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Do you believe the that you have a soul?
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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OP did not verbalize that as such, this sounds like your personal interpretation.
Regardless, vital spark = being = subjective experience = sense of self = animating principle = consciousness = soul. These are essentially synonyms.
Ohioans may have common attributes, these attributes will shape certain aspects of the soul. Souls are likewise shaped by religion, cultural ethnicity, philosophical beliefs, aesthetic preference, sexuality, and many other factors. These factors are like the hands and techniques that shape the clay, the soul is the clay. Being, at least one's own (in the solipsistic extreme), is uncontested even by the strictest materialist atheist. It's only the nature (origin, destiny, scope) that anyone disagrees on.
OP must be refering to the metaphysical definition, as they do not believe that souls exists. As you point out, denying the idea of personal experience is unreasonable, therefore OP must hold that "soul" refers to something more and is not synonymous with the sense of self.
You argue here that such a "something more" soul does not exist, reasonably attributing the idea to emergent properties of natural systems, yet you seem to argue that this constitutes every definition of soul, including the various flavours of "something more", simultaneously answering yes and no.
This is where the confusing begins. Do you believe souls are emergent or elementary? Is there a persistent metaphysical aspect, or are they ephemeral at best? Are they simply produced by the flesh, or is the flesh just where they reside while alive? Do souls exist, or are they an illusion like a tree in a painting?
I did no such thing. I argue for a descriptivist, rather than prescriptivist, perspective on the subject. I argue that questions of the nature of the soul are separate from questions of the existence of the soul, the latter being fairly obvious. The "something more" aspect is a question of nature. I deliberately abstained from arguing any specific claims regarding the nature of the soul, that lies beyond the scope of the question.
I engaged with the question as OP posed it. If they would like to refine the question to narrow the definition of "soul" then I will engage with that new question.