By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor

I had just finished speaking. The room had been engaged, the questions were thoughtful, and I was settling into that quiet satisfaction that follows a presentation that lands the way you hoped it would. Then a man approached me, and what he asked stopped me in my tracks.

He had heard, he said, that most of the people building artificial intelligence largely do not believe that human beings have souls. He had been sitting with that claim for a while and had not known who to ask about it. Then he heard me speak, and he thought: this person lives at the intersection of communication theory, paranormal research, and scientific credibility. If anyone would take the question seriously without either dismissing it or oversimplifying it, it might be him.

I appreciated that more than he probably knew.

I want to be honest about the statistic he cited. I have not been able to verify it in the precise form he presented it, and I am not willing to build an argument on a number I cannot confirm. But the question underneath the statistic is real, and it is one that the rise of artificial intelligence is forcing all of us to confront whether we are ready for it or not: what exactly makes a human being unique, and does that uniqueness have a name?

What Fifteen Years of Investigation Taught Me

I did not arrive at this question through philosophy. I arrived at it through people.

Over fifteen years of paranormal investigation, I have sat with grieving widows who believed their husbands were still present in the rooms they had shared. I have walked through farmhouses with families who were certain something was watching them from the top of the stairs. I have spoken with people who believed a poltergeist was dismantling their sense of safety from the inside out. I have listened to people describe encounters with figures in the woods that no field guide could explain. I have sat overnight in locations that felt, for reasons I could not always articulate, deeply and specifically inhabited.

And what I have found, without exception, is that no two people process any of this the same way.

Not even close.

A grieving widow and a frightened homeowner can be standing in the same room, experiencing what appears to be the same event, and what each of them carries away from it, what it means, how it settles into their understanding of themselves and the world, is as individual as a fingerprint. I have never once sat across from a client and thought: this person is interchangeable with anyone else I have met. Every single person has been irreducibly themselves. Their fears are their own. Their interpretations are their own. Their way of being in the world is entirely their own in ways that no formula I have ever encountered can fully predict or contain.

That is where my soul argument begins. Not in theology. Not in laboratory data. In fifteen years of paying close attention to human beings.

We all have idiosyncrasies that make us unique. I have seen that truth repeated across hundreds of investigations, in living rooms and farmhouses and locations that most people would never willingly enter after dark. And the more I study people, the more I realize that uniqueness itself remains genuinely difficult to explain.

The Question Science Has Not Closed

Interestingly, this question is not confined to paranormal research. Scientists studying personality and consciousness have wrestled with it for decades.

Behavioral genetics research has consistently found that genetics accounts for approximately 50 percent of the variance in human personality, with the remaining half attributed to influences that neither shared DNA nor shared environment fully explains (Wiley Online Library, 2020). Identical twins raised in the same household by the same parents still become meaningfully distinct individuals in ways that researchers can measure but struggle to account for. The gap between what we inherit and who we become is not a small rounding error. It is half of everything.

Philosopher David Chalmers identified what he called the hard problem of consciousness, the question of why physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience at all, and why that experience feels like something from the inside rather than simply occurring as a mechanical process (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d.). A 2025 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology proposed that consciousness may not emerge from the brain at all but may instead be foundational, with the brain serving as a kind of interface for something larger rather than as its sole source (Arora, 2025). That is a significant claim from a peer-reviewed journal, and it suggests the scientific conversation is considerably more open than the materialist consensus sometimes implies.

I am not declaring that these findings prove the soul. I am saying that the question remains genuinely and rigorously open, and that the people who study it most carefully are the least likely to tell you it has been settled.

Why AI Makes This Urgent

Here is what I think the man at my keynote was really asking, even if he did not have the words for it quite yet.

For most of human history, the question of what makes a person unique could be set aside as philosophical or spiritual, interesting but not immediately practical. Artificial intelligence has changed that. When a system can hold a conversation, generate creative work, and mirror the patterns of human expression with increasing accuracy, we are suddenly forced to define with precision what we mean when we say that a human being is something more than the sum of their processes.

I do not think that question has an easy answer. But I do think that every person I have ever investigated, every individual who sat across from me and told me the most intimate and frightening story of their life, carried with them something I could not reduce to an algorithm. A specific and irreplaceable way of being in the world. A history that shaped them in directions no one could have predicted from their starting conditions. An interior life that was entirely and unmistakably their own.

Whether that constitutes a soul in the theological sense is a question I leave to traditions better equipped than mine to answer. What I can say, from fifteen years of sitting with human beings in the most unguarded moments of their experience, is that the uniqueness is real. It is consistent. And it is, as yet, unexplained.

The question of whether human beings possess a soul may be one of the most important questions artificial intelligence is now forcing us to revisit. I do not think that is a coincidence, and I do not think it is a question we should be in a hurry to close.

That seems worth taking seriously.

Many of the cases explored in my newly published book, The Paranormal Professor: Investigating Belief, Perception, and the Unexplained, began with a similar question: what does it mean to be human, and how do we make sense of experiences that challenge our understanding of ourselves? If this blog has raised questions you want to explore further, I hope you will find it there.

References

Arora, A. (2025). The spiritual core of the hard problem: Consciousness as foundational, not emergent. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1659944. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1659944

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Hard problem of consciousness. https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/

Wiley Online Library. (2020). Twin studies in personality research. In The Wiley encyclopedia of personality and individual differences. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118970843.ch139