All language subtitles for Through.the.Wormhole.S02E01.720p.HDTV.x264-DIVERGE.HI

What happens when we die?

Do we simply cease to be?

Or do we survive
in some form?

What is it that makes us
unique, conscious beings?

It's the greatest mystery
of existence,

a problem seemingly too big
for science to solve.

But today,
a cluster of biologists,

physicists, and philosophers

are closing in on the answer
to the ultimate question.

Is there life after death?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos
lie through the wormhole.

♪ Through the Wormhole 02x01 ♪
Is There Life After Death?
Original Air Date on June 7, 2011

== sync, corrected by elderman ==

Is death the end?

Eternal silence?

Blackness?

Nothingness?

Or is there a spark inside of us

that lives on
beyond our physical selves?

Philosophers and scientists
have puzzled over that question

for thousands of years.

It's the great mystery --

one that, sooner or later,
we all have to face.

One morning
when I was 6 years old,

my grandmother didn't wake up --

then or ever again.

It was my first experience
with death.

How could she be here yesterday
but gone today?

Was she gone forever?

Or did some essential part
of her live on?

Christians and muslims believe
in a heaven for the just

and a hell for sinners.

Other religions see death
as a transition

to an existence
on the higher plane

or to another life
here on earth.

All of these beliefs
have one thing in common --

the body is just a vessel
for the soul,

and the soul is eternal.

This is something many believe
in their hearts,

but is there a way to prove it
or disprove it scientifically?

Eben Alexander taught
and performed neurosurgery

at the Harvard Medical School
for 15 years.

In 2008, his career took
an unexpected turn --

one that would give him
profound insight

into the possibility
of life after death.

He contracted an extremely rare
form of bacterial meningitis

and fell into a deep coma.

I think if you were trying
to come up

with an experimental model

that would best approach
human death,

meningitis is perfect
because what it does

is it attacks the entire
outer surface of the brain.

These are horizontal images
taken through my skull,

and you can see the entire
outer surface of the brain

was coated with pus.

These bacteria had gotten rid
of all the glucose,

and now the only thing left
to consumer were my brain cells,

and so my entire neocortex --

that part of the brain
that makes us human --

was completely shut down.

Freeman: After seven days
of virtual brain death,

Alexander emerged from the coma.

Miraculously, within a month,
he was back to normal.

But something happened to him
while he was away.

My first recollection
from deep inside the coma

was that I was --

it's what I sometimes call the
earthworm-eye view of the world.

Everything was kind of murky,
brown, red, dark.

I literally remember roots
over my head.

And I seemed to be there
for a very, very long time.

I had no memory whatsoever
of my life.

No words --
my language was gone.

I was certainly not aware
of anything going on around me

in the I.C.U. room.

And then, in the midst of that,

there was a little melody that
was spinning in front of me.

And it just started spinning
and expanded,

and it ended up clearing away

all that ugly, foreboding,
gross, muddy realm.

And all of a sudden,

I was coming up
into this beautiful meadow.

I had no body awareness.

I had no arms, legs,
or anything,

but I was aware that I was
a speck on a butterfly wing --

absolutely beautiful butterfly.

And there were millions
of other colorful butterflies

looping and swirling
all around us,

all in this beautiful formation
of flying.

And then we left this Universe

and went out
into what I now call the core.

At first, it seemed
infinitely huge and dark,

although I was there

with that beautiful,
warm awareness of the divine,

which was clearly
what we would call God

in this place
outside the Universe.

Basically,
I recall the whole multiverse

being out in front of me.

It was very clear that love
was a huge part

of the constituent
of that whole multiverse.

Freeman:
Alexander had faced something

that tens of thousands of people
have reported --

a near-death experience.

Nearly all claim something

that science has so far
been unable to prove --

that there is another existence
beyond the one we know.

Dr. Alexander:
This was something

that was very difficult
for me to explain

from a neuroscientific
standpoint,

and the scientific side of me
could not see how that could be,

and yet it was
a very, very powerful --

very powerful memory.

I came up with several models
having to do

with the neurophysiology
and neuroanatomy.

And the problem is none of those
models sufficiently explain

the very powerful memories
that I brought back with me

from this experience.

