In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of “mental energy” in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can “know” if you are or aren’t a brain in a jar.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of “mental energy” in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can “know” if you are or aren’t a brain in a jar.