THE MEANING OF LIFE

Whoo, yeah man find it on Gopher.

It was a few years ago when I sat down with a notepad from the 
discount store and set to putting down an answer to one of the post 
popular, though seemingly not all that difficult questions, the 
meaning of life. Of course being the sort of straight analytical 
straight man who I am (well when not I'm sitting naked at Christmas 
listening to weird early 90s techno music far too loud and typing 
bullshit into Gopher) I of course set to finding the key 
characteristic that separates those things alive to those not. Then 
I started to wonder if I'd read the question wrong, but we'll get 
to that later.

Seems hardly likely that nobody has an answer to this one, though 
granted popular literature/religion is all to willing to hand out 
talk about "lifeforce", "soul" and other such nonsense that still 
gets you nowhere as far as why a tree is more live than a lamp 
post. Nevertheless it didn't too much pondering to begin to piece 
together the common traits shared by living things from beetroot, 
to bunny rabbits, to me on a good day.

By the way, I lost the piece of paper. Somehow it's not in my ideas 
pile where I should have put it and I can't find it anywhere else. 
I'm pretty sure I remember all the key points still anyway.

Structure. The very fact that a bunny rabbit, beetroot, crazy 
human, is easily recognisable is that they are a complex structure 
replicated, with some relatively minor variations, over and over 
again. A complex structure at that, even the tinyist microbes are 
orders of magnitude more interesting that the assorted lumps that 
their consitiuent elements that form away from life's influence. 
That structure has itself the feature of life, the ability to 
maintain itself. While the sand in the desert blows into new shapes 
daily, lakes dry and flood, stone errodes, life continues in its 
fundamental form.

This form is one in which it uses its own environment to sustain 
its structure; Uses the energy of matter to counter its own 
inevitable decay. Replication of cells, replication of structure, 
not for one being to survove for ever, but for its structure to 
survive, for life to survive.

Reproduction is the key to life as we know it. For no lifeform 
sustains itself perfectly, its structure does in time decay. By 
recreating its own complete structure, from the key information 
that defines its own form, life continues beyond death. It cannot 
perform this perfectly either, but only as a result of that has the 
process of evolution managed to transform life into something so 
varied, so universally unique, that it can be everywhere and yet 
not obvious to define.

Seen differently, life is not an essence, not a spirit or a power. 
It is a loop, a runaway loop, equally mundane to a computer program 
written never to stop. Like the program it consumes the resources, 
or the energy, of its environment for as long as that is available. 
But life does this outside of a machine's perfect world, it 
continues against the decay and imprecision of reality, balancing 
the odds of its failure against those of its success across 
countless generations of rebirth. Somehow its structure can stand 
the winds of time, and thrive, limited only by the energy that it 
can harvest from here on the Earth.

May this loop maintain itself by some other means? Can life survive 
indefinately without reproduction? I'm not sure, on Earth the 
answer is no. Where else though might have this biological loop 
have started, and how might its nature as well as its environment 
differ from what we know? Perhaps though there is only one form, to 
be found by chance in our type of environment, in which structure 
can sustain itself, at least for any comparable length of time.

By this definition though life can be created, without even much 
great effort. The task is simply to create an environment that 
permits a structure to sustain itself. At its easiest - a robot 
supplied with power to operate and replacement parts that it can 
swap as required. So long as the replacement parts are to the same 
design, the robot's structure will be sustained.

Here I'll admit that I do come to a problem, because some time 
after defining life to myself on a piece of paper I found myself 
under my car attempting to fix whatever part had that time 
succumbed to over twenty five years of unmitigated decay. Somehow, 
under the myriad of heavy steel shafts, bearings, and linkages, I 
find my mind easily wonders back to the big questions in life, and 
I realised that I was in fact performing an act which brought my 
answer to this one into question. I was part of the environment 
surrounding this late 80s Jaguar saloon, and I was there attempting 
to sustain its structure. By me therefore, was the car alive? 
Clearly not, so then is my definition wrong? I would like to think 
that it's just incomplete.

The fact is that I can reconstruct my car any any form that I 
choose: new radio, electric drive, even with the back end chopped 
off and turned into a novelty couch. Yet while I can change the 
environment of a plant or animal such as to vary its size, 
lifespan, maybe even gender, I can't turn it into a complete other 
form. I can't train a dog to act as a transistor radio, nor can I 
turn it into a tree. The fudamental structure of a lifeform is 
sustained by its environment, but not controlled by it. The 
structure contins within it the instructions for its own conversion 
of the energy within its environment so that it can change back the 
effects of its own decay. We can maintain this form, or restrict 
it, even prevent it from sustaining itself, but we can't truely 
change it. All we can do is select from the variations made 
available to us through evolution (at least unless we get sneeky 
and try genetic modification).

Maybe then I was just one level too high in my definition: Life is 
a structure that uses the _energy_ from its environment to sustain 
itself. That might work.

As I said at the beginning though, I may have misunderstood the 
question. Does everyone really want to define life? Or do they want 
to define _their_ life? Should the question be "what is the meaning 
_to_ life"?

Still if the aim is to find some defining purpose to life, perhaps 
I have already determined that too. Life exists as structures that 
use the energy of their environment to sustain themselves. On 
Earth, this persists through reproduction. So those looking to 
fulfill their life's mission need simply to keep living, and have 
lots of offspring so that they can be sure that their structure 
will live on as well as it can.

That's a rather biological peak aspiration for the average human 
though, and also not a very revolutionary one. Plus, I for one have 
a very strong dislike for children, and don't find adults all that 
great either, even finding significant obstacles to liking myself. 
I therefore don't intend at all to reproduce, and living purely for 
the sake of maintaining my own physical structure isn't my primary 
rationalisation for not killing myself either. Frankly I don't 
think there is a meaning to life. It is, as I say, a loop. We are 
but a product of that loop, as water is a product of hydrogen and 
oxygen. What aims we set for ourselves, if any, even what we choose 
to believe about our own existance, are no matter for anyone but 
us. Just enjoy life as another little organism spun out of this 
crazy little run-away reaction of matter.

- The Free Thinker