Supernatural and Atheism

[The Grand Nudger]

What are the particles that make a soul, and what are the particles that mediate interactions between those particles and the particles that make a body. The Standard Model is filling up fast.

Is software made of special particles? Or is it more of a form or system which determines the operation of the material?

Because most people since Aristotle have spoken of the soul as the form which determines what a particular bit of matter is and does. The soul is not itself matter (e.g. particles).

Software manipulates the physical state of hardware so that useful effects can be produced by their interaction.  Special Particles™ may also be able to do the same job, whatever those are, but that's not how software is doing it.  The Regular Old Particles™ are up to the task.  Further, unlike this soul business, the software will itself reduce to some physical state of some piece of hardware.  There is nothing that isn't explicitly material in how computers or software work.  

Even deeper down the well, people might hold out hope that the now failed analogy can be reasserted, in that some thought made the program - but this is irrelevant - as a kogge-stone adder would behave the way it does whether some thought intentionally or coincidentally shaped it's "form", or it happened to fall together completely at random...and I'd be tickled pink to hear anyone say that an adder had a soul of any kind right on the face of it.

Whatever it is people are talking about when they talk about a soul, it isn't software. Not aristotle, and not a contemporary believer either. Souls are a very poor attempt to explain a range of only marginally related effects by way of rank superstition (respiration, metabolism, cognition, behavior, permanence...). Always have been - always will be.