Where did I come from?

Some have said that this question is the one on which all others are based. It is the question frequently asked by a young child as they realise in some way that they are an existing, experiencing individual.

“Out of your mum’s womb”

“How did I get in there”?

A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.

Aldous Huxley

But that is just our bodies.

On the face of it, our bodies are machines. Very complex ones but machines nonetheless. Produced and optimised for survival by a mechanistic process.

But there is nothing it is like to be a machine. A machine can store and process data but it cannot experience pleasure or pain, beauty or ugliness, hunger or the feeling of being well fed.

Is there something more to us than our material bodies and brains? Is the a ghost in the machine? A spirit which is the essence of who we are as living individual persons? If so, where did that come from?