Meaning of Life

[Brief excerpts from LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive, by Martin G. Walker]

If we consider the history of the universe as we know it, once the course of universal existence got into its stride, it plodded on for billions of years, churning out stars and galaxies and planetary systems, and flinging in the odd meteorite cloud for good measure. Everything was inanimate matter.

Protons, electrons, atoms and molecules, galaxies and solar systems, being persistent in form, came to predominate in number. But a few billion years ago, the course of existence crossed a bridge. That which had been constrained by the forms and possibilities of inanimate matter found a new form, a new set of possibilities: life.

Life interests us in particular, of course, because it is the form of our own existence. As a form of existence life differs dramatically from inanimate matter.

With inanimate matter, a type or category of matter remains fixed and immutable. Once we determine that carbon has six protons in its nucleus, we know that carbon has always had and will always have six protons in its nucleus. If we exert sufficient force to add another proton to a carbon nucleus, we haven’t changed the form of carbon—we’ve created a new instance of the atomic form of nitrogen.

Living forms, in contrast, change constantly. No two instances are identical. Frogs, human beings, ferns—every type of living organism comes in all shapes and sizes. We can identify the different types by some essential characteristics, but we know not to expect these to remain the same over time. But the same principles of existence apply to the living form, as they must to all forms of existence, regardless of time, type, or location.

Why We Find Life's Meaning In Its Persistence

With inanimate matter, the material itself absorbs our full interest—its composition and durability, the forces and processes that brought it about and hold it together. But with life the material itself interests us only insofar as it contributes to the form of the living thing. Inanimate matter changes according to physical and chemical laws.

Place a rock on a table and it will remain just as it is—granite or limestone, marble or pumice—unless and until acted on by some external force. But life has an existence independent of the form of matter.

We can imagine a cartoon artist with his flip-book. On each page he draws the same character, each image varying slightly from the image on the previous page. He carries the essential form of his character from one page to the next, creating a story that can only be discerned when he flips the pages rapidly. The character isn’t embodied by any one of the drawings but comes to life through the succession of one drawing from the next. So it is with the form of life.

Each new iteration, each generation, each species represents another page in the story of the form. We can’t understand life by looking only at the individual organism or species. The form of life reveals itself in the flow from one instance to the next, and without this flow it is nothing. There can be no form of life unless living organisms continue to propagate.

Life as a form of existence embodies a new imperative—it must further its own persistence. This embodies the essential characteristic of life as a form: self-propagation. Each individual living organism survives for a short time, but just long enough to pass on its essential characteristics to the next generation, to further the existence of life as a form. Life as a form continues to exist because it passes on its form from one instance to the next.

All species, however different from one another, represent life as a form. When we look at the richness of variation in the form of life on earth—the bewildering varieties of plant life, from seething jungles to towering redwoods hundreds of years old—when we see how each animal strives to exist, to eat and grow, to mate and raise its offspring, we can easily forget that all living things exist not only in and of themselves but as part of the form of life. The thing being propagated, the thing that persists, is the living pattern, the form of life.

Living things themselves do not persist indefinitely. Living forever provides no advantage to the form. Living things grow and pass on their variations of the life form through reproduction; they live to live, but they exist to create copies of themselves, to perpetuate the form of life.

What Is Life?

Each living organism consists of a complex interrelated collection of molecular structures. The molecular structures grow and sustain the living organism by metabolizing nutrients from the outside world (through photosynthesis and absorption, for plants, and by feeding and respiration, for animals). In all of this, the molecular structures operate according to a particular pattern or model, and they carry this pattern’s operating instructions encoded in their molecular structure. A key feature of the pattern is the ability for the living organism to communicate an approximate copy of itself from one iteration (one generation) to the next through reproduction.

Three essential qualities distinguish life as a form—reproduction, a self-sustaining metabolism, and mutation.

Without reproduction, life as a form would have stopped at the single-celled amoeba. Reproduction represents the flipping of the pages, the transfer of the possibility of continued existence from one generation to the next. Living organisms reproduce in myriad different ways—seed dispersion, pollination, egg fertilization—but all living things must reproduce somehow or face certain extinction. In order to survive long enough to reproduce, we need to eat and grow.

Plants and animals have developed many different systems by which to take in nutrients and absorb energy, but each successful plant and animal must take in enough food from its environment to be able to live to maturity.

And mutation is an essential quality of the living form, because it permits adaptation and diversification. Genetic material carries the patterns and rules by which each living entity operates, including instructions for the transmission of approximate copies of these patterns or rules from one iteration of the entity to the next. Variation in the genetic instructions, or mutation, is built into the reproductive cycle. Mutation is not a mistake; it is a marvelous mechanism for permitting changes in the organism’s structure. Adaptation results from a successful mutation. A particular mutation may equip the new organism with a life pattern that leads to relatively greater success, or success in a different way, or protection against a change in external circumstances.

The mutative quality of life leads to a broad variety of organisms, each of which can be successful in its own way, as well as to a particular focusing or narrowing of particular types or traits that prove successful. The earth hosts huge numbers of species and subspecies. Many similar or closely related plants and animals thrive side by side. The variation between them doesn’t necessarily lead to an either-or situation in which only one particular variation can succeed. If we study an extinct species, we typically see that extinction came about because the particular variation of the form of life couldn’t compete or adapt.

Persistence in the Form of Life

With the form of life, no new principles of existence came into being, but with life the principles apply to the form of life itself rather than to a particular individual or thing.

