How very shinto , but there's probably plenty of elder or ancient religions or filosofies who would grant soul to what's currently labelled as in-animate objects and actually why wouldn't it have. Even the mighty concept of god itself gains power from the energy directed at it. One could say prayer literally empowers deities by transmitting energy to their entity, wether that is tangible or an abstract concept doesn't make it less real or power-ful in that way. Ursula Le Guin huh :D i grew up with that as a kid , must be among my three favourite authors , Zelazny, Vance and Le Guin . The mother just brought the fantasy and the kid devoured it. Little did she know she was feeding the concoctions of a mythology-phile , a true science-fiction author who fed me the concept of entropy among many others in the dying earth and a die-hard, albeit well-spoken and behaved anarchist like Le Guin ... so basically the local library ruined my life and chance at normality (haha lol) but i guess that's why they don't push books like that in schools and demean them as invaders from mars and pointy eared fairy-tales , but those who know know better ... i have to mention A.E. Van Voght as well , the gedanken-experiments his sci-fi always was certainly shaped my way of thinking somewhere and who knows what it might have become if i didnt become damaged goods because after all that i suddenly had to be
and i personally think
After all if the fringe didnt invade the norm then things would have grown stale a long time ago and the universe itself would have died from inbreeding, just as if the simplified left- or rightwing would ever completely win : the place would simply topple over to one side and we'd all go rolling off, down into the void.
I think i once won a staring contest with the abyss too, but it feels like it's always there, ready to embrace me whenever i just
say the word hahah :p
if sould is consciousness then consciousness itself would still need a definition that at the moment might surpass all the available paper in the universe to write it down on. I'm not sure , i think an entity (like described above) doesn't have to be 'conscious' as such, but it can still move things outside itself depending on how much access to energy it has and how much of that it can control. Religion is probably the easiest example but i dont think i can put that in a clear scientific diagram ... that's metafysics in the metaverse for ya.
But sure get's a lot of nods :p Maybe soul has as one of its properties "the ability to create" , which means it can't do anything but dilute as over time most combinations will have been made and fresh, real fresh input doesn't happen too much. Even the occasional disruption like Satoshi-sama and his cronies modifiying a glorified torrent and calling it a blockchain isn't really completely new but the disruption lies in the way it makes people RE-vise things, look at it from different viewpoints. It's more like a re-mix that's better than the original and
i really chose the name for the account well heheh (ill be doing all my talking with this, easier to track and that way the utilities dont have to suffer from my not always popular opinion)
you take care there and see you around 
RE: Dark Alleys of the Glass (Haiku)