At the root of the problem is, as usual, a definition. If you want me to believe in something you are proposing, I need some sort of definition, not a fuzzy and moving target that depends on current trends in public superstition.
What I think most people mean start out meaning is "that which makes each of us individuals." If that is the case, well, I accept individualism. I not only see individualism in humans, it is very easy to see in other animals. As a birdwatcher, I have even seen great differences in personality in little birds in the wild (personality generally expresses as behavior).
Where I think many people make a wrong turn (at Albequerque, according to Bugs Bunny) is when they get to the permanence aspect of it. Your soul has always existed and always will exist, they try to tell me. This is something that I call "wishful thinking;" and not fully-formed thinking, at that. The first problem is that it does not fit the soul-as-individual idea. As individuals, we change throughout our lives. Some of us even experience total changes in who we are, due to disease and/or injury. There are disorders that, to me, seem to completely refute the personality-as-soul idea.
How about multiple personality disorders? Do those people have multiple souls?
What about people that have Capgras disorder? This is a disorder that can result from brain injury or disease in which they believe one or more people around them have been replaced by an impostor (I believe that the spouse is a common target of these delusions). We talk about our souls going to hang out with the souls of the people we love (oddly, no one ever asks how that's going to work out with the innumerable loves and families we have all had in the past and will have in the future. That is going to make for some ugly situations in heaven, or wherever -- Heaven is a silly idea for another time). How does such a thing work out for those who die with Capgras disorder? Do they then remember their loved ones? Or do they still believe their loved ones' souls have been replaced by impostor souls?
When does a soul enter a human form? If it is at conception, then what about cells that later split and become identical twins? Does each twin have half a soul? If so, shouldn't that express itself as some sort of half-soul disorder, like only having half the personality traits of a normal person? What about chimeras -- those cases where multiple fertilized eggs fuse into one human? Do these people have double souls?
If our souls (as personalities) reincarnate (and I have not heard an argument that there is anything preventing them from doing so), then why do children act as blank slates? Shouldn't their souls contain the information from previous existences?
What about people with developmental disabilities? Are some souls mentally retarded? When my sister dies, does her soul magically regain whatever normality it supposedly had prior to this life?
And what about animals other than our species? If we argue that they don't/can't have souls because of their different brain structure, then we end up backing up a paragraph and having to accept that those humans with malformed or damaged brains may be people without souls. If brain structure is not the determining factor, then what is? The particular genetic makeup that makes us Homo sapiens? That begs the question of what all these souls were doing before humans arose. And if DNA is the source or holding area or whatever, we should be able to prove or disprove a soul based on arrangements of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. But since DNA is not permanent, we have a problem there.
Which quickly leads us to the question: How many souls are there? Is it one per human? If so, what is the maximum number of them? Do they get recycled? Or is every example of humanity unique? If so, then there are souls just waiting for more human bodies to become available. The number of humans that will ever exist is finite, so the number of souls must be, as well. What mechanism will make sure we don't make more human babies than there are souls available? Will all humans magically become sterile when the souls run out? Or will there be soulless humans for a bit if we run past our quota?
I could go on and on with unanswered questions about souls and examples of how the concept (at least how it has been explained to me) violates what we know to be reality. More and more, we are seeing that our individualism is a construct of our biological structure and information processing (i.e., our genes and our environment). Far from the myth that "we only use 10% of our brain," we are discovering that every part of our brain is a part of who we are, and that injuries to nearly any part of the brain can have huge effects on us. Our "soul," I currently believe, is a delicate, temporary, and precious thing that requires no hocus-pocus to explain, and deserves to be handled with great care.
As always, I am open to refutations of my observations or interpretations of data or concepts, and welcome any evidence you might have for an immortal soul (SEE NOTES 2 and 3). After all, that would make the uneccessary deaths of so many beings much more bearable (even if it does so at the cheapening of the idea of life).
XXX
NOTE: Although I don't "believe in" cryptozoological beings like Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster, I also don't see anything that prevents them from being a physical possibility. The longer they persist as unfound entities, the less likely they seem to actually exist, but strange creatures are still being found in the wild, especially those that live in the water. Consider how unlikely the Ceolacanth was when it was found in 1938 (Cool web site here: http://www.dinofish.com/). Some cryptozoologicals, like werewolves and vampires, violate basic known rules of biology, so I don't give those much processing time.
NOTE 2: I will anticipate one silly example of support for the idea of a soul before anyone embarrasses themselves by trying to explain it: Near death experiences (NDE's). NDE's (as well as OBEs) have been tested in the lab, and even induced in the lab. They appear to align quite well with what we are learning about the structure and function of the human brain via the rapid data from neuroscience. We are pulling the curtain aside and finding out, more and more, that there is no Wizard of Oz. If we can improve education in the U.S., we'll answer many more of these questions and spooky unknowns faster.
NOTE 3: Some believers in pseudoscience/paranormal/whatever will try to invoke scientific principles. One I like is the "conservation of energy" principle applied in "What happens to our energy when we die? Science says that that energy must continue to exist." Yup. Then your computer or car must have a soul that leaves them every time you shut them down.
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