mmkay so ICEman's 2 cents..

What are we, ..really..

A body.. a soul.. and a brain. A body is the meat arrangement of proteins with which you manpulate and progate about earth. Your brain is the CPU what manages this hardware's functions and attachments.

Your soul is that which tonains your persona, your memories, your likeness, that which carries on, to be archived and wiped clean for the next life.

Mind you, this wipe isnt always perfect, ergo memories of past lives. I happen to know a soul is a real entity and that it lives on after you've physically died, carrying on your memoeries until you're reassigned.. I've seen mine.. I've died an incomplete death before, so I know it for myself (believe it or dont).

Some souls are never born, and thusly can't tell you anything about life, new souls get made, god only knows by what, some souls are recycled.. so that the circle of life can continue on and diversity can rule the progress of life on earth and everywhere else it exists on the universe.

The trick to understanding what we are is both not to overglorify it.by incorporating holiness into our existence beyond the fatc we're intelligent life with multiple layers.. and also not to dismiss the other planes of existence and reality because they are not universally detectable from this one.

Honestly.. you could probably fill volumes with what humans cannot generically or currently detect in just our physical universe. What's to say that souls arent real because we can't currently measure them.

So.. meat+soul+human DNA= man.

Arranged proteins(in our case, Meat)+soul+DNA= life.