On Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 3:39:23 PM UTC-6, Bill wrote:

On Wed, 24 Oct 2018 11:02:10 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc wrote:

On Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 11:20:50 AM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

I present the data as a brake on assertions that a spirit has no mass.
There is absolutely NO evidence that it has no mass but there IS
experimental evidence that it does. Do you believe that NO evidence
trumps SOME evidence?

That _sounds_ sort of plausible.

But while nothing can't trump something, to take the position that one
report of an observation

There were FOUR measurements.

that is not considered to have been done well enough to be reliable

Says who? WHO "considers" that? Do "they" understand the experiment?

is trumped by the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community
that it isn't even worth the effort to repeat the measurement to refute
it... is not unreasonable.

That's is silly baseless assertion. Where have you seen this "consensus?
I haven't seen any report of such. MacDougall was disinvited by the
hospital from performing any more experiments because it was considered
"ghoulish." It is unlikely that any such experiments would be performed
today because today's resuscitation technology would interfere.

Sure, you can take the position, if you want, that most scientists have a
materialistic bias. However, to many of us, this is hardly surprising;
how could they get any work done without one? They focus on what is
measurable, what is controllable, what is predictable, what is repeatable,
because that's where they can get results that can be confirmed.

John Savard

Exactly. Noting that mass was lost at time of death is interesting, but
simply not good enough for me to assert it was a "soul" that departed
the body.

SOMETHING left. "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth"

If the experiment could have been performed in a closed system (MacDougall
didn't have the means)

Really? How do you know this? His system was closed except for air. Do
you understand WHY that's not important?

then I could know if the lost mass was something known/identifiable matter
- or if the lost actually represented some sort of new enigma.

Methinks you are speculating in a vacuum.