Interesting timing, just today I was discussing with some friends my theory of time travel and while digging up some old documents where I keep track of my crazy theories and epiphanies, I came across something I wrote a while back while back about what defines us.
1. Atoms - all atoms - when excited, emit a photon. Every chemical or electrical exchange of any sort - emits photons.
2. All atoms can get and can be excited, even the ones in our body.
3. Photons, travel in packets and carry information perfectly.
4. So All things ARE made up of photons, including light.
5. Light is also energy
Keeping all that in mind, what if...the soul, the thing we call "me" is made up of some type of photon packet? And the photon packets (the energy) that we emit carries information (memory), then maybe it would carry the memory of who we are and who we've been...
To take this a step further, what if these photons are the universal pool (Soul/Heart- DNA), because according the laws of conservation of charge the total decay of a free photon into a neutron, positron and a neutrino cannot occur since the , the total electrical charge after decay will not be equal to that before. So, Photons live forever, and we inherit them, gain them acquire them on way or the other with all the coding they have and they influence our actions in the same manner our genes dictate our physical appearance.
And since there's so many types of photons (there are different kinds of light, or lack thereof), we are a composition of the energy we choose to absorb or emit.