Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
But the explanation dont make sense. If we assume 16 dont have a soul, then all he is are his memories and program. That means that when you recreate them you recreate 16.

Its the same as saying ressurected Goku is just a identical Goku who looks and act the same as the dead one.
We're getting into metaphysics. A "soul" in Dragon Ball is defined as this spirit thing that looks exactly like your body but with a halo over your head. The properties we know of:
-primarily dwells in the afterlife, the Spirit World
-has a Halo over their head, whether for good or for evil, to signify their dead status.
-at least one person can take a soul from the Spirit World and allow it walk among the living once again for a single day, however this seems to be a matter of energy- using up more energy shortens the time you have until you return to the afterlife.
-its implied that when your soul is destroyed your gone for good and not even the dragons can bring you back.
-no need to eat or breathe and so on.
-as an alternative to resurrection, a soul can reincarnate.
-afterlives seem to be considered apart of the Universes. Meaning if Zeno destroys the afterlives along with that- there is no coming back for those souls, not even with Dragon Balls. King Kai should be very worried.

Other than that, souls seem to work just like living beings. Theoretically one can just take Baba's method of temporary resurrection and engineer a way to consistently sustain a soul with whatever energy she uses on them to walk the living world once again, but that might be Against The Natural Order of Things or some nonsense like that. But then again the Dragon Balls are constantly used to go against that all the time, so who would care? But you'd lack the cushion of landing in the afterlife if you died again, so you might as well go for full rez.

So its all a question of whether Android 16 has a spirit-thing with a halo over his head. If he doesn't, then tough luck. Because in that case, Shenron might just be making a new body then putting your soul back in.

All I can see what the Dragon Ball wiki says is that he was presumably revived along with the rest of Cell's victims. and to be fair, I don't remember any specific source saying he was never brought back.

I've checked and well....it was actually just never confirmed. There is nothing saying he is alive, but nothing saying he is dead either. It was just left completely ambiguous without even an afterthought. I'd assume alive though, Launch and Android 17 are still alive, they just....don't appear all that much, so Android 16 is probably alive, just not being focused on at all. Toriyama likes him his robots and machines.