There have been successful brain transplants?

“A whole-body transplant or brain transplant is a hypothetical operation . . . ”

(First result in google states this)

Do you know what hypothetical means?

The best available right now, is partial transplants of brain centred nerves on some animals. Which is a far cry from any part of the brain. The most successful has been either the replacement of optical nerves in birds, or the partial replacement of the cerebral cortex in mice, which has so far led to them NOT dying as a result. Neither are very encouraging results.

On another note, some Scientists in Ohio faked some ‘full body transplants’ for fame and funding a while back, but if you look into their papers, they did something wildly different than what they claim in media sources. (What they DID do, is prove that they can keep a brain alive outside of a body, for a few hours, and keep a head alive, and functioning, without a body, for a few days before the head rejected the ‘body’ of machinery. Quite a far cry from a brain transplant)

In any case, there is no need for the ‘soul’ to be non-physical.

The part that makes the brain the thinking centre, as previously stated here in this topic, is the arrangement of the neurons and their connections. The brain is hardware; the part that you identify as ‘you’ is the software, and merely an internal state of the brain.

Lose that internal state, lose that arrangement, and what is left? The blank hardware. No personality, no memories.

Oh yes, still an experimental theory, (read: not enough evidence to conclude it yet), but it deals with a much decreased amount of additional variables that have yet to be observed. (That’s an Occam’s Razor type argument for cogency).