The experiment that Renee and David were going to conduct is of great interest as the search for the soul has been the question that has occupied the minds of great thinkers since ancient times. However, regardless of their findings, it would probably not be a philosophical breakthrough, at least in the current stage of scientific and technological development. If they do not determine any difference in the weight, their results would be unnoticed by other researchers. On the other hand, if they do discover the difference in weight, that would lead mostly to more research in physics or biology rather than in philosophy. The reason for that is the fact that the human organism is still not fully investigated. Therefore, any claims that researchers discovered the soul would lack firm evidence but can exist as a hypothesis though.
Despite that, it is still important to contemplate on significance of both possible outcomes of the experiment from a philosophical perspective. Suppose first that the scholars could determine the difference in body weight after a person’s death. That would mean that the soul has a material presence. Then we can make two possible conclusions. The first hypothesis would state that soul is a fully material substance. However, that would be a rather disappointing result. It indeed may be a fascinating finding for other scientific spheres, but at the same time, human beings would fail to “build the bridge” between the ideal (spiritual) world and the material world. The second hypothesis states that the soul is a half-ideal and half-material substance. Then we can conclude that the ideal world indeed has the ability to actively affect the material world and has a certain physical presence. However, there are still going to be many questions to answer. For instance, “whether the “ideal” soul continues its coexistence with the “physical” soul after person’s death?”, “if so, does it inhabit another body afterwards?”, “which chemical element(s) constitute “material” part of the soul?” and etc.
Now suppose that the weight of the body did not change. In that case, we still do not have sufficient reasons to drop the hypothesis about the soul. We can still argue that the soul exists ideally and can affect the physical reality; however, that process would be harder to prove. Contrary, we can also argue that our experiment signifies that the soul does not exist, that our spiritual reality is just something created by our bodies, mere illusion. For that reason, it was stated before that the negative result of the experiment would not push philosophical thought forward, as all the arguments that philosophers made before would remain.