What is the relationship between one’s personality and his/her soul? Is there any relationship at all? Is the personanlity only determined by the brain?
Any articles or external references would also be appreciated.
The answer to your question exists but at the moment cannot be explained here, because it does not fit into a traditionally religious context.
The soul is not defined well enough to support an answer to your question, so if you really want that answer, you’ll be digging for it. You must begin with a definition of the soul, and go from there to a determination of its relationship to the brain.
This itself brings up many issues, many in biology and neurophysiology.
Studies of the brain yield some results which might be interpreted as indicative of a soul, but cannot be useful because the soul lacks a serious definition.
By definition I mean: of what is it composed, how might it interact with the brain, what does it do (and not do), what is its purpose (please don’t quote from the catechism), what kind of information does it retain (in the context of the brain’s many varieties of information storage and retention mechanisms), and what information might it not be able to retain?
The first I know of who wrote seriously on the subject was the mathematician/philosopher Rene Descartes, and I recommend that you begin with him. Much of his best ideas are concealed, for fear of the Inquisition. The Church has failed to adopt his definition of the soul, which IMO was a mistake on its part. Not that his concept should be taken as the final answer, but it was a fine starting point.
If you want something more contemporary, a few decades ago the atheistic philosophers Hofstadter (who is actually a cool guy) and Dennet wrote,
The Mind’s I, a compendium of ideas (excerpts from other writers) about the nature of the human mind. The book presents a completely atheistic perspective through its authors’ comments, which follow and “explain” the excerpts. Their book includes two entire chapters from a novel,
The Soul of Anna Klane, which was excerpted entirely out of context, and is actually a story which uses the novel form to explain unique ideas about the nature of soul and its relationship to the brain. It is out of print, available used on the internet. I recommend it as an easy starting point. Both chapters have been filmed, but copies are hard to find, and are also out of context.
Should you read it at all, read it twice. The story is too powerful, and interferes with the ideas. On 2nd read, determine the day on which the story ended.
This research will prepare you to understand the more precise answers to your question, which are coming soon.
The wheel does not have to be reinvented, unless you just woke up from a coma and don’t know that the wheel already exists.