Life is self-organising chemistry which reproduces itself and passes on its evolved characteristics, encoded in DNA. Nicholas Taylor, Little Sandhurst, Berkshireįirst the technical definition. Yet humans, the ‘tool-making animals’, are themselves tools of life, in an unplanned experiment. So why do humans risk undermining the life of which they are part? Because they try to impose upon it a story of their own making. Its tools are potentially everything that exists, and its workshop is potentially the whole universe. Yet life is only a story, so it can act only through matter. The difference is that the process of life is intimately linked to story it contains, whereas non-life is indifferent to the story we impose upon it. Life is also a process through which energy and materials are transformed but so is non-life. Inanimate processes can be cyclic but not iterative: they do not learn from past mistakes. Life embodies a ‘plan’, but one that does not specify ends, only methods acquired iteratively. This should not be thought of as purposeful. Maybe other ways for memorising the story may be discovered, but in environments subject to common chemical processes, common methods are likely to emerge.Īlthough we have only the example of the Earth, it shows that life will evolve to fill every usable niche, and to secure and further diversify those niches. Life’s story is held in the genome, based in DNA. A living thing is an object that contains its story within itself. Even if the patina, chips and signs of repair of the inanimate object hint at its history, the story is told by a living observer. The ceramic artist Edmund de Waal places an object in front of him and begins to tell a story. So our natural intuitions determine the meaning of life for us and it seems for other species as well, for those intuitions resonate through much of life and give it its purpose. Most of us would avoid murdering and most of us would refrain from other acts we find intuitively wrong. There are, of course, many intuitively clear examples of Doing Good: by retrieving a crying baby from a dumpster by trying to rescue someone who’s drowning. The foggy term in this advice, of course, is ‘good’ but I leave that to the intuitive powers that we all share. I’ve come to reaffirm my Boy Scout motto, give or take a few words, that the meaning of life is to: Do good, Be Good, but also to Receive Good. But I think that the meaning of life is the ideals we impose upon it, what we demand of it. Or is the question, ‘What is the meaning (purpose) of life?’ That’s a real tough one. It is not cognition that determines life, then: it is rather proliferation and maturation towards a state of death and death occurs only to living substances. Computers are non-living because even though they can cognize, they do not develop biologically (grow), and cannot produce offspring. Can we say that viruses, for example, are cognizant? Yes, insofar as they react to stimuli but they are alive essentially because they reproduce and grow. Life is anything that grows and eventually dies, i.e., ceases to proliferate and be cognizant. The crucial difference between life and non-life (or non-living things) is that life uses energy for physical and conscious development. Life is the aspect of existence that processes, acts, reacts, evaluates, and evolves through growth (reproduction and metabolism). SUBSCRIBE NOW Question of the Month What Is Life? The following answers to this fundamental question each win a random book.
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