There is a lot written regarding soul. There are also a lot written about the uniqueness of Human intelligence. Certainly I will start into fiction as I often do from Star Trek stories. Picard S1 ends with his body dying but the “substrate” of his mind transferred to an Android body. This is a far out idea, especially to happen to the star of a show whose Humanity is what we tune in for. Boldly we have fictionalized! FAMX0.25

So… it seems that in the Trekverse, there remains some idea that there is a non-replicable component of our intelligence, or “our being” when the get sentimental This essence can be transported but it cannot be replicated to make two of you.

It is certainly within our imagination that human uniqueness can be interpreted as an Pseudo-random number generator. Each of us can have our own PRNG seed that were set at behest of god or the Big Bang. It kind of determines who we are. At any time our beings have a state, it results from all of our history and determines how we think in the future. One can also imagine that perhaps the limit of our lives is at the limit of the PRNG cycle, when it repeats your initial state, the life ends. Even if it repeats, the essence of the existence is same as the first time it ran, the life has ended. So suppose our intelligence, or our biological/genetic process is a program that invokes this PRNG. And the ideas of free will is encapsulated as the PRNG as well, the freedom from deterministic behavior and stimulus response is the PRNG, it is our freedom to ultimately decide no matter what and where the Universe puts us.

Along those lines, one can imagine a kind of state that cannot easily be observed or replicated. So when they make a copy of you, at some level, some material, some black box machine, must be transported to the new copy, and thereby your identity within this body is destroyed.

This kind of give rise to ideas of reincarnation… of a particular PRNG has a very long cycle that somehow outlasts corporeal longevity of the computer using it, it may have to be transported to another computer to continue running.

Also, PRNG may be a retronym. In retrospect or in a frame of thinking where time is static, for example when considering the world as a 4-D volume, the information of this soul we consider may most easily be described using an PRNG, either in analogy or to model it. Ex ante, the soul is the soul, how it will play out is difficult to think about in the 3D representation that is the body and mind. For all intents and purposes, it is a true RNG, to me.

And of course, that I think it now seems to imply that what I use to think is not quite 3-dimensional either, or that it is but is a result of a suitable RNG.