What is the purpose of life? - part 2.

This is in response to the earlier post. About what follows next, as you read it, don't take offense to it. I am merely stating a position, I am not trying to be smart.

Back to the question: What is the purpose of Life? Here is the trouble with the question.

It is the wrong question to ask.

It automatically assumes that there is a purpose, and sends you on an entirely unnecessary wild goose chase. You would be much better off asking the question : Is there a purpose to life?

At which point I would ask you two things, a) define life, b) define purpose. Let me share my definitions.

Life as is generally accepted, is the sum total of all processes that distinguish the inanimate from the animate, the living from the dead, including but not limited to, an ability to reproduce, to metabolize food and make energy to do work, to adapt to the environment, and so on.

I agree that this is an over simplified definition of life and perhaps many biologists will not be too happy about it, but for the purposes of our discussion I am assuming that this will work and you will accept it, and will not insist on bogging me down with stuff like; is a mountain living? It is changing all the time, eroding, responding to its environment. Is an interstellar nebula living? It is taking material from its surroundings and going to give birth to a star now. umm... I don't know. Go ask the biologists. But I think even they don't know. So lets just stick to the commonsense view of life as the difference between me and the chair I am sitting on right now. I am alive and the chair is not. Okay?

Moving on. Purpose. To me purpose is the end goal in mind for which something is done, or created, or used etc.

For example a knife serves the purpose of cutting up something, depending on what the manufacturer wanted it to cut; a tomato knife, a bread knife, or the three thousand other types of knives they would like you to believe you need. You would assume that at some point in the manufacturing process, someone sat down and decided what the purpose of a particular knife would / should be, and then figured out the attributes it would need in order to better fulfill that said purpose - serrated or plain, small or big, fixed or a folding blade? Once all the details have been mapped in theory, someone goes about the actual process of taking the right kind of metal and forging the desired blade and attaches it to an appropriate handle and the knife is ready.

Not that the police knocks your door down if you cut a tomato with the bread knife. But they will, if you butcher someone with a combat knife and it won't help telling them that that was the purpose of the bloody knife, it was made to be a weapon. You as an intelligent 'living' thing can decide what you will use something for. You can take any sharp edged object and use it to cut something, if it does a good job then that can be its new purpose irrespective of whatever else it is supposed to be doing.

The above discussion yields two conclusions. a) in order for something to have a purpose it must have been created or used with a particular intention and the two do not have to coincide - the intention can change between the making and the using, and b) there has to be someone who is making the intention. A sharp stone in the wilderness will just lie there. It does not acquire the purpose of being a knife (a cutting tool) until someone picks it up and uses it to that end.

Now in order for you to think that all life has a purpose, you must believe that life was created with an end goal in mind, which will take you to believe there must be a creator, an intelligent being with not just the intent but also the ability to bring forth a certain kind of live being and make him/her do a particular task.

As much as the religions around the world would like you to believe that that is the case, come to think of it, there is no rational proof for the existence of such a being. Fact is, there is not much proof about any theory of the beginning of life. To the best of my knowledge all science can claim so far is that life originated on earth around 3.8 billion years ago. How? We have no real idea. We do not know for sure exactly what the conditions on earth were that long back, the stimuli, the starting materials, the phenomena that might have lead to spontaneous generation of 'life'. None of the experiments we have dreamt of so far have succeeded in reproducing life from scratch. In such murky waters I can understand the charm of the 'G'- word. The only trouble is that if you are going to start giving in to your imagination, its hard to stop. One delusion is as good as another, and then you can make up just about any purpose for life that suits you. That is exactly what the clergy has been doing for centuries.

Personally, I would much rather admit that we do not know exactly how life originated on earth. It is an unsolved problem, we are working on it, but just because we do not know for a fact how something is being done, does not mean we will accept any crackpot theory / claims of how it was done.

Now the thing is, if you cannot answer the how, how can you answer the why? How can we claim to know the ultimate purpose, goal, task of such life?