And I ended up at a point
where I do not believe

that there is a good
neurophysiologic explanation

for what happened to me.

Freeman:
Eben Alexander's experience

was profound and life-altering.

But it is by no means unique.

Bruce Greyson is a psychiatrist

at the University of Virginia
School of Medicine.

He has investigated
more than 1,000 cases

of near-death experiences.

The consistent features
of a near-death experience

are a sense of profound peace
and well-being,

a sense of leaving
the physical body,

a sense of brilliant light

which seems to radiate warmth
and unconditional love.

Sometimes people report
encountering other beings,

including a deity of some kind.

Sometimes they identify
that deity as God or Christ,

and sometimes they don't.

They just say that there was

this all-powerful being
that they met.

Freeman: Many scientists dismiss
these experiences

as nothing more
than hallucinations

triggered by a brain undergoing
immense physical stress,

mostly due to the nerve cells
being deprived of oxygen.

Back in the 1970s,

experiments
by the U.S. Air Force

inadvertently tested this idea.

Scientists spun pilots
in a centrifuge,

subjecting their bodies
to massive g-forces.

It caused blood
to drain to their feet

and left their brains
starved for oxygen.

They invariably blacked out.

When they awoke, some pilots
reported seeing a bright light.

Others said
they left their bodies

and looked down at themselves
from above --

experiences similar
to those of people

who have been
to the brink of death,

but lacking one key feature.

In the period
when they were losing oxygen,

as they were
losing consciousness,

they had some features

which bear some similarities
to near-death experiences.

However, they certainly didn't
ever meet deceased loved ones

or other entities.

The problem with all of these
physiological explanations

is that they don't account
for the complex thinking,

the memory formation,
the perceptions that take place

when we know the brain

is not capable
of doing complex thinking.

Freeman:
Are near-death experiences

the final dream of a mind that's
about to wink out of existence?

Or are they a sign that there is
something beyond death?

Finding the truth
requires nothing less

than a scientific quest
to discover the human soul.

Is the soul a myth

or one of the fundamental
elements of the Universe?

For scientists,
the question of life after death

is inextricably linked
with another question.

What is consciousness?

Where does consciousness
come from?

And where does it go
when we die?

Dr. Stuart Hameroff
is the director

of consciousness studies at the
University of Arizona, Tucson.

He's also a practicing
anesthesiologist.

Under anesthesia,
patients don't dream --

even though I said,
"pick out a nice dream."

We always say that.
But there's no awareness.

There's no passage of time.
Patients wake up.

They don't know if they've been
asleep five minutes or five hours.

Anesthesia takes away
consciousness.

Brain under anesthesia
is quite active.

And the difference
is still somewhat mysterious.

Freeman: Years watching over
patients in the operating room

made Hameroff obsessed
with understanding the link

between brain activity
and consciousness.

Then, 15 years ago,

he met the great British
physicist, Sir Roger Penrose.

Together, they developed
a radical new theory

for how the brain works --

a theory that has grown
into nothing less

than a scientific argument
for an eternal soul.

At its root are tiny structures
inside our brain cells

called microtubules.

Dr. Hameroff:
If you look inside a cell,

you find these
structural components

that are somewhat like the bones
within our bodies.

The microtubules develop
literally a forest

inside each cell,

which determines
the architecture

and the structure of the cell.

And we think microtubules
are perfectly designed

to be the cell's
onboard computer

and process information
at the molecular level.

Freeman: Hameroff and Penrose
argue that microtubules

allow neurons
and the brain as a whole

to function
as a quantum computer,

performing operations
in a fundamentally different way

from normal computers.

Dr. Hameroff: So, here we have
a brain with two hemispheres.

Most views of the brain

are of a collection
of individual neurons.

When one neuron fires,

it sends a signal
to the next neuron at a synapse.

That, in turn,
causes that neuron to fire,

and that neuron causes
another neuron to fire,

much like dominoes.

So, for example,
if a neuron fires here,

it's gonna trigger
its neighbors to fire,

sending signals
through and around the brain.

That's the classical view
of how the brain works.

Freeman:
In a conventional computer,

signals move around
from place to place

along traceable paths.

But the microscopic components
of a quantum computer

are connected via a mysterious
process called entanglement.

