What's a soul?

[ledwix]

Genetic variance defeats your ability to say that souls are made up of unique personalities, because the scientific explanation doesn't necessitate souls, as devonin said. I do believe, however, that above all, human beings do have souls.

For example, have you ever thought about why you are you? Why can't you be someone else? Why isn't you me? Why isn't me you? Why aren't you a more primitive animal? Don't you ever feel lucky to be the mind of one of the 6.5 billion living human beings, rather than the trillions of bugs and apparently lesser-thinking creatures? Each person has the amazing ability to observe this world from his own viewpoint. No one else has your viewpoint; your perceptions are indefinitely stuck inside you. My reasoning is that we are souls experiencing a physical boundary; otherwise, there would be no consciousness. If you say consciousness is imaginary and an illusion arising from the sum of various mechanical processes (I don't deny these processes, but rather discredit their ability to explain everything you are thinking right now and why you have the right to perceive the way you do), then you are discrediting yourself, because what you are thinking right now is meaningless and imaginary. From that logic, why trust what you are thinking when consciousness is only an illusion? If consciousness is not an illusion, then we are still able to think as a whole creature regardless of what each individual cell in 100 trillion cells is "thinking."