What exactly is me?

I’ve been thinking lately how strange it is––being here and then being gone. My Mom and Dad passed years ago and so many of their things, knickknacks and valuables, have been sold or lost. Sure some were kept by their children but so many things that made up their lives just vanished. Poof.

Of course my folk’s legacy hasn’t. The effects of their lives on each of my family members lingers on. That’s important. I even wrote a post about the importance of legacy.

Still, I find it strange how we can be living a full life with all our possessions and then one day it’s no more.

Do you ever wonder what it is that makes us us? Where do our thoughts come from? What about right now? I’m writing as the thoughts of what I want to say pop up in my brain and fall onto the screen. Are these thoughts, these words, just the result of electrochemical impulses jumping across synapses? Are we nothing more than billions of neurotransmitters sloshing around in grey matter?

Or is there something more? It seems to me that if thoughts are merely generated through reactions within our brain than those thoughts should be random and chaotic. But they aren’t. Where does our logic, love, hate, fear, courage, lust, philosophy, mathematics, art come from? When we choose whom to love or even just our favorite color what is directing those choices? How can electrochemistry alone explain that?

Our thoughts are organized to make us unique individuals. Who’s doing that organizing? Who is creating order from the chaos?

Yes, we are physical beings. But physics can’t explain the origin of thought. It only explains how our brain, our command center if you will, moves those thoughts to nerve fibers in our muscles. I decide to hit the “J” key and that thought is processed amongst neurons in my brain which stimulates muscles in my index finger to press down on just the right place on this keyboard.

Is there something more? If I say it is “me” who decided to hit that key than where is that “me”? Is there a part of me that exists apart from this physical body? If I were to keel over right now all those electrochemical impulses would stop but what about the source that guided them?

I guess I’m asking if we have a soul. I really don’t know.

I’ll have to think about that.