Worldbuilding Wednesday #7: Souls and Ghosts (Patreon)

In the Poppy universe, souls are a tangible concept that have been proven to exist and can be rendered visible to the naked eye via magic. There are NOT magical in nature, however, and opossums do not exert any influence over them.

When most people think about souls, they think of some singular mass representing an individual, but this is a highly misguided view. A living creature usually contains, at any given moment, somewhere between 50,000 to 70,000 souls. These souls represent their current state of consciousness, and can come and go depending on the person's mindset. Things like fleeting feelings, opinions, memes and memories are all souls either produced within the mind, or picked up floating freely through the air.

For example: a memory is not some perfect representation of a moment, but a generated concept within a part of the brain to be used as future reference. Any given memory will only store a single concept, such as a situation, and will be reliant on other memories to provide context with things like the faces and names of individuals within that situation.

A memory is, by nature,  subjective, and can be corrupted by its surrounding thoughts and emotions. That corruption is a natural part of free will, and is essential to creating new mindsets, although it can have both good and bad outcomes. A negative person is highly susceptible to free-roaming souls that resonate those feelings, which can lead them into emotional feedback loops, such as depression. Conversely, someone with a positive mindset will attract positively resonating souls, which can color their worldview as very idealistic.

Even though souls have an obvious effect on the mind, that does not mean they're what make people tick. A person's ability to think and form ideas is born from the chemical and biological processes within the brain. The best way of demonstrating this concept is to consider the relationship between a living person and a ghost.

Ghosts

A ghost is a complete mass of souls that has been permanently seperated from the body, most typically as a result of death. Under normal circumstances, a ghost is not capable of being seen or heard, and cannot physically interact with objects, but if a person were to, say, astrally project via magic and then die (Such as Master Mouf's fate), their souls would be locked within that projection, and continue to exist in an observable state until they lost their structure and fizzled out.

Ghosts are not capable of true thought. They are simply a representation of person's consciousness at the exact moment of their death. They cannot learn things, or come to new conclusions, or change their current emotional state, as those things all require changes within the brain. Even if you were to tie a dead person's ghost back to their original body, without a living brain, you'd only be creating a flesh construct with no real will of its own.

Now, simply pulling a person's souls out would not produce a ghost, as their souls are naturally attracted back to their body, but for the sake of argument, if you could seperate a body and soul mass in some permanent manner, the ghost would eventually disappear into individual particles, but the body would continue to live, albeit confused and disoriented, without any memories or bias. They would eventually develop a new set of souls and move on.

The concept of free-roaming souls raises many provoking questions and theories, such as whether a single running stream of consciousness truly exists, whether living things actually have true free will, and if there's some in-universe credence to concepts like morphic resonance, the subconscious exchange of ideas and memories between unrelated individuals.

BUT ENOUGH OF THAT STUFF, NEXT WEEK WE'RE TALKING ABOUT FLORAN VIDEOGAMES