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Life is soul's nursery- its training place for the destinies of eternity. William Makepeace Thackeray

tthe topic of souls as an ineffable essence within the bodies of living entities themselves is an altogether different one, but today i use a different meaning for the word to speak on a certain trope in sci-fi fiction. the definition for "soul" I will use in this post is: "a human's dynamicism & ability to change; as well as their personality, memories, quirks, speech patterns, and uniquely personal patterns" .

i'm not a scientist, nor learned in such things, but i can claim that it will likely be a very long time until a machine can measure up to a real life human. a machine is not dynamic like a human brain. a machine cannot replicate the same mental processes, cannot recall memories, cannot suffer traumas, cannot look back in either anger or fondness. it can only replicate patterns, which is where the folly lies in comparing them to human brains -- humans are extremely apt at replicating patterns, but we are also capable of changing those patterns as we see fit while also following the basic schematics of them. we possess introspection. we can reason. we feel genuine emotion. we have evolved to look at the cause behind the material circumstance, and have become extremely good at it.

you could replicate a "soul", a particular person's electricity, put them in a machine & have them act like an imperfect & ineffectual homunculus of the original. but that's all they'll ever be. you cannot take the electricity that powers the human, and then put that same electricity into a box. it doesn't work like that. WE don't work like that. our "souls" only occur once, only in such a way, and even if someone were to force the hand of the world and mimick every physical circumstance and material condition to perfectly match your own conception, subsequent gestation, and finally birth -- the child that would be made would still not be "you". it would perhaps be very much adjacent to you in certain physical characteristics, and perhaps even mannerisms, but it would not be "you".

anyway. all that to say you can't make a human "soul". only a different, imperfect, necessarily static consciousness. when stories like to posit that a human's "soul" can be processed rather like meat and then simply transported-- it gives me the feeling that perhaps they do not place as much stock in actual science as they proclaim. which is not really an insult. it's fine if your scifi story has a pseudo-religious schema to it. just maybe be aware of that. awareness (particularly internal & mental) is also something we as humans are uniquely skilled in.

#souls #human consciousness