doppelganger
Through the Looking Glass
Unless one has an experience of a thing that has a set of attributes to which that symbol would be attached, yes. But that doesn't mean there's "no such thing." Just that we have not experienced a thing to which we have had a use in ascribing that particular set of attributes.
Yes. BUT, so is every common noun. The difference is that the "soul" serves only a grammatical function (so does "God" by the way). Put another way the soul (the ego, the mind, the self, "I am", any use of language that presumes the identity of user as distinct from other things) is not observed by associating it with categories of sensations, but by the fact that sensations are being categorized and used - and language presumes a "mind" behind it. Indeed, if recent research into mirror neurons is taken into account, this state of presuming mind/intentionality behind observed patterns may be so hard-wired into human neurology that it can't even be spoken of without creating a strange loop.
"Personality" is a function of grammar. It makes no sense to ask whether it "exists" because the very language you are using necessarily presumes its existence. Granted, superstitious people are in the habit of projecting their "soul" as a thing outside of grammar. But this is just from a lack of introspection.
No it doesn't. It claims there are no minds/souls that stand apart from Universe and act apart from it. All movement, including the movement of signals between neurons, is the product of all the movements that preceded them. Discreet things only exist in thought, and then, only to the extent that their "existence" is useful.
Spinoza gives a very succinct summary of this idea in his refutation of "free will" in his Ethics:
And indeed, as Spinoza goes on to explain, it is in this very error of not recognizing the role of thought in the forms of things and the purpose for which thought accumulates such forms that leads to superstitions about the "soul" and "God":
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