What scientific books can I find on the study of souls, and the possibility of other non-organic lifeforms to have such souls?

The existence of souls is not experimentally falsifiable, and is therefore outside the realm of science. In short, there are no scientific books on the subject. Link

The closest you could come, would be Philosophy of mind because @LostInParadise is correct. Science deals exclusively with the falsifiable. Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy with a formal and rigorous approach analyzing the implications of Dualism/Monism in an attempt to better understand the types of questions you’re asking.

There is no such thing as a “soul.” (Scientifically speaking.)

There are many scientists hinting at or claiming to have proven there is a soul. Look up Jeremy Griffith, Robert Lanza and his Biocentrism theory, Sir John Eccles, Mario Beauregard.

This is the closest thing to a book I could find on the topic.

https://philarchive.org/archive/PERSC-3

Scientific GOD Journal

Scientific GOD Journal | September 2015 | Volume 6 | Issue 7 | pp. 311–315
Pereira, C., A Soul & Consciousness

From @Inspired_2write link above. What a bunch of crap; it’s not even well written. It’s certainly not science.

“It is my view that my soul is my consciousness and my consciousness is my soul. It appears that energy renders my consciousness to surge within me and my soul is a sphere of energy that encases me. Further, it appears that my soul dwell within me until my bodily death and my soul makes me conscious of my existence and all that exist around me.”

And @seawulf575‘s link, if at all possible, is even worse:

“WE ARE INDIVIDUALIZED WAVES of consciousness on the Infinite Ocean of
Spirit; so say the sages. But, although the Ocean has become the wave,
and the wave, when it dissolves the illusion of ego-separation and
limitation, realizes that it has always been one with the Infinite Ocean,
the form-bound wave itself is not the Ocean. Nor is the Ocean merely the
sum of its waves—the Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves
cannot exist without the Ocean. ”

@Caravanfan, I just gave my standard once-over look at the book @seawulf575 linked, namely, The Science of the Soul, by Geoffrey D. Falk. My review leads me to think that the book is not crap. It’s just not about science in the way we usually think of it.

First I glanced at the bibliography, starting on book page 303. It’s quite lengthy and takes in a wide range of sources, including Huxley and Jung, Einstein and Feynman, Eliade and W. James, and a heap of writers on spiritual and mystical subjects, such as D.T. Suzuki, Ken Wilber, Yogananda, Ram Dass, and Joseph Campbell. I’d call it a respectable list of references within the range of this subject matter.

There’s also a comprehensive index, which to me is always a reflection of a book’s solidity and authority. At a quick look, this one passes muster. I’d probably read it if I were pursuing this subject.

The last step in my usual cursory review is to read the introduction. But I’ll leave that to the OP, who seems to have a penchant for getting other people to do his research for him. I’ll just quote the first sentence, which says:

“It is well known to all who have undertaken a thorough investigation of the quantitative ideology underlying the practice of meditation as a means toward the attainment of expanded states of consciousness, that consciousness is the fundamental reality at the basis of all creation. The fact that the only difference between matter, energy and dualistic consciousness is in their respective rates of vibration has also been much emphasized.”

So the subject appears to be the “ideology underlying the practice of meditation” and not the existence of the soul as the essence of sentient beings.

I’ve encountered the ocean-and-the-wave idea in a Zen context. It’s a useful way to understand a particular Zen concept. But it isn’t science. It’s a metaphor.

I’m not going to read the book, but just going on the impressions in my quick overview, I’d say it looks like quite a thorough account of the subject matter, and might prove very helpful to the OP. But again, it isn’t science. Can’t be. Rather, it appears to be about what is thought and believed about the notion of a soul, which is not an objectively verifiable construct.

So I take the “Science” of the title to mean science in its older and broader sense, not as observationally derived facts about the natural world but as knowledge in general.

@seawulf575, I’d call that a nice find.

It’s not science. We can get into a discussion if you like about the definition of science and the scientific method. But the short answer is that this is not science. It’s philosophy. (And it is still badly written)

It’s not falsifiable or testable with the scientific method, therefore not science. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently wrong, but it’s a misnomer to label it “science.” Like I mentioned above, philosophy of mind is really the closest you can come to an academically rigorous analysis of the subject.

Don’t believe scientists are in to woo stuff.

