So your problem remains: Classifiers come into use because they signify some experience or abstraction from experience (such as "chair") that is real."
I think we would concur that there is no such thing as a pink unicorn with fluffy blue wings, yet I can construct symbolic language to describe such a thing. Certainly, the concept of a pink unicorn with blue wings is constructed using elements that do, indeed, have real examples: horses are real, as are horns and wings. But the human mind is capable of putting these real things together in unrealistic ways, and it uses existing symbols.
In this sense, then, the "soul" can be thought of as an unrealistic combination of real things (and I gather this is pretty much the way you see it). Personality is real and life is real. But life after death is not real, and nor is the ability of the personality to persist without a physical body.
So do you agree in principle with strict determinism?
Strict determinism claims that events are, in principle, perfectly predictable, so there is only one possible future. I cannot quite agree with this for the simple reason that the motion of atomic particles is not, according to quantum mechanics, completely deterministic. This behavior trickles down to an infinitesimally small, yet non-zero, effect on large-scale objects such as people and their brains.
