There is no clarity in “in the same way”. Quine had the best solution:
To be is to be the value of a bound variable.
Just because something is imaginary, doesn’t mean it’s not real. In fact, to some people, imaginary items are more vivid and immediate than actual “reality”, as the rest of the world defines it. Granted, those people are usually locked up in mental hospitals or living on the streets begging for change, but that doesn’t make their perspective any less “real”, at least to them.
Same thing goes for souls. Except, people can profess belief in souls without becoming institutionalized or homeless. Flying pink unicorns? Not so much.
In addition to wishful thinking, I’ve always suspected that the idea of “life after death” arose, at least in part, when primitive people had dreams about their departed loved ones. Such dreams are almost inevitable, and they can very much feel as if the dead person “really is there,” talking to us. People who don’t understand dreams, hallucinations, and other illusions are susceptible to putting too much belief into them.
Sigh. And this can include modern, college-educated, intelligent adults. . . .
You are certainly overloading the word “real.” You can hardly find a concept that isn’t real to someone, from the hollow earth to invisible aliens.
If by “the soul is real” you mean the concept of a soul exists, one can hardly argue, since by doing so you prove the correctness of the statement.
If however you mean the soul is something which is in some way potentially detectable or measurable (a scientific concept of one, in other words) then the matter is in some dispute.
So, which is it?
You ever feel the wind on your face?
See the blue of the sky?
Consciously grasp how say the Pythagorean theorem works?
Then you fully understand what is meant by consciousness.
[Else you are a philosophical zombie…]
That was a frighteningly powerful epiphany for me in high school bio class - I still vividly remember the smugness I felt upon learning that cockroaches didn’t “think” as such and merely had bunches of nerve clusters that would mechanically prompt stimulus->response actions. My train of thought went : “Not like us ! We don’t automatically run away when we see a light, we look towards it and assess, we THINK about where it might come from, which… prompts a number of… holy shitbricks !”
I’d never been a religious, free-will-is-humanity’s-perk kinda guy, but had I been that single thought would have popped my special snowflake balloon then and there. All according to deterministic plan 
[SIZE=3][SIZE=2]Anyway, re: the OP : it’s not altogether impossible to scientifically assess things that we cannot see, measure in any way and the existence of which is only theorized, but it is a challenge.
We can, however, infer (or deny) the existence of such a force or phenomenon by brainstorming how its presence or absence *would *affect the rest of the Universe in measurable ways. Then measure that. As I understand it that’s pretty much how we’re so sure about the Big Bang : we naturally can’t prove it happened and don’t have pics, but if it DID happen then X, Y and Z would be true and we could find traces of A in the B in a C-shaped pattern. [/SIZE][/SIZE]Which, after postulating, we verified. Ergo, Big Bang ? Very likely until better theory comes along.
So : how would the presence, or absence, of a soul affect anything even remotely observable ? Bonus question : if its presence or absence doesn’t effect anything that we can or could possibly tell ; then who gives a quiet, contemplative fuck about it ?
Or we could be self-deluded, self-propelled life-support systems for a set of genitals. Either way, next round’s on me.
Yeah, I’ve had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we’ve come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren’t wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this “soul” does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
What was that about hats, again ?
I’ve never seen a scientist make a convincing case that souls exist.
That is probably due to the fact that there is no physical evidence for such a thing.
I don’t think so. An anemometer can “feel” the wind a lot better than I can, and more accurately. A spectrograph can tell me the color of the sky a lot more accurately than I could do it myself. Of course, neither of those instruments is likely to spontaneously burst into song or poetry about it, but that’s not the usual concept of consciousness. I don’t claim that those instruments are “conscious” but those were your examples, not mine.
