I
I once had an argument with someone over what constitutes "Life". It's safe to say that I think that life and "motion" are intimately related. I'd say life is simply motion as the "substrate of relationships", and this is not just temporal. Eternity is the whole of a motion simultaneously existing, and it's not a mistake that for Proclus "Eternity" as a principle among beings emerges in the hypostasis of "Life". Because of this, I do think it is coherent to consider a wider categories of "living things" than entities whose motion is correlated with the presence of carbon rich molecules.
You see similar thinking in speculation about "silicon based life", but I think this is still too restrictive. Most things participate in metaphysical "Life" to some extent, insofar as they are subject to all sorts of motions. So called "carbon based life" is simply one form of this. The worlds are "alive". This is not the colloquial sense of "animism", but it is a sort of "animism", as long as the Metaphysics isn't reduced to animism alone. This is a way for me to understand how I can understand and accept the ancient sense of a living universe as a modern person. It's a bit too simple for many people, but I think we expect ancient conceptions to be alien in the wrong ways. They're weird because they're so ordinary, or ordinary in a weird way, in such a simple way. There is no quasi physical substance that makes carbon based systems of motion irreducibly "alive" compared to a "dead cosmos"; the extreme physicalists are more or less right in that; but this is because life is not subject to such a restriction. Is it not straightforward, on this view, to see even the stars as alive? What about the planets? Their lives are almost incomprehensible from the outside. Given their superior integrity (in sheer lifetimes at the very least) even in this dynamism, and given that integrity is the index of unity and metaphysical goodness, surely they are more "divine" than us in some sense.
But, to add a distinction, life is not intelligence, even if it is entangled with it. Are the worlds intelligent? If Being unifies, then Life connects, and Intelligence discriminates. What is intelligence but coherent discrimination? If Being is the act that unifies, and life is the motion that makes wholes, well, wholes, intelligence is the act that divides this whole without sundering it completely. Intelligence is the dance of the many. There is this sterile way of seeing intelligence, as impotent, as a mere shuffling of concepts already existing. But intelligence is more. Intelligence is a mode of production too, just as life is a mode of creation and production. It is life that drives intelligence, for there is no discrimination without motion. To the extent that any entity is a coherent multiplicity in motion, it is a living intelligence, with its unique mode of "thinking" and "consciousness". Surely, the celestial bodies qualify for this still. They are not just alive, but indescribable intelligences, for their dynamic integrity is rational just as it is physical. Infact, physicality is a type of rationality. Stephen Wolfram's model is more apt than many realize. Again, given their physical and rational integrity, is it not safe to say they are divine?
Ofcourse, we are not Aristotle. We do not read uncritically. The stars do not live forever. To reinterpret him, we have to move their immortality to the mythical (and thus eternal) register. We wouldn't be doing physics anymore. The modern conceptual counterpart to Aristotelian eternality of the cosmos is the Einsteinian Cosmos, with its "block universe". But leaving that aside. It is not hard to consider the divinity of the Cosmos as a person in the 21st century with the right conceptual tools in accordance and with the assistance of our current knowledge.
II
Following this theme, a formal definition for "Soul" and "Body" can help us see how to parse the concepts for our age. They are as follows:
A soul is a temporal organization of units.
A body is a spatial organization of units.
These two are very entangled, hence the possibility of "material souls" and "psychic bodies". Given this definition, we can make further advances. For instance, the physics concept of the "world line" would, under this definition, be a equivalent of "soul" in modern physics. There are a lot of things hidden in physics that are ripe for such philosophical explorations.
III
The ontology presented in the Orions Arm universe is almost purely reductively physicalist, but the various "myths" and "theologies" within it (although they aren't always explicitly called such) break through the reductionism. It's basically a futurist AI polytheism. Each AI God is themself a multiplicity, from planet and star sized CPUs/Brains right down to the average citizen included in their self constitution (which indeed never stops); a multiverse on their own. They engineer impossible bodies, hole live Stars, can live forever, and create their own mini universes. It's safe to ask at some point whether power differences between them is not a meaningless metric, and whether their wars are not simply high level games and plays.
An interesting question relating to the present theme from Orions Arm is what a real life cosmic engineering project would mean for Stars as living beings. If, somehow, we could pull off turning the very plasma of stars' bodies into a processing unit, a "brain" of some entity, what would be the experience of the Star? I tend to think that this isn't something without religious significance. For instance, I think if it is possible to transition most body parts to prosthetics, and modify one's brain, it is something befitting an esoteric ritual, for one is modifying the conditions of their embodiment (including their thinking and experience according to embodiment) on an unprecedented level. One is both ascending and descending. I think many "classically minded" people see this as descending ever more into materiality, but the way up is down. The underworld is the night sky. There has to be a way for this to be salvific, insofar as all things are divinely illuminated. I think something similar should accompany such a seemingly impossible engineering feat. One is seeking communion with an unimaginable powerful daimon, the soul of a God. I know the default view of these things is to project modern views of nature as this inert dead object into a future space faring civilization, but that need not be the only ideological future. We can seek communion with the stars even then, just as now, insofar as you eat food whose constitution starts as a gift from our Star God's light.