Eclipse Phase and… the soul?

Question

What's Eclipse Phase's take on the soul? Does such a thing exist in the game world? Are there in game debates about it (with factions opposing body switching and so on)?

(If someone dies then having a copy of his memories and personality traits in a new body is not necessarily equal to that exact person living on. It's easy to consider the new manifestation simply as a mental/emotinal/[physical] clone that has just started living. Accepting the new clone as the old person's direct continuation requires quite a solid philosophical stance, like considering the Universe a simulation in which a "physical person" is just an instance of a "meta-person object"... or something along these lines.)

Answer 1

It's ambiguous and that's intentional. There was a long debate thread on RPG.Net that the authors even commented on. I believe the authors stated the intent was to be ambiguous. It could be easily said that one of the themes of Eclipse Phase is exploring your humanity and determining what happens to a transhuman soul certainly right up that alley.

There are factions opposed to body-swapping/any "upgrades" to humanity including the Jovian Junta (who rule Jupiter). I can't remember specific factions but as a whole these folks are lumped into a category called "bio-conservatives".

Answer 2

Personally, I run Eclipse Phase as a hard science fiction. Therefore the soul as a mystical thing does not exist. However, I am taking a very similar approach to the Ghost In The Shell (the manga, the two Anime films and both seasons of Stand Alone Complex) universe concept of the ghost. Forks do not have the same ghost and thus lack something. But some (good) backups are indeed capable of cloning the ghost. It is something I leave intentionally vague so that players can explore the concept and come up with their own conclusions.

Now, psionics is interesting. You could rule that it is a concept of the body and not the ghost. So, were you infected you could cure yourself by moving body. Or you could rule that it is a corruption of the ghost so that any new body will exhibit it as well. Or it could be both depending on exactly which strain a character gets inflected with.

Answer 3

In a casual read as an utterly amateur student of theology, I came to the conclusion that Eclipse Phase postulates no important individual soul, as it allows duplication of the person.

Since the duplicate can function, but, theologically, the soul is a unique gift from God at conception, the ability to duplicate a person means either the soul isn't part of the person in a significant way, or there is no soul, or the soul can be duplicated with the rest of the personality, or can be shared by the multiple instances. In any of these cases, it isn't important, individual, and/or of exclusively divine origin.

It's not so far as to say "no soul," but it is far enough to deny the practical importance and/or individuality of a person's soul.