The knowledge that this website has the picture of an ugly dwarf as its thumbnail, or that my previous post was about anime song isn’t lost on me. That said, here we go.

The most common questions about souls likely relate to their existence, or lack thereof. It makes sense to start there; before questions are raised about their nature, or ability to last beyond death of the body shouldn’t it be determined that they exist at all?

Instead, I find it more conducive to just pick a side and go with it. Then for fun, pick the other side and see how your conclusion differs. At the end of the day, choosing the wrong answer on if souls exist or not won’t make mine turn into Ghostbusters‘ Slimer and viciously maul me.

So, souls exist. But what are they specifically? The body is the physical matter of who we are; the mind can be what memories and experiences are contained in the brain. I’d argue that the soul is the personality; the resulting state of a given brain attaching meaning to memories and experiences it contains.

I apologize if that’s perhaps the most juvenile epiphany in or adjacent to the field of philosophy; I haven’t read very many things lately, let alone anything particularly thought-provoking. That aside, what fascinates me about this perception of the soul is that it doesn’t insinuate that it’s set in stone. Theoretically, if someone is made of body, mind, and soul like this, you could transfer their mind to another brain and have a different soul materialize altogether. Or, it may be the same soul, as this has never been attempted.

In that sense, the soul is the final element of the person. The body is created, the mind gathers information, and the soul coalesces from parsing this information. Rather than the soul being ‘who we are’, it’s simply ‘how we are’; our collective personality traits and learned feelings in response to a massive-and-growing number of memories and experiences.

I suppose this being true would mean that the common definition of the soul as an all-encompassing entity would transfer to the brain’s stored information as a whole. Well, it’s still fun to think about.