Some of us think
that quantum processes

play an important role
in consciousness in the brain.

So, for example, if there's
neuronal activity here,

it may be coupled through
quantum non-locality

to processes over here.

These neurons are connected

even though
they're spatially separated

so that activity here

instantaneously affects
activity over here.

Freeman:
Hameroff and Penrose argue

that a change in the
microtubules in one brain cell

can affect microbules
in another.

But that's not all.

Quantum theory claims that
every single point in space,

even empty space,
can contain information.

In the very fine structure
of the universe,

there is information,
quantum information,

not unlike these dominoes,

so that we can have information
up or down, here and here,

but they're connected

so that something
that happens here

influences something here.

Freeman: This means the
information in the microtubules

can connect and become entangled

with the universe
outside the brain.

Dr. Hameroff:
So, just like these two neurons
may be entangled,

it's possible that the
information of consciousness,

of the whole brain,
is entangled

and can exist
in the universe at large.

Freeman:
According to Hameroff,

our souls are built
from something

much more fundamental
than neurons.

They are constructed from
the very fabric of the Universe.

Dr. Hameroff:
I think that consciousness
or its immediate precursor --

we'll call it
proto-consciousness,

has been in the Universe
all along,

perhaps from the Big Bang.

Freeman: All of this recalls
the Buddhist and Hindu belief

that consciousness is an
integral part of the Universe,

and perhaps it is all there is
in the Universe.

If consciousness
is a quantum process,

it may solve the mystery
of what happens

during near-death experiences.

Dr. Hameroff: Let's say
the heart stops beating,

the blood stops flowing,

the microtubules lose
their quantum state.

But the quantum information,
which is in the microtubes,

isn't destroyed.

It can't be destroyed.

It just distributes
and dissipates

to the Universe at large.

If the patient
is resuscitated, revived,

this quantum information can go
back into the microtubules,

and the patient says,
"I had a near-death experience.

"I saw white light.
I saw a tunnel.

"I saw my dead relatives.

I maybe even floated
out of my body."

Now, if they're not revived
and the patient dies,

then it's possible
that this quantum information

can exist outside the body,
perhaps indefinitely as a soul.

Freeman: Many scientists
find it difficult to believe

that the soul
is a quantum computer,

hard-wired into the cosmos.

But Hameroff feels that research
is slowly validating his claims.

Quantum effects
have recently been shown

to control several important
biological processes,

from bird navigation
to photosynthesis

to the human sense of smell.

Dr. Hameroff:
So far, nobody has landed
a serious blow to the theory.

We're still very viable,
and evidence continues --

new evidence continues
to support the ideas

that we put forth 15 years ago.

Freeman:
But the truth is

we still don't know
where consciousness comes from

or where it goes when we die.

If there was a way
to measure consciousness,

perhaps we could find
the answers to these questions.

That way may be coming soon,

as one scientist explores
the depths of our minds,

hoping to discover
the mysterious mental pattern

that makes us who we are.

The human brain
isn't very big --

3 pounds of soft tissue.

But it can generate ideas
that transform the world.

It can hold personalities
as diverse

as Martin Luther King
and Genghis Khan.

It even knows what it is.

It's self-aware.

We think it has a soul.

But where does that soul
come from?

Is consciousness
a product of the brain?

And can it outlive the brain?

Studying what happens to
the human brain when people die

is not easy.

Death rarely comes on cue.

But one aspect of death
comes to all of us every day.

Each night when we fall asleep,
our consciousness slips away.

Professor Giulio Tononi
of the University of Wisconsin

is studying
how our brains change

when they lose consciousness,

and in doing so,

he's hoping to unravel
the secret of what makes us us.

The simplest definition
of consciousness --

that which goes away when
you fall into dreamless sleep.

But the fact of the matter is,

the brain doesn't
shut off at all.

The neurons, the nerve cells,
are actually just as active,

in a sense,
as they are when you are awake.

So, it is an interesting
scientific question.

How would it be, then,
that you disappear

when your brain is still there
and buzzing along?

Freeman: Tononi believes
our level of awareness

is determined
by how much information

the different parts of our brain
share with each other.

