1. You seem to be conflating spirituality, souls, the afterlife, and Religion (all of them in one, it seems). Your intro paragraph (“I fear, and suspect everyone else does too”) and concluding statement “This model is flexible enough to account for all major religious beliefs on earth today” are over-reaching in that sense. (But: just a few word changes without any overall thematic change would fix all that.)

2. Have you read any of, e.g., Larry Yeager’s stuff on Artificial Life?

3. Very neat thought / computational experiment you’ve done here. I might put it mathematically like this: just replace {(thing), properties of thing} with {(thing, soul), properties of thing} and voilà, you’ve got an undetectable soul.

I’m not sure it addresses some complaints that a, erm, “measurable-ist” might claim. Like who says it’s physically possible to have an undetectable soul? An Ockham’s razor type objection might also be raised: sure, it’s possible that I’m a brain in a vat in a brain in a vat in a brain in a vat, but … is that really likely?

4. Regarding the separate questions of soul – intelligence – consciousness kind of stuff, derived from electronic brain signals — maybe there’s another interesting computer experiment to be done there? Mathematically there are ways for the whole to be more than the sum of the parts, and … well, I’ll send you on another interesting goose chase: google for “neural correlates of consciousness”.

Have fun! Thanks for sharing your cool idea.

A mental exercise I can recommend is, try to remember your “soul” back when you were 6 months old… Could you remember how you saw the world, how you interpreted things, using your ideas, opinions and beliefs, your core values, the intellectual and emotional stuff that supposedly now in your adulthood you consider your soul… I am sure you cannot remember a thing.

Why? Because all that ethereal that defines your non-physical self, didn’t exist at all. You were just like any other baby animal (Even more defenseless). You learned so many things, understood complexity in so many ways, formed opinions, learned to interact with other fellow humans… All that that you may call a soul. The thing is that, you learned it, through interactions with other humans and your environment. Some basic circuits were there (nature vs nurture), but the rest was acquired in a long process we often tend to forget/ignore.

Our self-awareness is truly disturbing, I agree on that sometimes.

The only thing that will remain of you, is that invisible imprint you will leave in other fellow humans, both the good and bad. Your soul, if anything, is what remains in the others as they saw you.

Some friends say it’s not easy to let go, maybe nature of belief is hardwired (And some of us simply don’t have the circuits for that kind of belief…)?