Zen Master Bankei Yōtaku and his unborn, major religions, contemporary physics and cosmology - all speak to the fact that our hardware, at least a portion of our atoms(in the human body) predate everything, all the stars and everything in the universe.
Our hardware is ancient.
Free will, consciousness, self - awareness is the operating system. We can influence our own matter and matter around us. We can construct and self-construct.