What Is Life?

The following answers to this fundamental question each win a

random book.
Life is the aspect of existence that processes, acts, reacts, evaluates, and evolves through growth
(reproduction and metabolism). The crucial difference between life and non-life (or non-living things)
is that life uses energy for physical and conscious development. Life is anything that grows and
eventually dies, i.e., ceases to proliferate and be cognizant. 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. Computers are non-living because even though they can cognize, they do not
develop biologically (grow), and cannot produce offspring. 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.

Or is the question, ‘What is the meaning (purpose) of life?’ That’s a real tough one. But I think that
the meaning of life is the ideals we impose upon it, what we demand of it. 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. The foggy term in this advice, of course, is ‘good’; but I leave that to the intuitive
powers that we all share.

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. Most of us would avoid murdering;
and most of us would refrain from other acts we find intuitively wrong. 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.

Tom Baranski, Somerset, New Jersey

The ceramic artist Edmund de Waal places an object in front of him and begins to tell a story. 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. A living thing is an object that contains its story within itself. Life’s story is held in the
genome, based in DNA. Maybe other ways for memorising the story may be discovered, but in
environments subject to common chemical processes, common methods are likely to emerge.

Although 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. This should not be thought of as purposeful.
Life embodies a ‘plan’, but one that does not specify ends, only methods acquired iteratively.
Inanimate processes can be cyclic but not iterative: they do not learn from past mistakes.
Life exists at many levels. Life is also a process through which energy and materials are
transformed; but so is non-life. 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. Yet life is only a story, so it
can act only through matter. Therefore life is by nature a toolmaker. Its tools are potentially
everything that exists, and its workshop is potentially the whole universe. 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. Yet humans, the ‘tool-making animals’, are themselves tools of life, in an unplanned
experiment.

Nicholas Taylor, Little Sandhurst, Berkshire