An experience rich in detail

will generate highly complex
patterns in the brain,

creating unique shapes that
Tononi believes can be measured.

Every experience is essentially
like an extraordinary shape.

Just like a fire
with wonderful flames

is an extraordinary shape
that changes all the time.

Now, it's a shape
which is characterized

by something I would call
informational relationships.

But it's a shape
that shines of inner light.

The fire of consciousness
is a very special fire

that's generated
inside the brain,

and it requires a very special
set of ingredients

in order to be able
to burn and shine.

Freeman: But understanding
when that fire is lit

and when it is extinguished

is far more difficult than
simply reading a brain scan.

So Giulio Tononi built
an entire lab

dedicated to the unconscious
netherworld of dreamless sleep.

And he designed an experiment
to detect how the brain changes

when we lose consciousness.

It's the neurological equivalent

of knocking at the door
of a darkened house

to find out
whether anyone is home.

Tononi:
We use something called

transcranium
magnetic stimulation,

which is a way to inject
a little current in the brain

without having to open it up,

so in a perfectly innocuous way,

and then see how our
cerebral cortex reacts to it.

Freeman: First,
the team runs the experiment

on a volunteer who's awake.

A mesh of electrodes
will keep track

of all activity in his brain.

Now a small magnetic coil
is placed on his head.

At the flip of a switch,
it delivers a pulse of magnetism

lasting a tenth of a second
to his cerebral cortex.

The burst causes neurons
in a small patch of the brain

to fire,

and they, in turn,
send signals to other neurons,

making them fire, as well.

This complex pattern
of neural activity

spreads out to cover
about a third of the cortex

and lasts for almost
1/3 of a second.

The conscious brain reverberates
like a ringing bell.

Someone is definitely home.

But what happens
when he's unconscious?

Now that Brady is asleep,

we are going to
ring the bell again

and see how his brain responds
when -- after falling asleep.

Freeman:
Once again, the brain lights up.

But this time,
there is no reverberation.

The ring of the bell dies

as quickly as the pulse
of magnetism shuts off.

The sleeping brain
may be active,

but it has lost the ability
to share information

between one part of the brain
and another.

Tononi believes this
spreading of information

is the key ingredient
of consciousness.

The waking brain
keeps specialized areas

in constant conversation,

like a Cabinet meeting

with the Secretary of State,
Treasury, and Defense

all deciding
on a unified plan of action.

When the brain is asleep,
the meeting adjourns.

The specialists leave,
and nothing gets decided.

Why do you lose consciousness

when you are in deep sleep
early in the night?

The specialists that normally
do talk to each other

when you are awake --
they stop doing so.

There is some mechanism that
comes into place when you sleep

that makes the interaction

between the specialists
difficult.

And, in the end,

it looks like they can't
talk to each other anymore,

and not surprisingly, then,
you lose consciousness.

You're not there anymore.

Freeman: Tononi's ability
to tell the difference

between a brain that's conscious
and one that's not

may soon find application
in a medical setting,

assessing the level of awareness
of coma patients.

Tononi: One of the first things
you would want to know is,

is anybody home?

If that somebody is your wife
or your son or your mother

and you see the eyes are open

and you don't know
whether somebody's there,

maybe even suffering,
how do you go about that?

Freeman:
Giulio Tononi has found a way

to see consciousness
in the human brain,

but exactly how it arises amid
the complex web of neurons --

that remains a mystery at which
he can only begin to guess.

Tononi:
When one says that consciousness

requires a complex system
to support it,

in some sense,
that must be true.

But the Internet
is certainly very complex.

Another example,
you could also say

that a chess-playing program
is very complex.

So there are many things that
people intuitively call complex,

but only a few of them

seem to be able to give rise
to consciousness.

So what you need is
the right kind of complexity,

and only a few structures --
as far as I can tell --

can do that, can pull out
that extraordinary feat.

Our cortex, the cerebral cortex,

seems to be wired up
almost ideally

to achieve exactly that.

Freeman:
But is there a way to discover
the root of consciousness?

And is this sense
of self-awareness

the same as the soul?

This man thinks
he's found the human soul

and knows what happens to it
when we die.

What is the soul?

Is it a field of energy?

Is it something tangible?

