One of the final scenes of the 1993 drama “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” features Arnie Grape, an intellectually disabled teenager portrayed by Lionardo DiCaprio, and his morbidly obese mother on her deathbed. This heartbreaking scene vividly demonstrates something profound and commonsensical about the soul and personhood on two fronts: first, it shows that human persons, including those with mental incapacities, possess a deep awareness and intuition of what constitutes human conscious life, including the capacity for long-term mourning and loss, as opposed to non-conscious entities (matter and, as far as we can tell, at least for the moment, artificial intelligence) and lower-level organisms such as arthropods, and a vastly more profound nature than even organisms with a higher level of consciousness (apes, dogs, dolphins, elephants, etc.). And second, it is based on not only the realization of this truth but also the fact itself that the unique and distinct person that is loved, although virtually physically identical in terms of material composition, is no longer present after the moment of somatic death, i.e., their soul, which is fundamental to their personhood. This person is no longer unified or integrated with their body. Thus, the human person ceases to exist as a body-soul composite being. And yet, there is no significant difference in the material structure of a person who is alive or who has just died (whether healthy or ill). This is something that scientific materialism or any form of physicalism cannot explain, at least not satisfactorily or reasonably. Counter-arguments presenting the loss of consciousness at death in vegetative states do not work since a level of consciousness exists to maintain bodily functions. Furthermore, individual cells are still alive and participate in chemical reactions that convert glucose into energy. For a corpse, these cell processes and bodily functions have stopped; the cells are dead or dying; the heart has ceased to pump blood; and the lungs are incapable of oxygenating blood. Furthermore, the fact that people have regained full consciousness and returned to normal cell and bodily functions makes such cases wholly distinct from somatic death. Explaining this divide between a living person and a corpse, particularly at the moment of death, is as intractable a problem for physicalist philosophers of mind and consciousness researchers as it is for materialist origin of life researchers to explain the origin of the information that provides functionality for a cell’s operation and its capacity for self-replication. Furthermore, it cannot be based solely on the existence and particular arrangement of proteins, lipids, and glycans. Joshua Farris’s book The Creation of Self: A Case for the Soul (henceforward TCS), unlike reductive materialism and the plethora of naturalistic views, provides a plausible explanation and solution to this intractable problem for naturalism that I presented above and the various other conundrums concerning the connection between the body and the soul (the mind and the brain) and the nature of each. The book supports the notion that consciousness is the most veritable and fundamental thing we know, more so than the external physical world, since we require it to perceive and reflect on anything, rendering reason impossible without it. Nevertheless, as basic as it is to existence, it remains one of the most difficult questions facing modern science and philosophy. The book consists of an introduction and four parts, each of which is comprised of one to five chapters. It also includes a foreword written by well-known philosopher of mind Charles Taliaferro and an afterword written by noted philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer. Farris defends the idea that “the soul is the carrier of personal identity, …