Because most of that is badly executed retreads of the original material for fluff, or badly executed mechanics. 2E has exceptionally little in new setting material / content - White Wolf wasted an entire edition rewriting and padding out stuff they already had, with badly instructed freelancers writing for a line developer who didn't give a fuck.
You might have a point if Exalted 2 was this massively different retake on the setting with new material everywhere which the old Exalted 1 fanbase rejected, but, really, no. That's Exalted 3. There have only been two incarnations of the setting up to now, not three.
I think your statement actually doesn't contradict my observation, in fact it confirms it: you admit to consider most of the pre-3e fluff as badly executed; the only nuance is that you call the approved bits
original material, even though apparently many of the things that are criticised (list of examples already posted somewhere on page X of this thread) were part of the books that were praised as the good original material.
But if most of the setting is so bad, and even the Scavenger Sons (and to some extent Core 1e) can't follow the themes of the setting that people praise, I wonder why people don't just grab the themes and run off with them to make a setting of their own, without all the negative baggage. I can understand making a few minor fixes to a slightly flawed setting; I can understand salvaging good themes and ideas from a very flawed/bad setting; I find the idea of taking a very very flawed (in the GM/player's opinion) setting (particularly one linked to a flawed system), making lots of lots of (occasionally incomplete and/or difficult) fixes (that vary greatly from party to party) and seeing it as something better than building a setting to fit the desired theme from the ground up without having to deal with legacy flaws.
The fact that his Soul is different.
That's actually an extremely ambiguous answer, because I was specifically trying to figure out what difference do souls make on a mind-mechanical level, because you seem to be saying that they make a difference even when all the mind-mechanical bits have been set correctly.
From what I've gleaned in this thread, the Hun Souls are not erased as closely as the Po souls, which becomes the 'Nature' part of the person, whilst the Po soul is completely or almost completely erased between incarnations, and becomes the 'Nurture' part of the man.
So when you copy someone's mind and body, creating a new person and getting new souls for it, the Po soul keeps all the 'Nurture' part of the equation. But the 'Nature' part of the equation, though somewhat kept back by the original 'Nature' left over from the previous Hun, has been changed drastically, causing a huge shift in personality.
The nature/nurture dichotomy is misleading in the first place, but even so, I would expect those two to be swapped.
I'm not familiar with this argument.
P-zombies. (Warning: long, complex concept.)
Ghosts, in general, are weird. This is important: A ghost is not a perfect copy of who the person was in life. It's a distorted echo of who they once were, twisted and warped by the traumatic event of their death, the metaphysical wrench of denying their harmonious place in the cycle of reincarnation and their experiences in the Underworld, a shadow-realm forged from the nightmare-body of the Neverborn's lingering death-agonies. A ghost is a monster desperately clinging to the idea of who they were, because the dim flames of remembered Passions are all that grants them a semblance of life.
Those neuron equivalents are neurons. Aside from the metaphysical weirdness and the replacement of quantum physics by motonic physics Creation runs more or less on the same principles in conclusion as real life does. Which means that yes, when the least god of a kiln sings to the least gods of a pile of bricks getting baked the atoms and molecules in the clay react as normal. Usually.
Sometimes the chorus of least brick gods screw up and don't sing the proper reply and weirdness ensues, like getting a pile of sand instead of bricks.
Ah, well. You see, the thing is that if you get all the relevant bits, you get all the relevant bits. Including things like the appropriate soul structure. Of course, this requires getting everything right, and well, for an idea of how delicate a touch you need for that, try to weave a piece of cloth from a single string of cellulose, blindfolded without any assistance of any kind and on touch alone.
Okay, so I think these paragraphs indicate that there's a bit of metaphysical basics to be answered before going further.
If aside from the metaphysics, neurons are neurons etc., then let's figure out how a mind works in Exalted. If neurons work as in our world, and souls are a distorted echo of a person, that actually makes things comprehensible using concepts that are already invented. Let's see . . .
If neurons work as in our world, that means that they are the medium on which a mind 'runs' (so we don't have to deal with difficulties like emotions residing in the heart and the liver, or like the uterus swimming through the body and attacking the brain causing weird behaviour). And the souls are connected to the body, and can feed it some information (such as the Sun Soul feeding its memories to the mind, so the mind gains five Favoured and five Caste Skills real fast), and likewise the mind of a body can feed information to the soul (thus forming Passions, for example). But the souls don't carry
all the information that needs to be compiled in order to build a full mind-copy, right? That's why even on the first three days of their unlife, Ghosts are what Ghosts are, right? (I must admit I have read very little on Ghosts and the Ghostbloods, but the three-day rule is something I remember.)
If that is so, then resurrection is impossible without somehow getting the missing information - the part of the mind that is encoded in the brain but isn't copied by the souls neither throughout life nor during death. OTOH, if you ever gain the ability to produce a full mindscan image (something that Exalted probably can't do until a new Solar Deliberative gets someone with Medicine 10, Intelligence 10),
and you learn how to produce a proper medium that is capable of 'running' such a mindscan image (which probably is somehow related to 3e's perfect simulacrum/homunculus/copy-body Charm), then suddenly souls become irrelevant. Well, except it takes souls to perform Charms and Spells, because Essence. Right? (Probably not, as the simulacrum apparently can do Charms.)
