Here, I summarize my views about souls.* You are an immaterial soul. You have lived infinitely many lives in the past and will live infinitely many more in the future. While alive, you are embodied; in between lives, you exist as a disembodied soul.

[ *Based on: “Disembodied Souls Are People Too,” pp. 138-153 in Extreme Philosophy, ed. Stephen Hetherington (Routledge, 2024). ]

1. People Have Souls

1.1. Minds are non-physical

These are controversial views, and I can’t fully discuss any of these debates here; here, I will just very briefly summarize my views. I think the mind has three features that are hard to explain in physical terms:

• a. Qualia (the particular way experiences feel from the inside).

• b. Intrinsic intentionality (the feature of representing things or being “about” things).

• c. Free will (the ability to control which of a set of genuinely open alternatives is realized).

These make it seem that the mind must be something over and above the physical phenomena of the body and the brain.

1.2. Properties or substances?

Is there a non-physical entity, “the mind”, wherein the above properties reside, or is it merely that a certain physical entity (the brain) has certain non-physical properties?

I favor the former view (“substance dualism”) because I think it best accommodates very strong and widespread intuitions about personal identity. Roughly, I think there are objective, intrinsic facts about personal identity (e.g., whether a particular future person is you or is instead someone else); also, personal identity is a one-one relation (it is metaphysically impossible for more than one person existing at a given time to both “be you”).

I think the soul theory of personal identity (you are wherever your soul is) accommodates these intuitions, and I think no theory that relies only on physical entities, even supplemented with non-physical qualities, can accommodate these intuitions.

Ex.: spatiotemporal and psychological continuity don’t account for identity because of “fission” cases (hypothetical cases in which a person divides into two qualitatively indistinguishable persons). The continuity theory would violate the principle that identity is one-one.

You can rule out such cases by stipulating that identity requires continuity plus no branching, but then you have to give up the principle that personal identity is intrinsic (the identity of a person should not be dependent on the existence or qualities of other beings).

The “soul”, then, is understood as the immaterial