As for historical terms, I'm not yet resolved either way as to whether the term "soul" has a referent. If there is no soul, then how do we account for soul food and soul music? We have lots of good words for mental objects that aren't so laden with supernatural associations, and which can often stand in for "soul" in common expressions, and I'd like to make up my mind on the question of whether the the soul should be thought of as equivalent to any of them or distinct from them but also naturalistic.I don't have a tulpa, an egregore, a fursona, a cartesian theater, mental subagents, qualia, or free will, and you can not have them too.— Preinfarction (@preinfarction) January 28, 2017
Light-hearted proposals:
1. The soul is the mind-like thing which is tethered to the body but does not reside in the brain. Therefore the soul is the processing capacity of neural reflex arc pathways.
2. The soul is the mental image of a person in which their skin is still attached to their face. Saying a person has a soul = thinking they still have a face. Think about it.
3. The soul is what we called the brain's (magnetic) aura before we realized it was computationally impotent.
4. The soul is the thing that's confused when you learn about a new genre of fetish pornography.
Serious but low quality proposals:
1. The soul is whatever fragment of yourself you can identify with and appreciate finding in other moral agents and moral patients. This is less an identification of the soul and more a procedure for identifying it.
2. The soul is just one's mind or mental identity, but sometimes we call it the wrong name for poetry's sake, especially when a person has died and we want to be reverential. In support of this, notice that "psyche" is a synonym for both "soul" and "mind". By the transitive property of equality, we can derive ... nothing, because synonymy isn't equality. Still, they're plausibly the same.
3. A thing has a soul precisely if we attribute moral decision making capacity (agenthood) or moral value (patienthood) or both (personhood) to it.
Serious proposals:
1. The soul is the moral or immoral content of personality. The soul of a person is the set of stable traits or tendencies of decision-making which we call virtues and vices. I'm not sure how much of personality could be called morally neutral in contrast with this. Maybe the soul is just personality and "morally-charged personality" is redundant? Not sure either way.
2. The soul is what motivates us to moral action or inhibits us from immoral action. If the excitatory component, which works by inspiring pride through self-praise, is called "ego" and the inhibitory component, which works by inspiring guilt through self-shame, is called "conscience", then the soul is just the combination of ego and conscience.
3. The soul is the capacity to valuate behavioral policies. We could say that every formal decision theory is a different soul architecture. Similarly, but with a little more psychological realism, we could say that the soul is the set of human emotive valuation mechanisms, which I've taken to categorizing as liking/disliking, wanting/dreading, and approving/disapproving. In contrast with those two capacities of valuation, I think it's abundantly clear that the soul, if anything, is not a set of valuations itself: the soul is not a utility function of any stripe.
4. The soul is the unconscious mind viewed as a separate person. Like everything else, this is largely done through the use of the unconscious mind.
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I'm glad that I've explicated these hypotheses. Some of them feel a little plausible. Still, maybe soul rhetoric should be left to the super-naturalists. In the absence of feedback from other naturalists, I guess I'll just see what word choices I make in the future and that will be a telling sign of whether these ideas have led me to believe that the word "soul" is a useful word with a clear enough natural referent.
Edit 1: I found myself using the world "soul" to refer to the part of myself which (at the least) reaches profound conclusions about the value of my behavior, where profundity means something like "possessing strong emotive force". So that's cool. The soul reaches emotional conclusions or suggests them to us for conscious consideration.
But what is "strong emotive force" really? I understand intense emotion, but what's that "force" word doing there? It's some persuasive influence on our decision process, clearly. Maybe it's like getting angrier as you prepare for a fight; it's a condition wherein you're planning and rehearsing the behaviors that you would begin performing upon adopting a belief, and then that focus and simulation somehow irrationally influences your belief, and that's the persuasion.
Or maybe emotive force is more like getting angry with someone as your suspicion grows that you would *win* in a confrontation with them. For example, you decide that their behavior is indeed immoral as you realize that other people would agree with your assessment and support you in criticizing and standing up to your opponent.
More generally, suppose there's a contemplated belief, an emotion that you would feel upon adopting the belief, and a course of behavior which the emotion generally promotes to attention. When you judge that the promoted behavior would be good in your situation, then you've got an emotion waiting to flare up, and so the contemplated belief is associated with the possibility of a strong justified emotion, and that may be enough to convince you to adopt the belief and take the adaptive action, regardless of other evidence which should weigh upon our consideration of the belief. So, again, briefly: we see a valuable behavior, we want to have a reason to perform the behavior, and sometimes that's enough to sway our judgement and convince us that we do have reason. And sometimes the behavior is not "fight" but "keep your head down" and the belief is "you're not so special" and the emotion is shame. Omission and inhibition can have moral force too. Or, in a domain other than interpersonal confrontation, the soul might lead you believe that someone is worthy of moral consideration because it calculates that expressing that belief would be politically advantageous for you, and then we call the moral force "empathy".
I kind of like this hypothesis for it's naughtiness: the soul is preconscious, epistemically irrational, and politically motivated. The soul might give us our sacred conclusions, but it's operating principle is calculating and profane. Unconscious motivated cognition, folks. I'm calling it Serious Soul Identification Proposal #5. Best one yet, I'd say. In the top five at least.
Edit 2: On twitter, one Hope S. suggests that her lack of soul is related to her not finding inspiration in seeing a flower growing up from cracks in the pavement. Perhaps a soul is "the ability to be inspired by things like stories of perseverance through adversity".
