Talk:Penny Polendina/@comment-27402698-20160120233435/@comment-24891101-20160121062930

Says who? They're souls; completely fictitious entities. They can work however the author damn well pleases.

I very much have an extensive explanation of how this works. We start with the soul as a quantifiable phenomenon. This is incontravertible; they have machines to measure it. We have the fact that animals possess it, presumably ones as simple as ants. We have the fact that computers, with more processing power than ants, lack them. We have the Grimm which lack them. The commonality is the neural net for the animals. Something about the neural net generates the phenonenon called the soul. Penny therefore is an artificial neural net which generates one.

What is the soul besides an emergent property? What is stored there exclusively that is not contained within the brain in humans? Memories are still encoded there, patterns of behavior are still encoded there, everything that makes a person who one is is contained within the architecture and signals of the brain. The soul is at best a convenient byword for the phenomenon of consciousness. There is metaphysics in RWBY, but it is grounded in physics, requiring physical instantiations to interact. The aura sensors, Dust in industry, the aura transfer device, even Penny herself support this.

Given that Penny's processor is non-volatile, being some form of computer, it is the very act of activating a sufficiently-complex neural net that generates a soul de novo. Thus, since nothing of Penny is lost, her soul will reform. Rather, a new one will form, but it's the same difference.