What the hell is a 'soul' anyway?

[Whateverist]

The soul, like math, has no weight or mass, you can't see it and it doesn't alter light.

Like math, you can study its effects because the soul gives human life its fundamental essence and value.

This concept became more refined after Christian teaching met the philosophies of Plato, Aristoteles, and Socrates.

The human soul houses the core of human desire, and as such is an important basis of our understanding of personhood.

This has implications on human dignity, human rights, responsibilities, and freedom. If you ignore these things, you see important implications, the culmination of which are the Gulags of the Soviet Union for instance, or the Holocaust, or the carpet bombing of Dresden and perhaps the destruction of Hiroshima.  

All these things (dignity, rights, responsibilities, freedom), like the soul, are immaterial.

Value, like the soul, is also immaterial.

I can sign off on all of this except for the portion I lined out, and I only lined it out because I think it is a little presumptuous to assume the soul is a purely good thing.

But look at all the additional assumptions you make about the soul based on Christian dogma. There is no other reason to think it is eternal or the handiwork of a god.

Here is an alternative way to attach meaning to "soul" along with "god". When a woman becomes pregnant a new on-board god is also born (gods are not eternal except collectively). As the brain develops it becomes organized first in ways which are generic for chordates, mammals, primates and finally humans. Somewhere early along the way the mind develops dual processors with the capacity to monitor separate things. In humans and quite possibly earlier than that, one of those processors becomes specialized as the conscious mind. Now the "soul" is earlier than the conscious mind and therefore carries the vast majority of the information which makes you a mammal, a person and a particular self. But the conscious mind in the human is separated from the innate, earlier and more vast processor to a much greater extent than in other animals. The processor not associated with the conscious mind can be thought of as the "soul". Our conscious minds experience enormous independence but alas that means they are subject to becoming far more alienated from the soul. Perhaps religion exists to ritually connect the conscious mind to the soul of its being?