It’s about 15 years since I was a religious person, but here’s something I wrote a few months before my deconversion:
My view is that “soul” can usually be replaced by “mind” without loss of meaning, and that the mind is to the body roughly as a computer program is to the hardware it runs on, or as a piece of music is to a particular performance. If the hardware is destroyed—if the performers are killed by a freak accident—the program, or the music, can be set in motion again with a different substrate.
And something else from around the same time:
The language of “souls” is a useful shorthand sometimes, but it’s wrong if taken at face value. “Soul” in the Bible sometimes seems to mean more or less the same as “being” (“and man became a living soul”) and sometimes to mean something like “deepest part of the mind” (“now is my soul troubled”).
So I’m fairly sure that late-Christian-me would have said (1) that to whatever extent people “have souls”, if you make me into an em then I “have” the same soul as before, but (2) that ownership of “souls” in this sense is not a thing that can be transferred by signing a contract and (3) that if you’re concerned that selling someone your soul gives them rights to future ems made from you, you should also be concerned that it gives them rights to your mind right now.
(This was not, and is not, a common point of view among Christians, though I have one Christian friend who I suspect would say more or less exactly the same things.)
It’s about 15 years since I was a religious person, but here’s something I wrote a few months before my deconversion:
And something else from around the same time:
So I’m fairly sure that late-Christian-me would have said (1) that to whatever extent people “have souls”, if you make me into an em then I “have” the same soul as before, but (2) that ownership of “souls” in this sense is not a thing that can be transferred by signing a contract and (3) that if you’re concerned that selling someone your soul gives them rights to future ems made from you, you should also be concerned that it gives them rights to your mind right now.
(This was not, and is not, a common point of view among Christians, though I have one Christian friend who I suspect would say more or less exactly the same things.)