To understand it fully we must define the soul and its properties. A soul has no observable or measurable physical properties. You cannot study a soul in a laboratory setting and you cannot see it. While humans exist in a definite space and time, souls reside outside of any space time. Souls are also eternal, that is they outlive the body. These properties are similar to those associated with God. (This is, of course, most theists view) Souls are viewed in different ways by different types of theists. Christians, for example, believe that the soul is created at conception and lives on after bodily death. Hindus believe the soul is pre-existing and just attaches to different bodies at death. (deals with reincarnation theories) While souls cannot be observed, they can be indirectly identified by the physical vessel they are attached to. This is often times called the same body / same soul idea. If a body has a soul, the same body has the same soul each time you see it. This means of re-identification uses the principle of correlation to establish identity. Considering these properties, the premises for the soul theory are the following:.
(a) Your essence is a soul - a certain soul.
(b) An entity X is the same as you, S, if and only if X and S share the same soul. .
So the soul theory answers the questions of essence:.
(a) The essence of you, a being S, is your soul.
(b) An entity Y is the same as you, the entity S, if and only if Y and S share the same soul.
This theory is accepted by many because it aligns with their faith, but it also has some advantages. The soul survives after bodily death and this makes us more like God than an object without a soul (a table or a glacier). It also allows us to justify decisions because we will live past our physical lives. Religious faiths notwithstanding, this theory's advantages are somewhat comforting to many people simply because it makes us seem unique and special.
