On Life

What is life? What's the difference between something that's alive and something that's not?
Consider an insect, say a fly. When it buzzes around your head and disturbs your concentration, you would not doubt that it is alive. More so when it bites you and flies off, while you mutter a curse and rub the sore spot. But compare it to a rock, say a small piece of granite. No one who's sane would claim it's alive. It doesn't move. It just sits there and does nothing. Yet when the rock becomes part of a rock golem that's trying to kill you, I'm sure you'd no longer think of it as "unalive". How can you, when you're fighting against it for your life?

So what's the difference between a rock an a fly? Well, one obvious difference is their level of activity. A fly can buzz around your head all day. A rock can't. But does activity signify life? Can you call something 'alive' just because it moves about and does stuff? It's true that everything that's alive does some kind of activity. Trees, birds, plants, animals, humans, even coral reefs, they all do SOMETHING. But more importantly, they do that something by THEMSELVES. A rock thrown against a wall is active. But that activity does not come from within. A fly, on the other hand, will buzz around you without you having to throw it into the air or flap its wings for it. Life therefore, must have INDEPENDENT ACTIVITY.

But this does not define life. The equation Life=Independent Activity makes no sense. Rather, independent activity is the RESULT of life, not the cause. So , to understand life itself, we must examine the REASON behind independent activity. Why do flies buzz around our heads? Why do trees grow? Why do animals eat and excrete? Why do humans jot down meaningless words on paper? Hmm. The reasons vary, but one thing underlines it all: PURPOSE. A rock has no purpose of its own. A rock golem does: to protect, to attack, or to serve. A dead fly has no purpose, or rather. it has accomplished or failed in its purpose. A living fly has purpose: to survive and reproduce. The same goes for every other living creature.

The equation Life=Purpose does make sense. Something that's alive is something that has a purpose, or a will of its own. Life has a goal, a target. Everything that acquires a purpose, a goal and has the means to achieve it independently can be said to be alive. What do I mean by the
latter half of that sentence? Well, think about it. A rock may have a purpose and a will of its own. No one knows. The rock may want to reproduce and multiply and move about. But it does not have the MEANS to do so. Therefore it is still not alive. A fly, however, is able to survive and reproduce on its own without help. Therefore it is alive.

Ah now, Life=Purpose does bring up something interesting. I would say purpose=will=what something needs/wants. A rock golem's purpose is small: to serve another. A fly has a bigger purpose: survive to reproduce. Ditto for plants, bacteria and other low-level lifeforms. But as life becomes more complex, so too does its purposes. Consider bees. Each has an individual, different purpose. The only purpose of a worker bee is to collect food. The only purpose of a soldier bee is to protect, the queen to reproduce. Yet collectively they have a higher purpose: to manipulate their environment and maintain a great hive so that their basic purpose, to survive and reproduce, can be better fulfilled.

But move up the life level/food chain some more and you'll see more purpose. Lions want to survive and reproduce, but they also need to form family units, prides, with each individual needing a place in the pride. In other words, social organization. All higher level life forms, in this sense, compete for POWER. Male bucks fight, as do male monkeys, male lions, male kangaroos, and male (and female) humans. But sentient beings are unique: we decide our own purpose. We can want everything or nothing. We can desire world domination, or fame, or wealth, or maybe just simply love. Maybe underlying all this is the basic purposes of surviving and reproducing. But it is clear that sentient creatures have gone beyond that. We can choose our own purposes. Why, some of us even go against the basic instincts of surviving and reproducing by willfully commiting suicide or deciding not to have kids. So sentient beings have a higher level of purpose. Therefore, if Life=Purpose, can we not say that sentient creatures are more 'alive' than other creatures? Are we not on a whole different level of Life compared to other creatures? Maybe the hierarchy goes like this: Lower life forms are the Least 'alive' having the least complex purposes, reptiles are more 'alive', mammals still more, and sentient creatures, having the most complex purposes, are the Most 'alive'.

Anyhow, life= purpose brings up yet another question: Why life? Or rather, why purpose? Or what is the purpose of having a purpose? Why do plants and animals want to survive and reproduce? Why do sentient beings search for their own purposes? Why live at all? A much more powerful question, don't you think? Maybe the answer lies in the ORIGIN of life. But that's another story altogether....

-Musings by the ArchMage BenGarth