What's the Soul?

[thrasherpix]

Another thread got me to thinking on it, and so I'm sharing a vid I saw fairly recently:

The part that gets me the most...

Angel: "No. What I do know is that you love this baby, our baby. You've bonded with it. You've spent nine months carrying it, nourishing it..."

Darla: "No. No, I haven't been nourishing it. I haven't given this baby a thing. I'm dead. It's been nourishing me. These feelings that I'm having, they're not mine. They're coming from it."

Angel: "You don't know that."

Darla: "Of course I do! We both do. Angel, I don't have a soul. It does. And right now that soul is inside of me, but soon, it won't be and then..."

Angel: "Darla..."

Darla: "I won't be able to love it. I won't even be able to remember that I loved it. (Starts to cry) I want to remember."

 

[thrasherpix]

Any RWBY fans here?

If so, I could see Penny being rebuilt. However, rebuilding her android body would by no means she still had the soul she had when she met Ruby. (And btw, I suspect Watts may have contributed somewhat to Penny's creation, though that's just my fan theory...I'm sure something very sinister happened to give Penny a soul/aura since she is completely unique of all the robots.) A horrific (or perhaps emotionally devastating is a better way to put it) is Team RWBY finding Penny rebuilt...but without a soul or free will at all, even if she has all the memories (but those memories mean nothing other than raw data to inform her in carrying out the commands of her owners). Penny is her soul, not just her memories.

Of course defining a soul is problematic enough in the Buffyverse and in RWBY where a soul can actually be contained, measured, even eaten, and the like as any other physical energy source, but in our world where we can't do that (at least not to know for certain that's what we're doing) then it's impossible to make any definitive statements about it, so I was just saying in case there are any other RWBY fans here.
 
And if our memories are our souls, then what of those who lose their memories?