I'm not a fan of many revisits on the concept of soul. Too often people are working on their own preconceived or previously taught concept.
Each of us is unique, this is fact. Even identical twins, raised with the same family and pets and car wrecks, are different. This individuality cannot be questioned; too many variables exist in daily life, much less a monthly or yearly scale, to allow too much similarity.
Our brains configure and use such experiences to form the person that we become. The "branching tree" concept comes into play here. Take the twins for an example. Let us pretend that they are truly identical, in thought and form, and witness a person fall, one out of the corner of his eye and the other directly. There is now a branching of experience creating different perceptions that lead to different interpretations. Thus the individuality of people is easily demonstrated.
Too often the argument is that it isn't possible to have so many random variations; that some grand something must be somewhere doing some action or placing some object within us that controls some aspect of something else. Another common (in America at least) is that we cannot explain our affinity for music so there must be a soul that is designed to respond to this particular stimulus (also art, math, etc.). Bullshit.
Why say this in regards to a soul? Because these learned behaviours and differing perceptions create routes in the brain. These electrical routes determine the memory and type of memory. Without memory we are as nothing in a personal context. If a soul exists outside of these memories and connections, why would Alzheimers be possible? How could brain damage cause a lack of memory of self or change a person?
I remember years ago reading a study on a man in New York that was in a terrible accident. He was the most disgusting, foul, "evil" person you could imagine. I put that in quotation marks because evil is an entirely different subject. During this accident he suffered, rather severe, damage to his brain. When consciousness resumed he was an entirely different person. He lived the rest of his life as a caring, loving person who would be missed, prior to the accident no person would have missed him and most would have been relieved that knew him. To believe in the soul a person must ask themselves whether or not the soul was the person before or the person after the accident. Either his soul was a terrible vile thing or it was a caring and beautiful thing.
The simple and seemingly obvious fact is that our brain and it's "wiring" are the sole determinative concept in regards to self. This is it. There is no programming code (soul) that can override the loss of integral parts or reroute our personality around missing units. In a computer, you can take out ram chips and processors and simply reload the [previous "thing/personality/programming" of a computer. Humans are not like this. If you remove or damage the pieces that contain our memory, you remove us.