Does it have weight?

In 1907,
Dr. Duncan MacDougall determined

that the soul weighs
about 3/4 of an ounce,

or 21 grams.

He determined this by weighing
the bodies of dying TB patients.

But in the 100 years since then,

no one has been able
to replicate his findings

because there doesn't seem
to be anything to weigh.

Could there be some elusive
substance that makes you you?

At the smallest levels
of existence,

all matter is made of atoms.

Earth has been recycling atoms
for billions of years.

Carbon moves
from trees to oceans

to the cells in our bodies.

Even the atoms of dead people
get reused.

This means that an atom
in your thigh bone

might have been part
of Cleopatra's lower lip.

And this recycling doesn't just
happen at the atomic level.

You are constantly rebuilding
yourself at the cellular level.

Your body produces 1 billion
new cells every hour.

No matter how old you are,

most of you is no more
than 10 years old.

Christof Koch is a Professor
of biology and engineering

at Caltech.

He believes
that what makes you you

has nothing to do with
individual atoms or cells.

He believes that "you" emerges
from the unique way

the cells in your brain
are organized.

The brain is the most complex
piece of matter

we know in the Universe.

The human brain typically
is on the order

of 100 billion nerve cells.

Each of those is a very
complicated entity by itself.

It's more like
a little computer,

interconnected to 10,000
to 100,000 other nerve cells.

Freeman: Separately,
these neurons aren't conscious.

But when they interact with
each other on a massive scale,

the result is
a self-aware network.

We believe
that consciousness emerges

out of the firing of millions
or possibly billions of neurons.

So that's what my soul is.

That's what my feelings,
my subjective feelings

of pain and pleasure
and of yearning are.

Freeman:
But if, as Koch believes,

who we are stems exclusively
from this fragile

and ever-changing network
of brain cells,

then there can be
no eternal you.

Koch:
We constantly change.

With each experience,
we change a little bit.

With some experiences,
we change more,

and with other experiences,
we change less.

So, that sense,
there's no constant.

And as we age, again,
my mind -- my body,

but also my personality
and my mind changes.

So, that sense,
there's no constant personality.

It's a changing construct
of the brain and by the brain.

Freeman: This view of the brain
is called materialism,

and Koch is its champion.

For materialists,

the soul is nothing more
than a fleeting illusion,

an illusion that cannot outlive

the physical network
from which it arises.

Once that
electrical traffic ceases

because the brain itself
doesn't work anymore

and the neurons stop firing,

then, also, the soul
will cease to exist.

Freeman: But renowned cognitive
scientist Douglas Hofstadter

is not so quick to dismiss the
possibility of life after death.

He believes the soul does not
disappear the moment we die.

Hofstadter: When I was
a graduate student in physics,

I had a professor
who I was very fond of

who was a religious person.

And he believed, to my shock
and surprise and confusion,

that inside the brain,

there were certain kinds
of particles

that we hadn't yet discovered

that gave rise
to soul and consciousness.

Freeman: Hofstadter took
a more scientific approach

to the brain.

He became a pioneer in modeling
complex mental processes.

He thinks about
how people think.

And what humans do best,
in his opinion,

is make mental maps
of the world around them.

The process
of perceiving a world

gives rise to internal
representations of everything.

You know, if I look
at this pepper shaker,

I have an internal model of it.

And I don't need to look at it

because I've seen it
so many times,

I have an internal model of it
that is stable.

Freeman:
All animals make mental maps.

The bigger the animal,
the more complex the map.

A bee knows the position
of the sun and its hive.

A manta ray learns to navigate

the convoluted web
of ocean currents.

A baboon must keep track

of the troop's
social pecking order.

Our maps are built

from a lifetime of objects
and people we've encountered...

And one other crucial element.

Hofstadter: We incorporate
not only the rest of the world,

but we incorporate
our own understanding

of who we are and what we are,

which includes
superficial, physical things

like the fact
that we have two hands

and five fingers on each hand,

what kind of sense of humor
we have,

whether we're good at throwing
free-throws in basketball

or hook shots.

And we create a concept
that reflects who we are.

Freeman: Hofstadter regards
this map of the world

that also includes a map
of the map-maker

as a mental feedback loop.