I’m not supporting or denouncing any of the people I cited. Nor am I trying to convince anyone one way or the other. I’m answering the question. I just know there are a lot of scientist that are reconsidering the idea that a soul might actually be a real thing. And it isn’t hard to find scientists with psychology or physics or many other backgrounds that are researching it. And that IS science. That is how things progress. Remember when dark matter was the biggest craze and that answered all sorts of questions? Now I see they are saying it may not be a thing at all. As people ask questions and start researching and speculating, new discoveries are made. Some previous ideas are disproven. So really it is only those that denounce an idea strictly because they don’t like the implications that are the ones that aren’t scientific.

Describe an experimental test for the existence of souls such that if it fails then we know there are no souls. Can’t think of one? You are in good company. Nobody else can either. That is why the existence of souls is not a part of science.

@LostInParadise Is exactly correct. There is no experiment one could design that could empiracly falsify the existence of a soul (if anyone has one, I’d be more than interested to hear it though). Scientists engaging in philosophy, isn’t science, it’s philosophy.

@Jeruba the OP seems to me like he likes to read and fonder about conspiracy theories. He also doesn’t seem like someone who can read deeply into things like you do. So while I completely believe in your review, I don’t think this is a good book for him because I’m afraid he will take things literally and think of this book as the “science” of soul.

Souls don’t exist. That’s a fantasy invented by the church.

@LostInParadise experiments are interesting because sometimes things are found by an absence of indications as opposed to a positive response. And sometimes we have beliefs that are based on theories that seem to fill in blanks. Take quarks for example. No one has ever seen one. Ever. But it is a theory that someone put forth to explain an observation in the universe. And it seems to fill the blanks okay, for now. So you have something that is apparently impacting the universe, yet you cannot see it and we cannot measure it. Sounds sort of like a vague definition of a soul, eh?

But the problem with testing for a soul, as far as I can determine, is that no one really can agree on what a soul is and what it does. If you can’t really agree on what something is, you can’t test for it. The people I cited have put forth their idea of what a soul is, and then used that as a basis for explaining why it exists.

@seawulf575 They can build particle colliders to run experiments to test theories about subatomic particles. What kind of machine could they build to test theories of the soul? See the difference?

@gorillapaws I don’t know. Have any scientist really considered the matter as they have with subatomic particles? But here’s a consideration: many consider the soul to be that which tells us the difference between right and wrong (among other things). That suggestion is born out by several of the scientists I cited above. So technically, a lie-detector would be a machine that detects a soul. When a person lies, there are physical changes that can be detected. Why? Because they know they are lying and they know it is wrong. But that gets back into my previous statement: it really comes down to what we determine the soul is.

@seawulf575 If a scientist could disprove the existence of souls, they would go down in the history books. If such an empirical test were possible, I can assure you there would be plenty of scientists lining up to test it.

A lie detector could not falsify a soul. One would have to show that the lie didn’t originate from physical mechanisms in the brain (and how does one measure/test for that?). Deception does appear to be measurable in the brain, though not with perfect reliability. This certainly does not disprove the existence of a soul, but it does support the idea that there is a significant physical component to mental states at the very least.

One doesn’t need to fully define the soul in order to test for it, that’s not the hangup. It’s that it’s a non-physical entity that’s not able to be observed directly (or with instruments) that makes it untestable. Here’s an example to illustrate the point. Let’s say I have a hypothesis that there is a ghost responsible for all observable effects of gravity in my house. If I drop an apple, and it falls I can claim that the invisible, unobservable ghost accelerated the apple to the floor at 9.8 m/s^2. What experiment could anyone run to determine if my hypothesis is correct? There is none. It’s not a scientific claim because it’s not testable. Science can’t say if I’m right or wrong. Note, just because something isn’t testable with science doesn’t automatically mean it’s false, it’s simply the case that it’s outside the realm of science’s purview.

@gorillapaws The problem with your line of thinking is that science, true science, doesn’t strive to make something so. By considering that scientists would only want to disprove the existence of a soul shows how jaded your thinking is. What about proving a soul exists? Why do only look at it as a “disproving”? It almost sounds like you know they exist and you want science to make it not so.

