The Soul and Personhood
By Dominic Taranto
Personhood is a very hard thing to pin down. What makes a person who they are? Is it their memories? It seems not, as a person with amnesia is still the same person despite their inability to properly interact. Is it the makeup of a person’s body? Again, this doesn’t quite seem to make sense. Amputees are the same people despite not having the same body as they did before their procedure.
Therefore, personhood has to be determined by something non-physical. There must be a soul. Note that I will use “soul” in a very broad sense, not a specific metaphysical concept. But it seems that at the very minimum, there has to be something we cannot see that makes a person who they are. I will show that a soul is necessary for personhood by showing that it is the only thing that is consistent throughout a person’s life, it is the only thing that can provide value, and it is necessary for free will.
Firstly, a soul is necessary for a real sense of personhood because there must be part of a person's identity that is consistent throughout their lifetime. If there isn’t a real thing that gives a person their identity across their entire life, there is no real “person”. For this reason, what defines personhood cannot be subject to change. This rules out things like personality, memories, and physical bodies. Personalities change overtime; they can't be consistent indicators for personhood. Memories can change in one of two ways. We can either lose them because of an injury to the brain or, more commonly, we gain them through our day-to-day life—I make new memories every second I am alive. Therefore, memory is also not a consistent **indicator** for determining my personhood. Lastly, our physical bodies are also subject to radical change throughout our lifetime. Our cells cycle out every seven years, so if we judge personhood based on them, we are bound to say that we are a wholly new person every seven years. There must be something metaphysical that ties all of these changes into a single personal identity.
In order for my last argument to work, we have to agree that free will exists. There are a few ways that free will can be proved, but here is one: the existence of beliefs. Imagine that you wholly believe that dogs are superior to cats. There is nothing that could possibly determine your belief. There are metrics that could determine that dogs are better than cats, and there can be metrics that determine that cats are better than dogs. But there is nothing physical that can determine what you whole-heartedly believe about dogs and cats. It is not something that can be determined. Therefore, if you have a belief, you had to have chosen to believe it.
Thus, given that we have free will, it can only be explained by something non-physical. Since the initial moment of time in the universe, there have been laws that govern how physical things must act. The initial moment of time caused a determined chain-reaction of events that could not have happened in any other way. If we can decide to act a specific way, there needs to be something that breaks the determined chain-reaction, and it can’t be something that is subject to any physical laws (or else it would have already been predetermined). For this reason, there has to be a metaphysical aspect of a person that can break the determined chain-reaction. Free will actions are an integral part of personhood, and yet we cannot have it without a soul.
There is only one thing that can explain and define personhood. It cannot be anything physical, or else we would be thousands of different people throughout our life. There would be no real conception of personhood. A soul must exist.