But there are plenty of avenues left for you:You can have a body "ensouled" at birth (Jewish tradition) or at some point before that - some cultures don't ensoul people until they've begun to act like people and not bags of puke (which also conveniently gets past the high-mortality stage).You can go with self-aware intelligence being the thing that makes humans special; will and the ability to shape our own futures come with it and there's your self-determination right there.Or you can go with macrocephalic bald apes whose brains writhe with competing memes, one of which is the illusion of free will, which is pretty stark but amuses me sufficiently for now.Chemical life is only meaningless if you start from the premise that life ought to be more meaningful than that. The universe in general does not display teleological design characteristics - there's nothing there to teach us a lesson, or to help us learn about gravity (though newagers might disagree). I find it an unsupportable leap of logic (indeed, a leap of faith) to say that we're special and everything else isn't. That's just arrogant.Amusingly, it's the sort of arrogance I'd expect from a macrocephalic bald ape with a will delusion.
