The Matrix of You: Reconstructing a Person

Imagine being a private investigator for a second. One of those hard boiled types. A loose cigarette dangling in the corner of your mouth, slightly stinky breath. You've seen it all and now you've stumbled into some weird apartment. A messy one at that. You're not exactly sure what you're looking for but you're looking none the less, feeling a bit like standing in the middle of a dusty Stillleben. So what do you see?

Results may vary, but for me the exercise turns into a mental powerpoint presentation showcasing a bunch of inanimate objects. An arrangement of stuff. While looking at my own desk I see a metal bowl with some milky residue and a spoon. Two half-empty glass bottles of mineral water. A stack of punched paper with an empty cup on top. A butter knife. A package of tissues. A perforator. A few rollerball pens. Two cheap casio watches (one just started beeping). Some loose change in a tin box. A tuning fork and a few rolls of sticky tape. A voice recorder, a steno keyboard I barely used and... it's as boring as it sounds, but it is me. Or at least some sort of indicator of me passing through life. Like a bullet.

This might sound a bit like baby's first existential crisis, but I can't help but wonder about the true nature of oneself. Part of me likes the idea of being reconstructed in the far distant future. Maybe using some of my notes and other fragmented remnants to reverse engineer some kind of overarching pattern of me-ness. Call it soul, if you will. Then I guess this reconstruction could only ever be an approximation. You and me, the subject and the object, we imply eachother. There's no this without that. Carl Sagan for that matter once claimed if you wanted to create an apple pie from scratch you'd have to invent the universe first. No apples without trees, no trees without soil and water, ad infinitum.

Is the universe deterministic? If everything was interconnected, what would -you- do exactly? I'm no philosopher, but I reckon not much. We're all just part of one giant chain reaction of events and non-events, energy in a permanent process of everlasting transmutation. A bubbling... everything. Like white noise on an old tv screen. On the other hand, what does it matter? You're here and got no choice other than being you. Or do you? Look around.