of elementary particles.

And yes, it's really complicated, and no one

in their right mind would try to describe a human being

in terms of those elementary particles.

But particle physicists have collected elementary particles

in what's called the standard model of particle physics.

And those particles for all we currently know,

make up everything around us,

the entire universe, including us.

Now, a lot of people seem to be

a little bit uncomfortable with this.

They're wondering, isn't there something more about me?

Am I not a little bit more

than just those fundamental particles?

Where's my consciousness come from?

Whatever happened to my soul?

Personally, I don't think

that to describe our observations, our experience

of us thinking requires anything more than particle physics.

I'm happy to leave the understanding of consciousness

to neurobiologists or whatever those fields are called.

But I also don't think that we need to add anything

to the fundamental laws of nature

that we have collected in physics.

I think it's sufficient.

But a lot of people have difficulty with that.

They want there to be something else,

this thing that they call the soul.

So one possible route that you can take is

what's called dualism that just says

we have all those fundamental particles and atoms

and gravity and interactions and all that kind of stuff.

And on the other side, we have the soul.

And it just lives in an entirely non-physical realm.

And this is where I reside in some sense.

And this is perfectly fine.

It's compatible with all we know, so long

as this soul does not interact with the physical side.

Because once it starts interacting with it

they would have to be part of our theories

in the foundations of physics.

So for all we currently know from

the foundations of physics,

everything that isn't in the standard model

of particle physics plus gravity is emergent

from those particles and the forces between them.

And by emergent, I just mean that it can be reduced

to the properties of those fundamental particles

like the color of a metal or something like this.

And this is something that is known

under the word reductionism.

There's no observation

that we have ever made that contradicts this idea

of reductionism, that fundamentally everything is made of

and everything derives from the properties

of those fundamental particles.

But the properties of collective assemblies

of particles that in principle you could calculate.

In most cases, we cannot.

There are certainly no particle physicists who

can calculate what your eye color will be

if you give them the properties

of all the particles in your body.

But in principle, you know it should be possible.

If you had a big enough computer

you would be able to calculate it.

So on some level you could say that, yeah

we are really just constituted

of all those elementary particles

and all that we can do comes

about from the interaction of those particles,

even though that might be an

entirely useless description of us.

It's nevertheless correct.

But I think that actually

we're much more than that on a different level.

You could say we're somewhat less than that.

By which I mean that what's important

about us is not the particles that we are made of.

It's what those particles can do.

And that's what's contained in the information

of how those particles are put together.

That they make up a human body.

Someone who can walk and talk

and think and write books or fly to the moon.

Where does this come from?

Well, it comes from the way that those atoms are arranged.

And I actually think that this is a very hopeful message

because it means that in principle

it should be possible to upload your identity

and actually not just your thinking apparatus

but your entire body to a computer

because there's nothing that stands in the way.

All this information about the configuration

of the atoms in your body, you can formulate it

in mathematics and put it onto a computer.