What is a soul?

This is a presumptuous assumption on your part. You have no way of knowing what we all might agree on. What do you have against chemical reactions? Do you really detest the physical world as you seem to claim? If so, why?If our personalities are an emergent property of our bodies, what is wrong with that? It seems quite sufficiently marvellous to me without invoking undetectable ghosts to inhabit those bodies.

This is disingenuous. People are neither random collections of cells nor chemical soup. As for your post, it is so wrapped in cant and verbosity that I can make nothing of it.

What do you mean by value here? How is the usual concept of value applicable to living organisms at all? How is this not the fallacy of confusion of categories? How is your idea of value related to the definition of a particular organism? What makes a particular organism a slug is that it fits our agreed description of a slug: if it did not, we would call it something else.One can, of course, tell us from slugs by simple inspection. Why do you need vague terms like "transcendental"?You seem to be ignoring how matter is organized to make various objects and organisms, in order to sneak in the supernatural.

For variety, how about this view?The soul concept is an ancient error, like asking where the fire goes when the fuel runs out, and is still around because it is perpetuated by organized religion.Can we find any evidence pro or con for this version?

How are the two sides of your "or" different? What could this possibly mean? "Energy" has nothing to be sentient with, it is not a substance!(Thanks for the nice poem.)Edited by Woodsy, : No reason given.

Would it be more honest, having acknowledged the not knowing, to dispense with the believing?