If you point a television camera
at a television screen

and then the screen
gets put onto itself,

et cetera, et cetera,

and you get a very complex
visual pattern --

the system itself
is perceiving itself.

To me, the soul is
an emergent process,

an emergent entity
that comes out of decades

of perception and feedback.

Freeman:
But this view of consciousness

has a shocking implication.

If the soul is just
a strange mental feedback loop,

then it should not be
unique to humans.

Any sufficiently smart network
should be able to experience it,

whatever it is made of.

Which is why
this latter-day Frankenstein

is planning to build a soul.

What he learns could point
the way to a life beyond death.

Religion tells us that our souls
transcend the body.

These are just shells that we
walk a around in for a while.

Most scientists
don't believe that.

They say
that what we call the soul

is a self-aware network
of brain connections

that evolved
over millions of years.

If that's true,

then what would happen if we
built a copy of the human brain?

Would it have a soul?

We're on the verge
of finding out.

And if the mystery of the mind

is something we can crack
computationally,

it would even give us
an escape route from death.

Around the world,
teams of researchers

are attempting to
reverse-engineer a human brain.

It's a tough job,
because for all our research,

the brain is still the most
complicated instrument

in the known Universe.

But mapping the brain
could take decades to complete,

which is why
some rebel scientists

have decided to harness
the firepower

inside living brain cells.

They're trying to crack
the secrets of the soul

by fusing biology
and technology,

taking bits of brain and mating
them to bits of hardware.

Most computer simulations

are limited
to very simplistic neurons.

What we have here
in our culture dishes

with real, live, wet,
squishy neurons

with all their complexity,

is immensely
much more complicated

than anything we can simulate
on today's computers.

Freeman:
Professor Steve Potter

of the Georgia Institute
of Technology

designs and builds brains --

brains that are
half-living, half-machine.

Potter's team takes neurons
cultured from rat embryos

then grows them on miniature
plates of electrodes.

Potter:
Here is a multi-electrode array
culture dish.

You can see some fluorescently
labeled neurons growing on it.

These are the electrodes

with leads heading off
to the electronics

that we use to record from
and stimulate the cells.

These are all the axons
and dendrites

that represent the connections
between the cells.

Those connections form

over the course of the first
four hours in culture.

You can see
on this time lapse here

connections forming.

So, those are
the synaptic connections

by which the neurons
talk to each other,

and we can film
that conversation in progress

using a calcium-sensitive dye
here.

So, here you can see
the cells flashing.

Every time the cell sends
a signal to another cell,

it has a little burst
of calcium.

Freeman:
When the brain has grown,

Potter send information to it
through the electrodes,

and the brain responds.

Those electrodes
are connected to a computer

that's wired up to a robot body,

resulting in a new form of life.

This is hybrot --

a robot controlled
by living brain tissue.

Its brains
are in a refrigerator,

but you can see its neurons
react on the computer screen

as its body finds its way
around the lab bench.

Like any animal,

the hybrot has experiences
and learns from them.

In this case, how to navigate
its environment.

So, the question is, could
a hybrot ever become conscious?

Whether or not we could ever get
to conscious cultured networks

is a question which I would say
we've already answered "yes."

We have culture dishes

that are receiving inputs
from the environment.

They're responding to them
in complicated ways.

So they're conscious
of their environment

in some very rudimentary
fashion.

Perhaps with
more complicated interactions

between different brain tissues

and between the computer
and the brain tissues,

we could get to something
that people would say

is a high-level cognition,
more like human consciousness.

Freeman: But if one day a hybrot
or a computer wakes up

and realizes what and who it is,

if a soul emerges
from those wires,

how would we know?

We'll have to rely
on conversation.

If we asked the artificial
brain, "are you conscious?"

And it persuades us that it is,

we'll just have to
take its word.

But the same thing applies
when we talk to other humans.

We don't actually know
that other people are conscious.

They might just be zombies
who are saying the right thing

but having no private,
subjective experience.

I can put some sort
of an artificial intelligence

into a computer right now

that represents the kind of
decisions I might make

and has, in some sense,
some of my consciousness in it.

So that's not hard to do.

