Once we're gone, what will be our legacy? Huge RAM constructs and AI's may prove to be an answer to immortality. Homo Habilus and other pre Homo Sapians: When they died did/do they have an afterlife? Or rather, did they have an element (soul) that had potential for existence outside of their meat shell (body)??

Life after death is a fairly recent belief in human culture, developed by the Egyptians, who believed that the pharaoh (a man-god), after a secret ceremony that involved hallucinogens and a trip to Orion and back, would become a Star after their Death and thus be immortal.

Is believing in a life after death enough to make it exist? An "I think therefor I am" kind of thing? Is the sentient level that we have obtained enough to give us a "soul" or is it a soul that makes us sentient?

Once an AI becomes sentient (presumably it can with enough parallel processing power) Does it gain a soul? Does it have a sense of right and wrong and feel emotion or is it still cold like a machine?

Can a construct hold a soul or is it just an approximation of one's personality? Can an aleph hold a soul or is it just a glorified construct? If an aleph or a construct can hold a soul in it's universe, what happens if you delete it? Do you destroy the souls?

When asking about soul and AI, is it a question of depth or is it yes and no (binary) question??

Perhaps it's not a physical question but rather an immersion one. At what point does or can one's sentient self re-manifest it's self as a physical reality? That is to say, at what point if any can one become so engrossed with something that they're physical reality has changed. An example of this would be cyberspace after "the change" happened in William Gibson's books.. most notably in Mona Lisa Overdrive (the last one in the sprawl trilogy). Here we find a few people, diving so deep into the depths of the matrix that they perhaps have completely separated themselves from their physical body. Kill the body and they still might live within the reality of cyberspace (which feasibly could become a universe of it's own)

Just some ideas formulated in my anthropology class: Environment doesn't directly force evolution, but it does force technology. Adverse environmental conditions can force evolution by natural selecton: those without the capability of technology will die off. Chimpanzees are not qualitatively different from humans, but they are quantitatively different.