I think you’re speaking as if the soul were some kind of physical object placed somewhere inside the body, but that’s not really the classical Christian view.
The soul is not “inside” the body in the way the heart, brain, or lungs are inside the body, they soul is the form and life-principle of the body. In other words, it’s what makes a living body a living body, so asking where the soul “sits” is, in my view, a category mistake ( a bit like asking where the meaning of a sentence is located on the paper),
As for animals: yes, animals have a “soul” in the broad Aristotelian sense, because they are living beings with sensation, appetite, memory, and movement, but they don’t have a rational, spiritual, immortal soul in the way human beings do, their soul is a sensitive animal soul, not a rational one.
Do animals have a mind? That depends on what you mean by “mind”. They clearly have sensory awareness, memory, imagination, and a kind of instinctive intelligence, but they don’t have intellect in the strict philosophical sense (the capacity to grasp universal truths, reason abstractly, make moral judgments, or know God).
So I would put it this way: the intellect, or mind in the higher sense, is a power of the rational soulc and in human beings the soul is spiritual and rational; in animals, it is neither rational nor immortal.
Also, the soul is not “added after the mind,” as though God first made a mind and then inserted a soul somewhere into the body. As I said the human person is one unified being composed of body and rational soul, which means that the souls is the life-principle of the whole living person.
My point was that if consciousness were proven to be totally and exhaustively reducible to matter, then the Christian doctrine of the immortal soul would become basically impossible to maintain.
For example brain damage can seriously affect memory, language, personality, perception, and the outward expression of consciousness, but that only shows that the brain is necessary for the normal phenomenal manifestation of consciousness in embodied life, it doesn’t, by itself, prove that consciousness, intellect, will, and personal identity are nothing but brain activity.
To make an example, if a damaged brain prevents a person from speaking, remembering, reasoning outwardly, or expressing awareness, that may show that the instrument through which consciousness is expressed has been damaged, but it doesn’t automatically prove that the deeper principle of consciousness is inextricably linked to, and originated by, matter.
This is also why phenomena such as terminal or paradoxical lucidity are relevant. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but there are reported cases in which people with severe dementia or serious cognitive decline unexpectedly recover clarity, recognition, communication, or memory shortly before death. I’m not saying this scientifically proves the soul, but it does challenge the simplistic idea that the observable condition of the brain always maps perfectly onto the presence or absence of conscious personal capacities.
So, to be clear, the brain matters as Christianity sees the human person as a unity of body and soul (the soul can subsist after bodily death, but that separated state is incomplete and unnatural, which is precisely why Jesus has taught not only the immortality of the soul, but also the resurrection of the body), but dependence on the brain for ordinary embodied expression isn’t the same as total ontological reduction to the brain.
If strict materialism were actually demonstrated ( meaning that intellect, will, personal identity, and consciousness are entirely and solely produced by matter, and therefore necessarily cease at death ) then the immortality of the soul would be disproven.
Sure. I never respond to anyone that way. I replied to Roy like that because he tends to get caught up in nitpicking ( this Your thoughts on punishment or rehabilitation and whether there are any truly bad people - #188 by 1Cor15.54 is exactly what I mean: he focused on a single term without taking the broader context into account), which ends up wasting a lot of time.
Sure, have a read Your thoughts on punishment or rehabilitation and whether there are any truly bad people - #163 by 1Cor15.54