Death

[Cyberman]

"It could be" just about anything that your imagination wants it to be. If you're going to make stuff up for the sake of personal comfort or convenience, why stop at the philosophical equivalent of a hard drive? Without anything to tie the concept into reality, it's all fluff and white noise.

That's exactly what I think a soul is. A hard drive. It would be an efficient way of preserving one's self. which is what a soul is supposed to do in theory.

And I repeat, why stop at that? Entertaining a concept, saying "it could be such-and-such", is fine but that is far from the end of the journey. Positing the idea is not the conclusion. Quite to the contrary in fact. The next step, if you are serious about discovering the truth, is to find out how your concept marries into reality. For starters, where does this hard drive reside? Is it of the body? If so, where would we have to look for it? Emo Phillips has a wonderfully absurd line about how he used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until he realised what was telling him that. We already know that the brain is the repository of our thought processes, our memories, our personality. We already know that damage to the brain can result in a total personality change, examples already cited demonstrate that a person can go from a devout believer to a staunch atheist (and presumably vice versa). If you want to postulate this spiritual hard drive idea these are the sort of questions and established obstacles you have to confront.

Incidentally, there is no theory of what a soul is supposed to do.