Annotated Chapter 7 Page 4
Pretty sure Poe was going to say “you do really have souls. Or at least a feature that reasonably fills the properties humans are thinking of when they use the word ‘soul’.”
But Miranda gets caught up in a tangent on dinosaur bones and dragons.
And, I mean, hard to blame her. Dragons are very distracting.
The next day.
Poe: I do believe you can do this. You learned one piece of magic so quickly already.
Miranda: There’s no such thing as magic.
Poe: Then . . . when you transported us across space, what should I call it?
Miranda: A natural process whose properties we don’t fully understand yet. Same as everything else humanity has ever called “magic” or “religion.”
If the weather’s bad, we blame a witch or hire a shaman. When it clears up, we thank Yahweh for sending a rainbow.
We don’t understand how a child gets personality, so we credit a soul. And if the kid was autistic, we used to figure it had been taken by faeries.
Take any real thing — like dinosaur bones —
— and start calling it “magic”, and eventually you lose all perspective. Sooner or later you’re falling for that story from George down the street about that time he fought a real-live one. And, ooh, it breathed fire!
Poe: Now, Master . . . not all of those things are . . .
I think, before you can answer whether or not people really have a soul, one needs to understand what exactly a soul is.
Like so much of religion, the definition of a soul is so ineffable that it defies proof or disproof. Sure, we can change someones personality by messing with their brain, which could suggest that the brain is the source of personality, rather than this soul thing. But if the brain is the conduit from the soul to the body, messing with the brain would still reasonably cause changes, even if it didn’t actually affect the soul – or didn’t affect the soul in the same way.
I personally feel it would be something of a nightmare to be connected with a body one couldn’t control anymore. That experience would probably affect the soul, even if the alteration made to the brain did not do so directly.