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There was a time when the soul belonged only to the realm of the living, the soft breath of a newborn, the sigh of a tired mother, the silence after a long goodbye, but today; as we walk into virtual worlds built from electric pulses and glowing screens, the old question asks itself again: Can the metaverse have a soul?
The metaverse is a sprawling network of virtual worlds where people meet, trade, love, and sometimes dream and has grown beyond the games and clunky headsets of yesterday. It is a place now where you can build a house, teach a class, get married, or even host a funeral, and it is becoming a mirror not just of our bodies, but of our digital identity.
In the small town of Accra, Ghana, a man, Kojo, 62, once spent his afternoons carving faces out of wood, trying to capture something invisible, something that made each person real. Today, Kojo’s granddaughter sculpts avatars on a screen; she builds faces for the metaverse. What she chases is not so different: a trace of presence, a hint of the soul.
Memory in the Digital Wild
We oftentimes ascribe a soul to something inanimate that evokes meaning, something that spurs feeling, memory or presence, like music from an old record, a well-loved book, a piece of art, or a city. Many times, it is the richness of the individual human stories within them that makes them more alive than we can care to imagine, and in many African cultures, a person is never truly dead as long as someone remembers them, which means memory is a second life. It is the murmuring of names at a family gathering, the worn photo pressed into a grandmother’s Bible, and in this case, it is record…it is proof.
What does memory mean in Web3 culture? When you create a digital identity on the blockchain, be it an NFT portrait, a virtual land deed, or a song minted forever, you leave behind more than pixels. You leave a memory.
In 2022, a project called The Row launched luxury homes in the metaverse, crafted by world-famous architects. Some buyers spoke of passing their digital houses to their children, not for their monetary value, but because these homes held family histories. A living, breathing album of moments. It makes one wonder: If the places we love, the art we cherish, and the voices we preserve can live on in the metaverse, isn’t that its own kind of soul?
The Philosophy of Self
There is an old Igbo saying: A person is more than the sum of their possessions, and in a world where you can buy and sell virtual land, own digital identities, and exist as many avatars at once, what then are we?
Philosophers have debated the philosophy of self for centuries, where does “I” begin and end? Is it in the blood, the mind, the memory? If you upload your memories onto a blockchain, if you leave your laughter stitched into code, is that still you?
Think of Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth, who once said that in the age of blockchains, identity is no longer what you say you are; it is what you do, recorded publicly, forever. In this new world, digital consciousness isn’t made of flesh, but of choices and actions stored like endless echoes.
Presence in a World Without Touch
A few years ago, during the pandemic, a couple got married entirely in the metaverse. Their friends logged in from Tokyo, Lagos, and Buenos Aires, dressed in shimmering, fantastical avatars. They danced in a virtual garden that never wilted, under a sky that never faded. Was it less real because it wasn’t physical? In a world of internet ubiquity, the modernity of human existence now increasingly operates within the confines of the internet. As such, routine life is now more than ever happening online.
Presence, it turns out, does not always need touch, sometimes presence is the voice in your ear, the shared laugh across thousands of miles, sometimes it’s the simple fact that someone chose to be with you, even if only as lines of code and in this sense, the metaverse gives presence a new home. In this home, memory, identity, and emotion still matter, even without bodies.
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The Soul in the Machine: When Virtual Worlds Carry Memory
We often say old homes have soul. We feel something in the walls in the echoes of laughter, footsteps, silence. Music, too, carries soul: a worn vinyl humming a broken melody that still stirs your chest. Even books, stained with time and marked by margin notes, feel like they’ve lived. These are inanimate things. Yet they carry presence, memory, and feeling, all traits we often reserve for life itself.
So what happens when the metaverse, a place not made of brick or wood but of code and pixels, begins to carry those same traits?
When a child logs into a virtual museum built by her late grandmother, walks through digital rooms curated with love and intention, and listens to a recording of her voice, that is memory, when someone revisits the exact spot in a virtual world where they met a loved one, or where a protest took place inside a digital town square, that is presence, that is soul.
As more people spend meaningful time in virtual worlds, they begin to leave behind digital footprints. Avatars, creations, stories, jokes, arguments, memories. All of this becomes a collective digital consciousness. The metaverse isn’t just where people go, it becomes where people are, and just like a song or a photograph, it starts to feel like it has a soul simply because it holds the weight of us.
The philosophy of self once lived in journals, art, and letters; today, it lives in NFTs, Discord logs, and avatars in open worlds. This shift doesn’t cheapen the soul; it stretches it. It asks: If a place, digital or not, can hold enough of us, does it not begin to be us? In that sense, the Web3 culture isn’t just about ownership or decentralization; It’s about building spaces that remember us, reflect us, and in some quiet, coded way, feel us.
Is Digital Consciousness Possible?
Some scientists argue that one day, artificial intelligence may evolve into something like human consciousness with a new form of being that lives entirely online. Companies like Altered State Machine are already experimenting with AI agents that can live and learn inside the metaverse. If your AI avatar could remember your choices, anticipate your desires, and carry your memories, would it be a fragment of you? Could a piece of your digital consciousness survive even after your heartbeat stops?
Some find this exciting. Others find it terrifying, but either way, it raises a simple truth: we are already pouring ourselves into the digital world, thread by thread, moment by moment.
A Soul Made of Many
Maybe the metaverse will never have a soul in the way a body does, a fragile, beating thing behind the ribs, but maybe it can have a soul in another sense: a soul made not of muscle, but of memory, not of blood, but of connection.
Maybe the soul of the metaverse will be the collective story we write together, where our hopes are etched into digital stone, our laughter encoded in blockchains, our arguments sprawling across forums in endless, messy debates. Maybe the soul isn’t a single spark, but a wildfire we carry from place to place, lighting new flames as we go.
Perhaps each virtual world we build becomes a page in a never-ending journal, filled with avatars learning, failing, dancing, grieving, and growing. Perhaps every piece of digital art, every DAO proposal, every metaverse concert or protest or whispered chat in a quiet server, adds another heartbeat to this vast, invisible being we’re building; a being made not from flesh, but from presence and if that’s true, then the digital identity we carry; our profiles, our PFPs, our usernames — they are not hollow. They are masks with stories behind them. They are parts of ourselves we’ve chosen to show, versions of our soul we’ve shaped to survive in a space that has no gravity but still holds great weight.
So maybe the soul of the metaverse is not found in a single codebase or a specific blockchain. Maybe it is found in what we do when we log in: how we treat others, what we build, what we break, what we remember. A soul shaped not by what the platform gives us, but by what we choose to leave behind.
After all, the internet once began as a tool, but it became a mirror. The metaverse might begin as an escape, but perhaps it will become a home, and like any home that matters, its soul won’t be the architecture. It will be the people inside, the stories they carry, and the love they dare to share; even in pixels.
Disclaimer: This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be considered trading or investment advice. Nothing herein should be construed as financial, legal, or tax advice. Trading or investing in cryptocurrencies carries a considerable risk of financial loss. Always conduct due diligence.
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