concept of a soul exist? I think not. However, the concept of character 🤌 does exist, and that is what we understand when we mention the word "soul." While the most devout people 🛐 truly believe in the soul as a separate entity that flies off somewhere after death, no one can show exactly where that is. If they do show it, it is often just into space at some arbitrary point 🥴. Logically speaking, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Although that speed is significant within the confines of our planet, it is quite small on a cosmic scale. Accordingly, if there is a "heaven" somewhere in the far reaches of the universe, the soul would take at least 13 billion years to get there (which is the age of the universe and its observable size). Character, whatever it may be, is merely the reactions of neurons 🧠 to the surrounding world. Everyone reacts differently to the world and the people in it because we all have different settings for our "scales." I borrowed the term “scales / weighting coefficients” ⚖ from computer neural networks. But let's not forget that the principle of operation of a computer "neural network" is based on the workings of the brain, only with significantly fewer neurons. In other words, neural networks 🪢 are a simplified version of the brain. So, I believe that no soul exists, but there are neurons that respond to the surrounding world. In the case of a person's death, they cannot be brought back to life precisely due to the death of neurons. Scientifically, this is called "necrosis." This occurs because oxygen does not reach the cells, which is known as "hypoxia." In the case of the brain, it is referred to as "cerebral hypoxia" or "brain hypoxia." Many organs can be restarted, but what’s the point if the so-called "soul" begins to actively decompose just 5-30 minutes after death (depending on the temperature)?
Although the scientific community does not use the term "soul," I had to dig a bit 📑 not only into what happens to the brain after death but also into whether there have been attempts to prove the existence of the soul from a scientific 🔬 perspective. If we filter out all the dubious websites in the Russian-speaking internet with unfounded studies (including foreign ones), we can stumble upon truly interesting research 🤔 by the Soviet and Russian scientist Konstantin Georgievich Korotkov. He continued the work of Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, who identified the emergence of radiant glow 💡 from living objects in a high electromagnetic field. This phenomenon is known as Kirlian photography. Korotkov studied the changes in the glow emitted by the body of a deceased person in his research on corpses. He took Kirlian photographs 🎇 of bodies a few hours after death and subjected them to computer processing. The conclusion of this research was that the indicators of oscillatory processes (ups and downs) in the deceased manifested similarly to those in living organisms. However, the amplitudes of the oscillations varied for different subjects for some reason. This also depended on the manner of death (peaceful, sudden, or unexpected). Korotkov concluded that not only is the physical body of a person real, but so is their energetic-informational 🔋 structure. There is a close connection between the two, and the post-mortem separation does not occur instantaneously but sequentially. And if a person is biologically dead—showing all signs of vital organ failure—their energetic essence continues to live. However, it is not possible to determine where it goes afterward 🤷♂️. The interest in this field of medicine is primarily related to the fact that, thanks to similar studies (Kirlian), it is possible to predict potential diseases 🤕 in living people with some probability. However, the research aimed at identifying the soul has not proven its existence. The energy of a person is not the soul; it is more like some gradually fading biological reactions in a slowly decomposing body. Later, the scientist himself responded to the question about the discovery of the soul: “I would refrain from making such categorical statements. The experiments I conducted are more of an invitation for other researchers…”
Continuing the topic of the soul, I want to reflect on heaven and hell and whether anything ends up there. Let's start with the question: "What distinguishes us from other beings?" Perhaps it's the awareness that we exist. But we don't even know for sure if some animals possess the same skill, as they can understand the loss of an individual in their group 🦍. In other words, I am hinting that biologically, animals 🦧 are not fundamentally different from humans. They are simply less evolved beings with fewer neural connections, but they share a lot in common with humans. According to Christian doctrine, a human's "soul" goes to heaven, while that of animals does not. Is that logical? Where is the line, according to the church's logic, that determines which living beings are allowed in and which are not? After all, both primates and whales 🐋, along with many other species, possess extremely high intelligence. So I believe that no soul exists at all. And nothing goes anywhere after death.
It's hard to cope with loss, knowing that the soul goes to heaven after death, but it's even harder when you think/know that no soul or afterlife exists, and that death is the end.
With a decent understanding of physics and, especially, astronomy, I could write a lengthy article that would surely present dozens of arguments against the existence of 🙅♂️ God, but that is not the topic of this article. And besides, I don't want to take away from readers the most important thing—their beliefs. If religion is useless, faith can give a person strength, regardless of whether that faith is in religion.
I started this article with technologies that, unfortunately, did not save my relative, but now I will return to them again, as I still believe that technologies 🧬 will radically change our lives in the future. I think we are living in the wrong time. Of course, compared to our ancestors, at least we will leave behind records in databases and numerous photos/videos. In the future, hundreds or even thousands of years from now, when scientists can thoroughly study the human brain, humanity will learn to create a complete copy of the brain. They will digitize it and upload it to some network so that the "brain" 🤖 can continue to live and develop independently of whether it has a body or not. This brain will understand whether it is in a human body or in a virtual environment, but it will be able to have meaningful conversations with relatives, connect at any moment, even initiate contact, and remember everything that happened to it before. Humanity will learn to transfer such virtual brains into real bodies, using stem cells, into bodies identical to those that existed before. Part of this "has already begun," but that's a whole different story.
