Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-24993958-20151118083252/@comment-24891101-20151119201006

The metaphysical here is fundamentally far more physical than in numerous other works. The soul is measured, after all, and can be detected by handheld devices. They've created an artificial soul in the lab. We have no evidence that souls persist after death. It's barely metaphysical, when you come right down to it.

Because of these factors, I hold that the soul is merely a product of the mind, with no independant existence, snuffed when the mind fails. There's no biological elitism (look at Penny), and souls apparently seem to vary from species to species. To me, the soul in RWBY is an emergent property of a sufficiently-complex neural net, and is thus almost entirely a physical property. Unless you can show that memories and such are stored in the soul and not in the mind, given all of the above, this won't work.