Well, I can’t take them with me…

Ummm it’s hard to do without giving up a wonderful 9-book, 7 or 8 novella plot, but I’ll do my best. It’s ultimately a space opera, but the ideas explored are well thought out and intriguing. I don’t think it really gets as deep into what you’re looking for as you’d like but it’s still a wonderful book series.

Future humans, in our solar system, lots of political intrigue between the powers of the UN (all of earth), the Martian Congressional Republic, and the Outer Planets Alliance (people of the asteroid belt, less of a govt, more of a political movement). Someone finds what might be alien life or alien technology (possibly sitting for a billion years in outlets solar system), and the rest is what happens to humans in the wake of that.

The tech itself gets into possible collective consciousness, planet-sized carbon crystal data storage and quantum entanglement. Along with things like worm hole technology and heavily bending (but not really breaking) the laws of physics.

It’s all written with VERY sound scientific thought behind every little nuance of the story and all the tech involved.

It’s not the hardest of sci-fi and ultimately there’s isn’t a ton in the narrative specifically about this, but there’s some really interesting stuff in The Expanse series (book, not show) that touches on this kind of thing.

not even close to the limit on my desktop. let’s keep it going

Got my first two Hydroflasks (32oz and 20oz) in 2014 I would guess? Still have both and use one of them every day.

There’s a bunch of communities on waveform.social but as of now I don’t see much in my main feed from them. I’m not sure if it’s just a matter of the niche community taking time to develop or if there’s a better place as of yet. I haven’t done much searching for it in a couple of weeks. I really hope these communities start to flourish here. Have been doing my best to engage what I do see to help grow.

Not trying to argue at all, just spitballing off your thoughts: I feel like (assuming souls are things that exist) the brain is the hardware and the soul is the software in this scenario. If your computer’s mother board develops a problem, the data on your hard drive still exists and works; the hardware just can’t compute.

That all being said I’m an agnostic and I don’t really know the answer to OP’s question. I’ve kinda always assumed there was some star trekish we-are-just-energy thing going on. But I ultimately accept that we don’t know and can’t know and won’t know until we do.