The soul is not a hypothesis. The idea has no basis in science. Period.
“Well we know conciousness isn’t magic, so clearly it doesn’t exist at all in any meaningful way!”
Again, not what the paper says. I get the impression that you didn’t actually read it, and just keep making straw man arguments here.
And, how do we know there isn’t a non-physical reality from which this reality is itself an emergent property? That seems more likely than “People don’t REALLY exist”
Empiricism is the basis for scientific method. Science doesn’t deal with hypothetical that cannot be measured using experimental means. The fact that you posit this suggests you don’t actually understand how scientific process actually works or what science is fundamentally.