If life persists then, once we die, we are literally consciousness that has been liberated from the body.

Imagine that you are a soul that exists timelessly in many dimensions at once. We think that there are ten dimensions, but that our bodies exists in the three dimensions of : height, length, and width. It might be that our bodies exist in ten dimensions simultaneously, but we can't perceive that.
[link to www.superstringtheory.com]

To imagine the body in four dimensions is difficult, for all of those cells switch out as they grow and then are discarded through that dynamic process. And yet, we intuit a sense of continuity of the self. That continuity is partially the soul.
[link to en.wikipedia.org]

If time is the four dimension, then imagine you could see yourself from life to birth as a being being conceived all the way through to your death and release from the body, and then all at once. The information would overload or overwhelm you. It would be too much information.

What if the soul if the summation that we cannot perceive because our mind is only the intellect?

Imagine the intellect as that momentary awareness of data that comes from the senses. You sense heat, vibration, position in space, hear something, taste something, tactilely sense movement, smell a flower, see a color, etc. All of that goes to your momentary intellect and is reported. Then somehow that information is cataloged.
[link to www.scientificamerican.com]

Cataloged data is a memory. It could be that the arrangement of white matter in the brain is the storage place of memory. It could that neurons in a certain order not only transmits a signal to another neuron, but could be memories too. It might be that the sequence of DNA is used to encode data as well:
[link to www.techspot.com]
[link to www.neatorama.com]

It's entirely possible that once you smelled a gardenia. That smell is recorded as data. Then whenever you smell a gardenia again, that memory is accessed and the intellect notes: “Gardenia smell”. The brain might conserve memories, in fact I think this is so. You're 16, you take a girl on a date. She's very beautiful, wearing a white dress with a floral pattern and a perfume with Gardenia notes in it. Your intellect pulls from data in the brain for all of that. She isn't a Gardenia. She doesn't look like a Gardenia, but her smell is partially from a Gardenia. So your intellect notes: Gardenia smell, and you associate all of her data as well as that in an instant.

This causes a cascade of memories to constantly be generated and why we think the way we do by a plethora of associations of memories.

What if the intellect then is working with the soul? The soul has continuity of Self since it exists in a timeless way. In a way, that's about the summation of memories, isn't it?

Maybe true analysis of all the intellect is done by the soul. The intellect wants more information, it's the thirst for knowledge, but the soul has access everything that you know at once and then communicates to the intellect to tell us, “Say that girl in that dress. She is really special and not like the other girls you have met. Be on your best behavior. She's important. You're going to marry her someday.”

This is what I think the soul is. It's the timeless spirit that knows us at 3 as well as at age 77. But our intellect can't handle that.