But to get something
that we would say

is a good enough copy
of my consciousness

that if it were put back
in somebody else's body,

people would be fooled
into thinking it was me --

this is something
we haven't even the first clue

of how to do it
in any kind of a detailed way.

Freeman: Building artificial
homes for our souls

may be a long time coming,

so what do we do
in the meantime?

Turns out the ideal vessels

to carry souls
after the death of the body

may already exist.

One could be sitting
right next to you.

Despite our advanced technology,

the riddle of life still seems
a long way from being solved --

or...Is it?

In Bloomington, Indiana,

Douglas Hofstadter says it's
all a matter of perspective.

He believes consciousness
is the inevitable result

of the strange and wonderful way

the brain joins
information together

into patterns of thought.

And the patterns of thought
that form us

are not unique to us.

We are all curious collages

of everyone
we've ever been influenced by,

living or dead.

The pattern of your soul

is the strongest and
most complex in your own brain,

but it can be passed on
to other brains.

Hofstadter:
This is a book of Chopin études.

These black splotches
on white paper

capture some
very, very central pieces

of Chopin's emotionality --

his highs, his lows,

his sense of triumph,

his sense of resignation
or anguish.

Anything that was part of his
emotional makeup comes through,

and one gets a very deep glimpse
of another human being.

Perhaps 150, 160 years
after that person

has officially vanished
from the surface of the earth,

something of their soul persists

and invades the minds and brains
of millions of other people.

Freeman: This is a form
of life after death

that we all experience,

though we may not recognize it
for what it is.

Freeman:
It took a great personal tragedy
for Hofstadter to see this --

the death of his wife, Carol.

We were in Italy,

and it was a very sudden
discovery of a brain tumor.

And we only found out
that she had a brain tumor

on the 11th of December,

and on the 12th of December,
in the evening,

she fell into a coma.

So it was very, very, very fast.

When somebody that
I have been entangled with

for so long and so deeply

is suddenly poofed
out of existence,

I then had to, you know,
confront the question

of what, if anything, survived

and where, if at all,

can a human soul
be transplanted,

uprooted from one brain
to another brain?

And my answer
would have to be,

in a very limited sense, yes.

The degree to which Carol
exists inside me --

it's a much stripped-down
version of her.

It's a crude version.
It's coarse-grained.

It's as if one had a mosaic done

in very, very small,
fine stones --

a million of them.

And then it was a destroyed,

but somebody,
before it was destroyed,

had made a copy of it
but only using 1,000 stones.

And so the 1,000 stones

still have the same colors and
the same kind of arrangement,

but much more coarse-grained,
in a different medium,

in different stones.

The original has been destroyed,

but the copy exists
in a coarse-grained version.

Freeman:
And so, we live on.

A piece of our soul survives

in everyone
we have ever encountered.

That soul fragment

is the strongest,
most recognizable

in the people who loved us.

This form of life after death
is one we can all relate to,

whatever our religion.

But is there some other
resting place for the soul?

Does our consciousness
just shimmer out of existence

in our last moments on earth?

Is the soul nothing more than
a network of neural processes,

something that one day
can be recreated in a machine?

Or does the quantum state
of our brain

get reabsorbed
into the Universe at large?

Scientists believe
they are finally getting close

to solving this puzzle,

even though they passionately
disagree about the answer.

When you lose consciousness,
you lose your soul.

You lose everything.

The world does not
exist anymore for you.

Your friends
don't exist anymore.

You don't exist.
Everything is lost.

If you take these near-death
experiences at face value,

then they suggest that the mind
or the consciousness

seems to function
without the physical body.

Dr. Hameroff:
I think the quantum approach

to consciousness
can, in principle,

explain why we're here
and what our purpose is

and also the possibility of life
after death and reincarnation

and the persistence
of consciousness

after our bodies give up.

Dr. Alexander: I have
great belief and knowledge

that there is
a wonderful existence

for our souls
outside of this earthly realm,

and that is our true reality.

And we all find that out
when we leave this earth.

Ultimately, every one of us
will discover the truth.

But will we ever enter
our final hour

knowing our fate?

Perhaps some things really are
too big for humans to grasp.

That's when we have to shift
from what we know

to what we believe.

== sync, corrected by elderman ==