Hypothetical discussion on souls

[Angrboda]

It's worth noting that the language, concepts and ways you describe a hypothetical soul is essentially identical to the way one would describe consciousness and the mind. And I don't think that is mere coincidence, as I suspect that you, like most people, imagine a soul as just a consciousness or self that transcends death; a mind, but with permanence. You have some vague intuitions about what mind or consciousness is, and project that vague intuition onto the soul. The problem is two-fold. First, your notion of consciousness is vague, ill-defined, and little more than an accretion of prior folk beliefs about what consciousness is. These notions about what consciousness is are largely founded on nothing, and so the inferences toward the soul have no substance. The second is that the idea of consciousness enduring is entertained primarily because we want it to be true, and not because we have any reason to suspect that it might be enduring. Despite all the religious speculations, ghost stories and whatnot, there is not a single compelling example of a mind existing outside of a body, after death.

Given that you're just basically 'super-sizing' consciousness to create your notion of the soul, it's going to inherit all the faults that your conception of consciousness contains. And it's relatively obvious from your description that your understanding of what consciousness is and how it works is lacking. I see two common errors that are often involved when people think about consciousness. The first is to make an unwarranted ontological assumption about it, leading to the conclusion that it must have certain properties, when the necessity of those properties is a direct consequence of them having made those specific ontological assumptions. The second is to ignore the role of abstraction and interpretation in understanding the phenomena, of having a certain interpretation of the phenomena, experience, or observation, and mistaking your interpretation for the thing itself. It's an analogous mistake to that made by 'biblical Christians' like Drich when arguing points from the bible. The assumption is that the truth is there in the text, and they're just slurping the truth straight off the surface of the text. Interpretation is constructive; reading is rewriting; the text by itself is inert. The situation with consciousness studies is similar. People imagine consciousness to 'be' a certain way, and so that 'way' then becomes, to them, a feature of consciousness. It's not; it's something they've added to it as a part of the process of trying to understand it.

If your thinking about consciousness is infected by an ignorance of either of these two aspects, then your speculations about the soul are likely going to be likewise ill-informed.