What is a soul?

What is a soul? Is it made from a non-material substance that exists beyond time, space, and known matter? Does this non-material substance then escape from the physical corporeal body upon death? Or is it a fantasy created by human beings to assuage the all too common fear of death?

Perhaps there is a third option: The soul is both encased within the constraints of matter and our perception of time. The soul is not a thing but a process, built within our brains of a myriad of electo-chemical impulses that travel along a maze of axons and dendrites within a three dimensional volume. From that perspective, a soul is both immaterial - it is not the electrical impulses, but is an amalgamation of the change of a pattern of impulses over time - and yet also exists within a material substrate. Thus, the soul is a combination of information processing over time and the results of that information processing - which only feed yet more information processing until the physical system that contains it breaks down due to entropy and other physical constraints.

And if that's true, then the only questions about life after death worth considering are: what is time? Is it truly an arrow moving in only one direction of a space-time vector, say along a continuum from the Big Bang to the Final End? Or is that just what we perceive it to be? Is time really an amalgamation of all potential events? And the next question worth considering is: What is randomness? Do all physical systems create some inherent random outcome, just by their very existence? If so, how then does "randomness" interact with "time?"

For if time is not an arrow in only one direction, and the outcome of all macroscopic physical existence is imbued by microscopic random chance, and can not be considered an ordered set of predictable events after all, then there is no reason to assume that a nonphysical electrochemical pattern emergent from a physical brain (or computer) - ever-changing across the span of its corporeal existence - might disappear just as the matter that calls forth its existence turns to dust.

Existence - information - could well be be conserved in the universe across all time. All process state might thus be conserved too. And there's your life after death.