Talk:Soul Eater/@comment-35075069-20180705092008/@comment-45.56.46.26-20180706000832

Because souls are a source of magical power, and are also apparently something to do with volitional living beings, then it is probably intended that the soul is something like the energy/power which allows a non-material volitional entity to control/influence a living body.

It is possible that the soul stores personality information and memory, but uncertain. The soul shouldn't include the volitional element, since that would make it difficult to do controlled magic with harvested souls. However, the soul of a living being probably remains under the control of the volitional element until death. It can then be harvested by certain methods.

Really, it is uncertain whether a 'soul' is anything more than the innate mana which allows a body to be controlled by a volition. Obviously, absorbing a soul would separate the living body from the volition, effectively killing it. But we don't know exactly how that looks. It may be that the body would still be 'alive' in a medical sense, but irreversably comatose and thus expire as the parasympathetic nervous system failed and went into shock. Or it could be that even life at the cellular level requires innate mana to function (at least in the New World...though the possibility has not been rigorously excluded by science of our own world), and harvesting the soul would terminate all life functions right down to complex molecular chemistry of the cellular nucleous and mitochondria. Or anything in between.

Not that this would look all that different without the benefit of advanced scientific instruments. Soul eaten, body keels over and doesn't get back up.