Of course you have to identify what a soul is in order to test for it. You at least have to set parameters that you would consider to be a soul. Without parameters, you cannot set up tests to show the soul exists or not. Take your ghost/gravity example. You have to first identify the parameters. You set the parameters as something (the ghost) that is solely responsible for all the effects of gravity in your house. The first thing I would do is to ask one question: do those same effects exist other places than in your house? If it does, then it is highly questionable that a ghost is solely responsible for the effects of gravity inside your house. That is how science works. You come up with a hypothesis and then start testing to see if it holds true. But other questions that might apply with your example might be “what is a ghost?” “what is a ghost made of?” “How does a ghost interact with our world?”

You can apply those same questions to the soul. And THAT is what I am saying about why we need to identify what a soul is. Is a soul just something that lets us identify right from wrong? Is it a piece of universal energy that is tailor made for each of us? If so, what differentiates from one person to the next? Is there any differentiation?

Again, I’m not suggesting anyone has to believe or disbelieve in souls. The OP asked the question if there were any scientific type books on the study of the soul. Each of the examples I gave all had differing views on what a soul was and how it interacted with us.

@seawulf575 “By considering that scientists would only want to disprove the existence of a soul shows how jaded your thinking is…Why do only look at it as a “disproving”?”

It’s not MY thinking, it’s literally how science works: Falsifiability.

@seawulf575 “The first thing I would do is to ask one question: do those same effects exist other places than in your house? If it does, then it is highly questionable that a ghost is solely responsible for the effects of gravity inside your house. ”

All of those are excellent questions (the EXACT RIGHT questions to be asking), but they’re NOT science, that’s philosophy you’re engaging in. You’re using logic and reason to extrapolate the truth about things that you cannot observe, measure and test. That’s exactly what philosophers do. What is the soul? what is it’s nature? If it does interact with the physical world, how would that work? All of these questions are discussed extensively in philosophy of mind. I assume you’re a dualist.

Despite what you might think, I don’t have a dog in this fight. The only bone I’m picking is clarifying that science doesn’t study souls, philosophy does. Just like particle physicists don’t analyze the literary devices used in Chaucer as part of their academic work, or structural engineers don’t evaluate the impacts of African languages on the evolution of anti-bellum slave dialects in the deep southern US. I mean, a structural engineer could do that, but we wouldn’t say they were doing structural engineering.

@gorillapaws I love your examples.

@gorillapaws Falsifiability is one portion of the scientific method. It isn’t the only one nor is it the start of ideas. You don’t come up with an idea then try to prove it false. You come up with an idea and try to establish if it could be true. THEN you challenge it…after you think you have proven it. Your own citation says as much. Maybe you should have read it?

Maybe we need to define what a scientist is. Is a physicist a scientist? How about a chemist? Yeah…those are easy. What about a psychologist? They aren’t studying atoms and electrons, but they are studying other aspects of our existence that aren’t philosophy. How about epidemiologists? Scientists come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and fields of study. Just because there isn’t proof of something right now doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean that someone won’t decide to look for it.

Think of the study of souls as the study of something unknown. Let me give you a for-instance. Bacteria were not actually seen until around 1660. Someone thought they might exist so they came up with a way of seeing them. And then they found them. But they still didn’t tie it fully to illness until around 200 years later. But again…they had to come up with the idea that there might be a tie to disease so they could test it. Here’s another one. I saw an article today about alternate universes, or the multiverse theory. We can’t see another universe. We can’t test it. We can’t prove or disprove it. Yet someone is looking into it. Why is it so hard to picture this same curiosity being put into whether a soul exists or not?

@seawulf575 “Falsifiability is one portion of the scientific method.”

Correct. Falsifiability is axiomatic to the scientific method. It is necessary but not sufficient.

“It isn’t the only one nor is it the start of ideas. You don’t come up with an idea then try to prove it false.”

I don’t think you fully grasp the concept. What it means is that proving the hypothesis false is one of the possible outcomes, in the set of all possible outcomes of the test. If your hypothesis cannot be proven false in any of the possible outcomes, then it’s not science. The goal isn’t to prove things false (as you correctly point out), but it’s not a real test if it is designed in a way that the only possible result would be confirmation of your hypothesis. That’s what falsifiability is.

