What's the Soul?

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but I've been busy with college exams and stuff like that. They went surprisingly well, to be honest. My average is probably going up this semester. ^^

Well, anyway, today we will be talking about the definition of the soul (or, if you prefer, the conscience). First of all, my definition of "soul" should be exposed to you all. I figure the conscience of a living creature is made up of 2 things: the memories and experiences of a person and their line of thought. So, if you could remove the conscience of a body and put it into another body, according to my definition, what would happen is that the line of thought of that person would remain completely unchanged, as well as their memories. However, memories are stored within the brain, so this scenario would be impossible; but trading consciences (or souls) is also impossible, so let's not dwell in such hypothesis; it won't lead us anywhere.

So, again, the "soul" or "conscience" of a person is made up of their thoughts and memories. Most people would also assume it would contain a person's personality, but in my opinion, your behaviour depends solely on your memories, experiences, which define who you are (and what you when you get angry), and genetics (which decide whether you get angry easily or not). This implies that I believe people not only may have a predisposition to goor or evil but that they may also be molded by their surrounding environment. But anyway, this is good, we've managed to define what is a soul! Great... But... What are memories and thoughts?

Well, no one knows. While memory can be and is defined as a set of encoded neural connections in the brain, thoughts are merely rumored to be neurons firing. It is interesting to theorize about what is a thought. While you are reading these words, you are imagining your own voice reading them. Almost like you could perfectly listen to yourself saying the words out loud. What do you think constitutes that line of thought? Could it be just like memories, neural patterns being fired in the brain that make you think your own voice is reading these words?

I'm probably just spouting bullshit and some neuro-scientist is ripping his own balls off reading this, but oh well, ignorance is bliss. There's room for imagination when knowledge isn't blocking the way! Anyway, i started thinking about how to define the soul when i was thinking about teleportation. Let's say teleporters existed. If your body was moved from one place to the other, would the conscience travel with you? That would depend whether it was something physical like neurons or something that we can't define, something ethereal that science will never understand.

If, however, your body was destroyed on one side and recreated on the other, you could assume that your conscience would die and one just like that would be created on the other side. Basicly, YOU would die, but someone just like you would appear on the other side and not realize he was someone completely new, just with the memories and thoughts of the old one. Something scary to think about. Maybe every time you fall asleep, the same thing happens, and you will never know. Maybe it is what happens to people that wake up from a coma. Kinda reminds me of The Prestige.

Well, that would be all for today. Hope you enjoyed reading this. Also, if you can, make sure you read all of these posts with the voice of Morgan Freeman, it will sound so much wiser.