Talk:Yang Xiao Long/@comment-26838620-20150901052756/@comment-24891101-20150902053623

But Penny does have a soul, per her own statement regarding her Aura capacity. I take a reductionist/materialist view here, in that we have an artificial person with a soul, and the ability of machines to detect phenomena generated by such. This suggests that the soul is not a metaphysical object in itself, but merely a byword for the effects of consciousness under RWBY's metaphysics.

Phantom: I would submit to you that there is absolutely no evidence of Aura in real life to any meaningful extent (sure, the body has an EM field, but it doesn't do anything). Ockham rejects. And if Aura is a field of some sort generated by neural activity, it still would not increase intelligence, since that is entirely down to frequency of impulses and degree of interconnection. Intensity does not enter into it, save in the trivial sense of requiring certain voltages for certain gates to actually propagate the action potential. Unless you're talking about Aura literally rewiring the brain, that's not going to happen.