For example, the Theory of Evolution is falsifiable because it’s theoretically possible to discover an organism or the remains of one that contradicts the theory such as a mammal located among fossils from a much earlier time period. Or another example is Richard Lenski’s decades-long study of the evolution of bacteria. His work has actually falsified some of the ideas of evolution and shown that evolution can occur in bursts instead of a long slow gradual process as some had previously hypothesized. One of the possible outcomes was that the bacteria wouldn’t evolve at all thereby falsifying his hypothesis. This didn’t happen and instead we have evidence that supports the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

“What about a psychologist? They aren’t studying atoms and electrons, but they are studying other aspects of our existence that aren’t philosophy.”

Correct. Psychologists can run tests that are falsifiable such as Pavlov and Behaviorism. That’s science.

“Just because there isn’t proof of something right now doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean that someone won’t decide to look for it.”

Correct. Just because it’s not practical with current technology to test for something doesn’t mean it’s false. But the difference is, there’s no theoretical mechanism to test for the existence of a soul either. A soul is a non-physical thing that purportedly interacts causally with a physical thing. There’s no way to otherwise differentiate between responses as being from the soul or just the brain.

If we had a test subject and poked him with a pointy stick and the subject says “ouch” the dualist could say “There, see it’s the soul that’s responding to the stimuli.” and the physicalist would say “What are you talking about? The subject is responding to physical stimuli. There is a physical neurological response in his pain receptors that’s triggering a pain response in his cerebral cortex.” There is no possible way to learn anything new about whether or not there’s a soul in there by experimenting on humans. Any type of experimental design related to souls will suffer from this same problem—it’s fundamental. Souls are inherently unfalsifiable.

The best we can do is study the brain, create artificial intelligences, and learn from those things. But even if we could fully architect a conscious mind from scratch, the dualist can still assert the existence of the soul. And there still wouldn’t be a scientific mechanism to refute that claim.

”...the multiverse theory. We can’t see another universe. We can’t test it. We can’t prove or disprove it. Yet someone is looking into it. Why is it so hard to picture this same curiosity being put into whether a soul exists or not?”

The multiverse theory isn’t falsifiable either. It’s also philosophy. I have certainly spent many hundreds of hours studying about the existence of souls. I have taken an entire course just on the philosophy of mind. I find it a fascinating subject. I’ve never come to a firm conclusion one way or the other.

@gorillapaws “But the difference is, there’s no theoretical mechanism to test for the existence of a soul either. A soul is a non-physical thing that purportedly interacts causally with a physical thing. ” Yet. It is entirely possible that in the future there WILL be a theoretical mechanism to test for the soul. And again, you are limiting your thinking. You are saying because there is no test it can’t exist. For the longest time there was no test for proving the earth was round. People just believed it was flat. For the longest time there was no theoretical test for bacteria though they existed. But by your reasoning, until someone devised the test, they didn’t.
It all comes back to how you perceive the soul. If you say it is energy that exists then there should be a test to measure it. If you say it is just there without form you cannot hope to find it. You have to identify the parameters of what we call a “soul”. Once you do that, you can start evaluating how it causally interacts with us. Once you do that you can possibly design a “test” to show it exists.
Cleve Backster did many tests on various things. He was a “lie detector” specialist. One particular study, he threatened the subject and it reacted with an electrochemical reaction. The subject was a plant. He got really curious and started testing many other things. The one I found particularly interesting was he took cells from a person’s mouth. He found that even after being removed from the person, they still reacted to the person’s mood the same as the person did. I’m not saying this proves a soul or anything like that. But I’m saying that it is a test that most people wouldn’t have thought to even try. In the past people assumed plants were basically living but mindless. When a plant demonstrates fear, that kinda changes things.

Before there can be an experiment that tests for the presence of souls, there must be a specification of what a soul is. Does it contain matter? Does it have energy? Does it obey the law of energy conservation? What is the mechanism by which it interacts with the physical world? Until such things are specified, souls lie outside the realm of science.

@LostInParadise Exactly what I have been saying. We need to define what it is we are looking for. Once it is defined, then we can start determining the parameters that can be measured. I don’t say that makes them outside the realm of science. It means the scientific community has not agreed to what it is. The people I cited earlier made their own definitions of what a soul is and then set about determining if it existed. That doesn’t make their research right, but it is the first step down the scientific method.