Its not clear to me, what being me actually is. I’m not sure its always been that way. I think that in the past I might have know, or had the illusion of knowing. There are certain asumptions, or my perception and interpretation of cultural norms that I have begun to doubt. It started in earnest when I found myself thinking about the meaning of the phrase “you are what you eat”.
I though, if I am what I eat, what is “what I eat”; or more specifically what was what I eat before it was me? And when did it stop being what I eat and start being me? And how long will it be me for?
There are several sources that constitute the mass of my body. What I eat, what I drink and what I breath being the three that spring most readily to mind. There is also the probability that some of my mass was previously part of the mass of my mother, and even the possibility that some of it was previously part of the mass of my father.
I knew something about where my food started out. There was a very small, very hot, slightly uneven explosion. As the explosion cooled, many classes of object formed. After a while, a force, or a curvature caused by slight variations in the distribution of some of these objects caused them to clump together. The clumps grew and became more dense untill the objects where forced so close together they began to stick to each other and produce new more complex composite objects. These more complex objects where more stable than their constituents; a great deal of heat and other forms of energy where emitted by these clumps. Enough heat to balance the collapse of these dense clumps.
In the early parts of the explosion, all of the mass and the energy that constitutes me now was in a very small area of space, at a very high temprature. After that, a substantial portion of me, especially many of the more complex arrangments of these primordial components, where formed in a massive nuclear furnace.
The largest of these composites where not formed in the first nuclear furnace they where part of, but where created in processes which occured after it had run out of simple elements to fuse and support its weight. And in subsequent clumps which formed out of the reminants of the first.
Some of those objects started to be me. Whilst I continue to exist, more objects will continually become me, and some of the objects that are me will stop being.
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