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Originally Posted by duga
I must have totally misunderstood what you were trying to say earlier, because I don't agree with this...there are no direct effects the "soul" has on anything. I believe it is there simply because self awareness is not required for living, yet we have it...
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Our intelligence and self-awareness seems to me to be a perfectly natural consequence of an evolutionary process. It's a consequence of natural and sexual selection. The wording is important, we have it because it's a consequence, not because it's a need. Evolution doesn't operate with needs which suggests a directional selection to the point of intentional. If you create a fish, it will needs gills to breathe in water so you as a creator create them. However, evolution is a process of continous interacting causes and consequences which simply favour whatever works at the moment and moments go from one moment to the next which might be significantly different from the previous. Like self-awareness, life doesn't need legs to live, nor arms or buttocks. Yet we have them. Many organisms don't and get on perfectly well.
As a more general contribution on the topic of souls ..
Modern biology is capable of explaining why we became self-aware and we're understanding more and more of the miracles of the brain and it's capacity for creating our thoughts and personalities so the idea that we have souls becomes more and more redundant. We don't need it anymore to explain why there's thoughts going on in the darkness behind our eyes, even as we sleep.
As biology can explain how we got our heads and the biological processes that go on in them, it should be easy for anyone with a little psychological insight to see what makes the idea of souls so attractive, so the persistence and popularity of the soul idea is explainable as well. Generally speaking, the only thing which can't be explained is souls as a true concept.
If you want to elevate the idea of souls onto some higher metaphysical plane of existence with consequences reaching far beyond whatever ideas religions have promoted so far, well .. I can see why some might find that an interesting topic to discuss, so I'll respect those who think so and try to stay out of it!