The soul is the animating principle. The Latin for soul, anima, is where we get our words animal, (in)animate, and so on.
In the most loose sense the soul is whatever it is that a living thing stops having when it becomes a dead thing.
Philosophically speaking saying “consciousness requires a soul” is a consequence of the observation that consciousness requires not being dead.
People, many of whom were assuredly considerably more intelligent than you or me, have spent thousands of years pondering what exactly the nature of souls is. Your metasyntactic zinger adds exactly nothing to that ongoing dialog. But by definition we know souls exist, at least as much as any abstract principle does and perhaps more than some.
So then bacteria have souls? And computers will never have one since they're not biological. But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.
I will argue that a self reproduced organism that has organized its own self reproduction over the course of N generations and which metabolizes what inputs it can, defining a niche in the complex web of life != an attempt by one organism to call its tools independent consciousnesses
Plants, fungi, and everything else that's alive also have souls. In fact the term medical "vegetative state" is using Aristotelian vocabulary. Obviously it's not saying the patient has acquired chloroplasts.
> And computers will never have one since they're not biological.
That depends. Can a computing device come alive? Inanimate matter evidently somehow came alive at least once so I don't see how we can rule it out.
> But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.
So far as I know everything that we've verified to have consciousness is alive and thus has a soul. I'm very interested in any counter-examples if you have any to offer though.
What's a soul? How can you possibly know that's what's required?
Maybe it requires a blerpqu.