Throughout my education, I was told that the natural world is a collection of molecules mediated by physical forces. Adherents to this “materialist” view may acknowledge that some dimensions of reality remain hidden, but the governing idea is that we are things. This was certainly the teaching emphasis in medical school, and is is also a common perspective in contemporary philosophy, under which notions about the "soul" or the "spirit" tend to be deprecated.

We will pass over the objection that materialism leans heavily on the laws of physics even though those laws are themselves not physical. How to account for the existence of the laws is left out of the picture. The fact that our inner lives also remain unaccounted for under this scheme is an even bigger objection, but doesn't seem to bother its supporters much (see Daniel Dennett's attempt to argue consciousness away as a sort of epiphenomenon).

Before considering living beings, we can ask: Are physical objects really just a collection of molecules and the forces that bind them?