To illustrate this difference, we can compare the hydrogen atom with the fruit fly. The hydrogen atom persists as a form because hydrogen atoms tend to persist—many hydrogen atoms that came into existence billions of years ago still exist today. But the variety of the form of life that we know as the fruit fly persists because the fruit fly archetype persists. (Individual fruit flies live only a few days, just enough time to spawn the next generation—the next incarnation of the fruit fly type.)

The fruit fly’s life span is shorter than the half-life of some unstable atomic isotopes. If we start with a thousand atoms of gold-198, which has a half-life of about three days, after three days we’ll have only about five hundred remaining gold-198 atoms. After another three days, that number will have dropped to about two hundred and fifty. If we start with a thousand fruit flies, however, most of them will have died within three days, and certainly after five or six days we wouldn’t expect any of the original fruit flies to remain alive. (Individual fruit flies don’t persist.)

But, presuming that our fruit flies have had some access to nutrients and to one another, the total number of fruit flies may not have dropped at all. We may even have many more than one thousand fruit flies. It is through the fruit fly type that the principle of persistence appears and operates. The fruit fly archetype persists even though each fruit fly has a relatively short life span.

To better understand persistence in the form of life, we can go back to the three essential characteristics of the living form—reproduction, self sustaining metabolism, and mutation. The most primitive varieties of the form of life, single-celled organisms, appeared through chemical and physical processes rather than by reproduction. But to persist, the form of life must generate new instances of itself. It must reproduce.

To ensure persistence of a particular species, each generation, on average, needs to produce sufficient offspring to guarantee a growing population. Individuals in some species (frogs, for instance) produce hundreds of offspring, most of which won’t reach maturity. In other species, our own included, individuals produce relatively few offspring, but each has a much greater chance of reaching maturity.

Each living organism must take in and metabolize the nutrients it needs to grow and sustain itself. And the physical structure of the organism must provide it with sufficient protection from harmful conditions and predators. Some plants and animals can go for long stretches without sustenance and can survive in the harshest conditions. Other organisms have far less resilience—the hummingbird, for instance, which must feed almost constantly in order to survive.

Either way, a particular type of organism can only persist if the instances of that type live long enough to reproduce successfully. (In animals, successful reproduction also implies that each generation gets the care and protection it needs to grow to maturity.) Fruit flies reproduce relatively quickly and therefore needn’t live long to ensure the perpetuation of the fruit fly type. Human beings reproduce more slowly, and therefore we must live substantially longer than fruit flies to ensure the success of the human species.

Mutation contributes to persistence by enabling variation and adaptation. By changing slightly from one generation to the next, each type of organism and the form of life in general improve their chances of persistence. Some mutations work against persistence, but without mutation there can be no successful adaptation. If the fruit fly didn’t constantly and quickly mutate, the species would be vulnerable to changes in its environment; it would be defenseless against new threats.

The rate and range of possible mutation in a particular species needs to be appropriate to that species. (There will always be the possibility that a disruption occurs too quickly for the species to respond to through adaptive mutation, leading to extinction, but for the form of life to persist, the adaptive effects of mutation must tend to outweigh this possibility.)

It is not clear whether, in some cases, external circumstances might not positively influence the way in which a species mutates. A species in which the material of the species’ DNA changed, not from one generation to the next, but within a generation, could transmit beneficial traits more successfully than disadvantageous traits. (Genetic engineering, through conscious intervention, makes this, in practical terms, more a reality than a hypothesis.) Such a species would be more tenacious and successful, without changing the fundamental principles by which life operates.

All essential aspects, and many nonessential aspects, of the form of life contribute to its continued persistence. Having come into existence, the purpose of life is to remain in existence…

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LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive presents a fully-consistent philosophy of our existence. Through a distillation of the principles inherent in space and time, it shows how these principles apply to life and help us achieve a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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Contents:

Understanding Our Perception
Understanding Universal Laws
Why This (And Not Some Other) Matter?
The Principle of Persistence
Understanding Life!
Consciousness
Abstract Concepts
Objective Morality
Life's Span and Arc

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"[LIFE!] is a philosophic work written by a physicist, grounded in rationality and empiricism. … A central assertion is that life exists because it perseveres whereas things that do not persevere tend not to exist. There is something Buddha-like and iron-clad in this utter simplicity that is arresting.

"[Walker's] is an "objective morality" that does not rely on doctrines or authority, but, as he argues, is derivable directly from the way of the universe and the way of life. I believe he is correct in this, and that his book is very much worth reading for this alone.

"Walker writes, "…the totality of material existence…is transitory and conditional… We came from nothing and we will return to nothing. What happens in between has meaning and importance only to the extent that we grant it such meaning and importance." — Dennis Littrell

"superb… [LIFE] deserves a wide audience… where the individual discussions cohere, greater themes emerge…" — Dr. Chris Shields, Prof. of Philosophy, Oxford University

"the best part about his thesis is that it is neither difficult nor unreadable…thought provoking rather than mind boggling. Serious students can compare his succinct 122 pages to something like the 835 page club of a paperback Critique of Dialectical reason Vol. 1 by Jean-Paul Sartre. Walker’s structurally solid book promises hope and affords time for a gathering desire to think…Satre’s book induces blurred vision and guilt from straining to understand.” — Bob Howdy, PhD.

"the author's love for all forms of life shines through every page. A gifted teacher, he answers unanswerable questions in a way that is deeply satisfying and uplifting" — Karen Brunson, Editor