My take is this: Fine I do not know how life began on earth, but since there is no particular reason to buy the intelligent design theory, I do not. When I look at the world around me I find it probable and not causal. From the quantum to the cosmic levels, there is a probability of an event occurring, not a certainty. I do not think that life was put here for a purpose. Life just is. It exists. That is the long and the short of it. There is nothing grand about it. No plan, no goal, no thought behind it. There is no intended purpose. Not in the traditional sense. Not to the best of my knowledge.

However it came to be, life has been evolving to survive a hostile environment forever trying to snuff it out. So if you insist on giving it a purpose then that is what it is - survival. Life strives to exist. The deer must learn to run faster than the fastest lion, and the lion must learn to run faster than the slowest deer. Trees, birds, insects, human beings must live long enough to pass their genes on, so the species can survive. What the species does with that survival is a different matter, as long as it lives; that is important.

And I guess that is where all that mumbo jumbo about being good, and helpful, and altruistic as the purpose of life comes from. You must live, that is the most important thing. However, while doing that, if you can help other members of your species live longer, become stronger, pass on more genes for natural selection to look at, more power to you. On the other hand if some cunning people can frighten or guilt you into doing more and more for the species, and giving up on, and sacrificing the heart of that which makes you you, then more power to them and really shame on you.

You did not ask to be here, you have no control on how long you stay, and how / when you leave. No one gave you an instruction manual when you got here, the rules of this game are not written anywhere. It is entirely up to you whether you choose to play along or not, and they are both equally acceptable responses. If it makes you while away your time here better, go ahead, pick a project, label that your purpose in life and spend the rest of your time doing it. To me it really does not matter. There is no purpose and I have made my peace with that.

No, it was not an easy peace to make. It gnawed at me for a long time. Why bother living in a purposeless universe? That used to be the first question I asked myself every time I concluded there was no purpose to life. It is another one of those things that I have made my peace with, let me try to explain my reasons without digressing too much.

You have two choices, you can choose to live or you can choose to die, there is no third option. I mean there are those people who choose to live and keep thinking about dying, but that is a very inefficient way of doing business if you ask me, unless of course you are still trying to decide which side you want to be. Just be sure to not get too comfortable sitting on the fence, you will have a very sore behind.

I must admit that for a while there, I very seriously considered the 'choose to die' option, but it did not add up in the end, because I figured there really was no reason to work so hard to reach an inevitability. You are going to die. Eventually, one day, some how, some time, some where. Its going to happen with or without your help. (It is like those game shows where you get to pick door 1 or door 2, only in this case door 2 is yours for sure, and the only question is weather or not you take 1 also.) Then it only makes sense to pick the 'choose to live' option, coz that way you get them both. you choose to live and then one fine day you die. Win - win, isn't it? Unless of course the door 1 ends up being a completely horrible place and then you are well within your rights to want to walk out. It is totally your decision, no one else -religion, law, society- should have any say in it.

Once you have decided to live in spite of the purposelessness of the world you live in, the next question is what do you do with this life. Now, at this stage of my life, my goal is to only do things that fall in these two categories a) things I want to do and b) things that allow me to do the things I want to do. Anything else just does not make sense. There is the third category, honoring prior commitments that I have already made as my younger more foolish self. But I guess that also falls in category a) because that is what I want to do - keep my promises, coz the day I decide to break them, there is really nothing anyone can do to stop me.

So that is how I want to live my life now. Yes, there are times when I lose my head and let other people guilt me into doing things that they want me to do, to the extent when for a while I actually start believing that that is what I should be doing too. But as I grow older the shackles seem to be coming apart. Even when I fall for it, I begin to see the fallacy sooner and can bring myself to rise out it. I have come to learn to be patient with myself, that logic is a slippery slope, and hence to forgive myself for my lapses in judgement and errors and for all the times I let other people make up my mind. I figure as long as I choose to live, I might as well do it myself. That is all I want from my life anymore.

And now I do not know how far I have digressed from the topic and if I have made anysense at all.