As for the Pythagorean theorem and the like, we used to marvel over the fact that we could “understand” things like that – meaning that we could learn things, and then build new ideas from what we had learned. That argument doesn’t lead anywhere, either; animals, which are supposedly bereft of souls, can learn, too, and now so can computer programs. As a matter of fact I was told recently in connection with a reset of some of my car’s computers that one module responsible for gear shifting had learned all about how I drive, and was now going to have to learn it all over again. Adaptive behavior based on prior experience is not uniquely human – just ask my dog, or my car.
If one defines consciousness as the ability to be deeply introspective about one’s own existence, I know a cat who seems to fit the bill. AFAICT that’s all she ever does, and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong. 
There are some theories that consciousness is an electromagnetic phenomena. I’m not an expert obviously, but I have read some of Johnjoe McFadden’s papers in the past.
Electromagnetic theories of consciousness - Wikipedia
Neuroscientist Christof Koch has speculated consciousness is a byproduct of any complex, integrated information processing system. I get the impression he is implying that consciousness arises naturally (according to physical laws) out of this kind of organization, and isn’t an evolutionary byproduct (ie, we didn’t evolve consciousness it just happened naturally alongside the information processing units of our organic brains). He claims consciousness could exist in non-organic matter.
How any of that would relate to concepts like a consciousness that survives death, I do not know.
The concept of a soul lies outside of the basic areas addressed by science, just as the idea of God and heaven. None of these are testable, and are not supported by physical evidence. (Unless you say that a sunset is proof of God as it is so beautiful - hmmm what about that hurricane?)
A scientist would most likely never attempt to prove the existence of a soul, as it is outside of the measurable detectable physical world.
A scientist would likely also be the first to recognize that we are not qualitatively different than any other of nature’s creatures, but different only in degree. To quote again the words of Clifford Geertz, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance [that only] he himself has spun.” A scientist would also likely be the first to recognize that such beliefs are matters of faith, and that matters of faith have their genesis in fears and longings, hopes and wishes that we are both special and specially protected, and not in rational evidence.
Do I have to choose? Can I be both?
That’s not quite correct. See my post above re:going about studying stuff that can’t be studied directly.
It’s as of right now impossible to scientifically and conclusively prove (or disprove) the existence of the Judeo-Islamo-Christian god of course, BUT we can study whether or not prayers to him/her/it effect the material world to a statistically significant degree for example.
Spoiler : astonishingly enough, it doesn’t seem to be the case. That doesn’t prove there’s no god at all, but it does strongly suggest that the subset of humanity that ascribes supernatural power to prayer is wrong about at least one aspect of their god/religion. Meaning either there’s no god, or we can’t actually communicate with them, or they’re too busy spying on sparrows to be bothered with healing the sick. Or they’re just not dealing with the *specific *sick involved in all of those studies just to keep their existence on the down low which seems like a bit of a dick move, not to mention counter-productive wrt the whole Good News business model 
You probably can, but in any event do NOT google “zombie genitals”
Can science detect the soul? Obviously, no. Has science adequately, precisely, and (above all) accurately defined the hypothesis of a human soul? Now there’s a question to chew on.
Bah, mine’s bigger and has slightly less necrosis.
If you read the book I cited early on the thread (which is great fun) you’ll see that some scientists did try to detect a soul.
Now, while it is the responsibility of someone advocating the existence of a soul to develop a hypothesis, we can think about it in some ways. For instance, if a soul influences one’s personality and is independent from the brain and body, there should be at least some aspects of the personality which would not be changed given changes to the brain. However almost every aspect of the personality we can name is influenced by one part of the brain or another. So it looks like the evidence supports a direct and causal link between brain and personality.
I invite you to come up with a hypothesis of your own.
I’m up with that - I studied lambda calculus my freshman year of college.
Sure, there’s one aspect which never changes – the continuity of self-awareness. Every day, “you” are “you” and “I” am “I”. Aside from alcoholic blackouts or Hollywood-style amnesia, that part of the mind’s conscious self-awareness never changes, as far as anyone can determine.
How’s that for a starting point? Is it acceptable to define “the soul” as that, and that alone?