If a body is just a vessel to contain a soul, then why do we need to die for the soul to come out? Well, you may talk of astral projection. But has anyone realy ever 'committed suicide' by simply leaving the empty body behind, in a never-returning astral projection? I don't think so! However, in a good theory of afterlife, there is a straight foward answer to this question, which you will see. There is no need for 'soul', if you understand 'soul' as 'non-physical entity that can survive death'.
Now consider the following analogy: consider someone holding a rope ready to create a wave in it. Holding one end of the rope, he raises his hand. Let the raised thing be analogous to a living thing. Then let the lowered thing be analogous to a dead thing. Now if the person immediately lowers the hand while still holding the rope, a pulse is generated that moves along the rope, as shown above. So when the hand is lowered, the part of the rope just next to the hand get raised. When that part of the rope is lowered too,the part that is still ahead is raised, and this is how the pulse moves. So when the hand 'dies', the 'life' (the act of being raised) immediately gets propagated along the rope. But this rule is far more general and will explain why a 'soul' only moves 'out of the body' once you die. So have in mind the 'wave' analogy.
Now take a look at how electromagnetic wave 'looks' like:
Note that in practice, these 'lines' should not be seen as lines at all. This is because space, not beeing empty, contains particles that are capable of being charged. Infact they get polarized. So in the real space, the 'field lines' looks like in the figure below:
Which when you zoom it looks like this:
And it is so even in 'totaly empty' space, s phenomenon termed 'vacuum polarization'. Vacuum is composed of combined matter and antimatter that have 'annihilated' each other. Electromagnetic field repolarizes it as if to partially seperate the matter and antimatter. But now visualizing the electromagnetic wave as an alignment of polarized matter-antimatter, compare electromagnetic wave with axon potential along your nerve:
Combining all these knowledge and premises shows that 'empty space' has all the properties that can make it behave exactly like neurones! This shows that awarenes can abide in space and moves like a wave. All what is neaded is merely to generate a pattern in space that exactly looks like the brain's axon potentials. But this can easily be done. Electromagnetic waves can form as complex patterns as there can be. This is how all the complex scenario in your TV get transmitted to your receiver. As complex a thing as to look exactly like an image of say a human being must somehow be getting 'moved' through apparently empty space.
There appears to be one last catch: the electromagnetic wave seems to spread. So if the undulations in your nerves copies the nerve itself into the 'empy space' as electromagnetic wave, such a 'brain' will seem to 'spread' into oblivion! However, it is never a must that waves spread. Infact, EM waves rarely spreads. Waves normally moves as 'wave packets', which never spread. In fact this is how physicists understands how waves can behave like particles, especially in Quantum Field Theory. This is how wavepackets moves:
So a 'soul' can be simply understood as a 'wave of brain'! All the complexities of brain is encoded as nothing but the complex shapes in a wavepacket. Essentially, it is wavepackets in wave packets in wavepackets, and so forth.
But now since it moves at speed of light, how does it slow? The answer is that the electromagnetic wave is never much different from the waves that cobstitute these other particles, eg electrons, which can move at any speed, or even stand still. Infact, electron can be understood as light that has merely interacted with higs field to 'acquire mass'.
So we see that science alone, if we think very carefully, can explain 'soul' and 'reincarnation'. The popular belief that it can't is based more on prejudices and stereotypes than on careful thinking and analysis. It has become just a custom that 'there are some things that science should not be considering it carefully'. Or that 'science should just dismiss some claims', without giving it any thought. Furthermore, the human, inate desire 'not to know some things' is prevalent even amongst scientists!
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And yes, we can even apply technology. Notice that we can combine holography with the idea of '3d printing' as a perfect way of creating clones, like I have hinted above. Essentially the projected image is a literal light body. However, due to a phenomenon called 'pair production' we can '3d print' a body from an hologram!!
So reincarnation is a concept which, even if it is not there, we can invent it!!!!
Now, to understand what I mean, even better, consider the fact that light is an EM wave and that wherever there is an EM field, there is what is called 'vacuum polarization'. With this in mind, ask, what would it happen if we were to take the hologram of the entire brain, even including the interior and reproduce it at the other side as an 'image'. Then 'thinking' will be like a 'movie' on the 'projected image'. However, you should note that this is more than image of the brain, it is an EXACT BRAIN reconstructed at the other end!! Why, because 'vacuume polarization' creats real charges the moves exactly like in the brain, wherever there is light. This means an hologram of the entire brain takes the consciousness itself to 'the other end'!!
Now, there one more catch, I talked of. To reconstruct an image, we need to 'refocus' the light that has spread around. The hologram reconstruction is meant to reverse the effect cause by the fact that the wave in question is not moving like a 'wave-packet'. The wave packets comming from the points would not need any hologram reconstructions to creat an 'image' at a place far away from the brain.
'Soul' normally has more than one meaning. In one of them (the one I like), Soul is the unseen part of us that can go on to live even after the seen body dies. This is the original definition and is much more open ended. The ancient people could not have meant 'the unphysical' in such a way as to exclude such phenomena as electromagnetic fields. This is for 2 reasons:
1.) They did not know much about EM fields
2.)They thought wind was a good candidate for 'soul'
So soul is not 'the immaterial' in the modern sense because 'immaterial' or 'non-physical' is ill-defined and 'physical/material' often means anything a scientist is interested with, regardless whether the scientist understands it or not!! So the modern definition merely removed 'science' out of it!!! If scientists begine to believe in soul, they will say 'a soul is more than that'. They will keep moving the goal post away so 'science' may never talk of 'soul'.
This 'moving of goal post' is actually spear-headed by sceptic to discredit any ideas such as 'soul'. However, in great imprudence, the 'new ager' has adopted this sceptic behaviour oblivious of the fact that it was meant to undermine 'soul' and almost everything they believe in!
It became clear that matter, as understood by science, was not all there is. This should have once and for all established that what they called 'immaterial' was real. However, they opted to concoct anothet notion as 'un-physical' that means anything except what might underpin 'soul' scientifically. They merely redefined 'soul' to be incapable of being discovered scientifically, careing far less on the original property desired, which is just 'survival after death'.
All this makes pple blind to anything, knowable by science, that shows that life can easily go on even after death!