On spirituality, the soul and self

I guess for non-believers in the Christian faith to be "spiritual" is not a bad thing. If they haven't been elected to follow Jesus at least they are recognizing that the human is more than just a physical body. I hope !

It's weird really, Christians and Spiritualists alike believe that we have a quality (let's call it "the soul"), and that this soul is somehow separate from our physical being. But this "soul" does not register on any scientific apparatus known to mankind. So what is it? It's not an electromagnetic phenemenon. Did we invent the soul for survival purposes?

We have not found the soul with instruments, but to me, as a scientist, the soul could only exist (in this Universe) in the small spaces that are excluded from our intruments. These are very small distances, but add up to the entire Universe. All these tiny bits of space that we cannot look inside of (uncertainty principle) add up to a Universe. So if we cannot see what the Universe is really made of, then could the soul perhaps live in those spaces?

Hypothetical question: if I could copy your physical body and the electronic state of your brain exactly (like resuming a PC from hibernate), would that copy be "BAGWELL"? Who is "BAGWELL"? Is "BAGWELL" defined by his soul? And can the soul be copied?

I've been musing on this problem lately and have been kind of losing "myself". It appears to me that the "self" doesn't really exist. If you think about it long enough you get lost (or at least I do) in the feeling that the whole Universe is one connected thing, and that none of us are "real".

But while thinking about it, and getting lost, ones attention wanders and you might get eaten by a lion. So natural selection has ensured that we don't think about such things. :-) (Or better, we don't think about such things because those of us that did died out and those of us that survived are a different breed).

Current song: "Groove is in the heart" -- Deee Lite