They ask you concerning the Spirit. Say, "The Spirit is from the command of my Lord, and the knowledge you were given was but very little."
Translation endnotes
[17:85] Influenced by the Christian scholars who were influenced by Greek mythology, the word ruh is commonly mistranslated as "soul." In the Quranic terminology, ruh means divine information and commandments. The thing that disconnects from our body or quits functioning during sleep or death is not ruh but nafs, that is, personality and consciousness (39:42). The Quran refers to the controller that delivers the divine revelation as Jibreel or Ruh-ul Quds, meaning "Holy Revelation" or "Holy Spirit" (6:102). God endowed the human species with a program called consciousness and personality via a special revelation (15:29; 38:72; 33:9). We can reform or restore our innate program if it is infected by viruses of ignorance, indulgence in sins, or self-inflicted abuses, by re-installing the program called ruh. The ruh in revelation revives those who have lost the function of the ruh in their genetic makeup (6:122; 8:24). See 15:29. Charlatan psychics or so-called mediums cannot bring the nafs (person) that is uploaded to God's master record, back to the world. Communication with the person of the dead is a third-rate fraud and it haunts the gullible who take the pretender serious. Is it possible to record or transfer the unique neural connections and memories recorded in a brain throughout its life into another organic or inorganic medium, such as a computer disk? In other words, can we one day isolate the information recorded in the brain in terms of a holographic network of connections from its biological material and then transfer, preserve and duplicate it as data? Considering the speed of technological advances, this possibility might even become a probability. The atheists who scoff at God's promise of resurrection by asking, "How can rotten bones be revived?" might learn this lesson in their labs: that with the biological death everything is not lost, and humans and everything in the universe are no more than "bundles of information," and information is not dependent on a particular organic medium; its transferable and theoretically eternal. However, looking at history, it is a safe bet that instead of regretting their bigotry, and acknowledging their Lord who declared this fact millennia ago, they will continue their opposition, doubts, and arrogant attitudes. Of course, this self-deception will end one day (10:24). See 15:29.