Do we have souls?

[darkstar3]

173. That's a treacle-sweet phrase, "his soul is untouched and shines through..."

Now tell me how you've seen that. How do you quantify or qualify his "soul", and how to you know that it's doing anything?

I lost my great-grandmother to dementia. My great-uncle is in late stage Alzheimer's. When another uncle of mine died, the trauma and anguish changed my aunt so much that when she followed him to the grave shortly thereafter, the family said "she'd already been gone for a while now." In those cases, and many more of stroke victims, head trauma victims, and others in my old community, I never once saw evidence of something I would call a "soul" or an "inner self" shining through. What I did see was clear evidence that the fundamental self changes, sometimes in its entirety, when the brain is subject to savage modification.

Now for the funny part: You modified your brain chemistry using hallucinogens, and you think it allowed you to see beyond your own brain chemistry.