Life has purpose

By Christopher Poff

What is life? It can be amazing how such a short, simple question can explode into so many different answers.

Douglas Adams illustrated in his whimsical novel Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that, in order for any answer to make sense, one has to understand what the question truly entails. It can be analyzed, of course, from a clinical perspective–what characteristics must the entity in question possess to be considered life? Leslie Mullen tackled this angle in an article written for Astrobiology Magazine. Here it is noted that physicist Edwin Schrödinger distinguished living from nonliving matter by the quality that it “avoids the decay into equilibrium.” That is to say, a living entity possesses chemical and mechanical processes that oppose entropy—the natural tendency for energy to radiate from high concentrations to low concentrations until everything is uniform.

But is that all that life is supposed to entail? Is it no more than a confabulation of cellular machinery, grinding away against the flow of time like the steam engine of an old riverboat, until it finally breaks down and falls to pieces? Human existence certainly seems to crave more purpose than merely the cycle of “eat, excrete, procreate, repeat.” If that is true, what constitutes purpose–or perhaps, in more general terms, meaning? Well, the currency on which meaning is minted is information. Not merely data—unless we are to accept that human existence has as much significance in its purpose as your typical adding machine at any rate.

In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase determined that the material we know now as DNA was the substrate by which an organism inherits traits; the following year, James Watson and Francis Crick presented a model of how DNA stores and reproduces hereditary information as genetic code. At the core of the definition of life, then, is information, organized in a meaningful way, recorded in a lasting medium, capable of releasing copies of itself. But is that a significant upgrade, from engine to calculator to database?

There is a critical element that is yet to be recognized as we jump from one discrete state to another. It lies perhaps in the intangible space that resides between the singular bits, much like the blank areas in and around the characters on this page. More so even—it arcs the distance from the page, through your eyes to the virtual image in your mind, a volume in which the individual letters (W-O-R-D) are joined to form a second-order indivisible entity in its own right (a word).

In other words, life is symbolism.

Take, for example, the set of genes in your DNA that instruct your cells on how to grow into a pair of eyes. Put that genetic strand under a microscope and you can read it as a sequence of base pairs—but that alone isn't remarkable in the physical universe, as even entropy allows for the natural formation of your average crystal as a matrix of atoms that lock together just as neatly. What gives those genes meaning—gives them purpose, gives them life—is the notion that these genes represent your eyes. They are your eyes, in a sense. They accomplish this feat by a mechanism of transformation—by metabolism, replication, and growth. Your genes become your eyes...the latter can't begin existence without the former, and the former exists only to generate the latter.

So perhaps, the answer to the question “What is life?” is in fact, another question—“What does life become?”

At this point, the puzzle box that is our question might best be rotated and viewed from an entirely new angle: that of the human psyche. As sentient beings, each of us is aware of our individual psyche. As part of our cognitive development in infancy (barring, perhaps, certain individuals who suffer under specific forms of mental illness) we incorporate an almost reflexive capacity to assume the existence of psyches in other humans we meet. The elaboration of our psyche's composition is, perhaps, better left to someone more studied in psychology than the author, but some of the primary building blocks would seem to include sensation, the raw input from our senses; emotion, the instinctual reaction we have to our sensations; and ideas, the ephemeral products of our mental activity as we attempt to interpret, reconcile, classify, or otherwise document to ourselves the other components of the psyche and the aspects of our environment that they represent.

Is this the answer to our new question? Is the defining quality of life the generation of ideas? Probably not. It could be a vital aspect of human existence, but evidence would show that plants and animals demonstrate no (or at best, severely limited) capacity for generating ideas. A dog is aware of its environment, certainly...but is it aware that it is aware of its environment? Bees can memorize a map of the surroundings outside their hive and can communicate to their brethren via dancelike motions...but is there a dance move in the bees' repertoire that identifies the concept of the map itself?

When exploring the lofty heights yields an unsatisfactory answer, sometimes turning to the primal depths is a good idea—instead of seeking the answer in Athena's domain, we should be searching in that of Aphrodite.

In other words: sex.

This is something we arguably do share with our lower-order neighbors on planet Earth. There are very few species above the cellular level that do not possess differentiated genders in some capacity; in order to reproduce, in general an individual must find a mate. Even plants, rooted to the spot though they are, have mechanisms for transferring genetic material from the male organs of one plant to the female organs of another.

This sort of coupling requires some sort of etiquette—something that differentiates one's behaviors for, say, feeding or defending oneself, from those for such recreational activities. But here, perhaps here is the answer we seek.

Not sex, specifically.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of life, though, is motive. Desires, goals, behaviors...the answer to the question isn't what purpose does life serve, but merely the fact that life has purpose. The aspects of our environment don't take on purpose until we designate it: we give it the name fire and we assign it the quality of burning. Fire itself can't do that assignation—it can grow, feed and arguably reproduce but it does all of this without motive. Whereas a living creature acts with specific intents and motives.

In other words, life becomes “I” as in the pronoun. A creature moves against the nominal current of natural cause and effect, influences it, creates wakes and ripples that change the shape of its environment in a purposeful fashion, even if it is simply a single-celled organism that metabolizes one molecule into another. Even that simple process was enough for cyanobacteria to change the composition of our atmosphere to the oxygen-rich blend we enjoy today. In other words, life can change its environment, and in doing so, establishes a boundary between itself and that environment. Perhaps that is life's defining trait.

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Christopher Poff is currently a student of Digital Arts at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He pursued Computer Science and Physics degrees prior to his current major. He is an avid gamer and science fiction fan.