And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

A colloidal bag – consisting mainly (three-fourth) of water – with 75 trillion cells, 20 billion of which are collectively responsible for producing the non-physical entity identified as “I” and associated with the rest of the bag.

Oxidizing polysaccharides, lipids and protein at the rate of 2 to 3 K calories per day, this bag, can amazingly code, store and process another abstract concept known as “information” which enables every “I”, normally clustered in large numbers, to manipulate its surrounding and produce indefinitely more “information” as long as the bag can support the “I”.

Despite the fact that, save for a small number, the ~7 × 10^27 atoms involved in this process change, but the non-physical entity remains more or less constant and stable with an average duration of approximately 2.5 × 10^9 seconds.