We must start at the beginning, for why we’re here, why we’re alive, and what we must do. What is the meaning of life? It’s to improve, endlessly and in iterative incremental steps, as individuals and as whatever groups, communities, and collectives we’re a part of.
The question of the meaning of life is often pondered, but the proposed answers are usually wrong. For example, some suggest the meaning of life is the pursuit of happiness. This idea holds some merit, but happiness is a vague term, and it requires further reconciliation, consideration, and definition with the necessary hardships of life, and narrowing the specific form of happiness to what’s intended, while discarding all others. Without that narrowing definition the pursuit of happiness, intended or not, it almost always devolves into hedonism, into the pursuit of pleasure, a death spiral of increasing degeneracies and addictions, a never ending pursuit of dopamine. Exercise is a hardship, but is necessary to maintain health and strength. Cooking and eating healthy food is better, but more difficult than eating junk food. Raising children is more difficult than being single, but necessary to continue one’s genetic line, community, nation, and species. Maintaining a healthy community is more difficult than being atomized, but is necessary to experience the fruits that a healthy community provides. In all of these hardships we’re improved, in one form or another.
Another proposed example is that the meaning of life varies from life to life. This holds some merit, too, as all life is unique and different, individually and collectively. However, there are similarities between all life. The meaning of life is a commonality that all life shares.
We are to pursue perfection, even though none of us can reach it. It’s perpetual improvement along all paths, to see what works and what doesn’t, to learn what’s efficient and what’s not, to figure out what leads to life or to death, what promotes health or sickness, what instills safety or insecurity, what builds abundance or destitution, what is right or wrong, what is true or false. It’s like a tree sprouting branches dendritically out in all directions from a central locus, exploring outward into infinity, seeking truth. The branches that explore into what’s false wither and die. Only the branches that find truth survive, grow, and branch further outward.
Why is the meaning of life the pursuit of perfection? It’s derived by comparing life to existence. What can be said of life that can’t be said of existence, of things that aren’t alive. Life exists and is alive, but things that aren’t alive only exist. By figuring out and enumerating those differences, a commonality emerges, which points directly toward the meaning of life.
Difference 1: Inanimate objects have no control over their own movement. They are purely ballistic, dictated by all of the rules of reality, like gravity, momentum, speed, direction, the rules of collision, and so on. A rock has no choice where it goes. However, life can choose where to go. Life can move from one location to another, contrary to the forces acting upon it. This doesn’t necessarily mean life always acts against the forces acting upon it, but we have the choice and ability.
Difference 2: Inanimate objects can’t change themselves. They can be acted upon by outside forces and collisions with other objects, but not by their own will. However, life can change itself, regardless of external stimuli or forces. Life can grow stronger through exercise, or become weaker by laziness, or can become healthy due to eating better food, or learn new skills to pursue specific goals, like a predator becoming better at hunting certain prey, or a man fashioning a stick as a tool, or learning where to find certain foods, and so on. Even very small life, like bacteria, can improve themselves, by adapting to different situations, so that they’re more likely to survive, or move to different locations in search of food or a better environment. Individually and collectively, life can change itself.
Difference 3: Inanimate objects are not sensitive to their surroundings. A rock will never swerve away from an oncoming collision, or protect itself from constant erosive pressures. However, life can sense its surroundings, through things like sight, hearing, touch, and taste. We use these senses to figure out what is good and bad, where we should go, to detect dangers, and so on. The more we can sense, the more we can protect ourselves, and the more likely we’re able to survive and procreate.
Difference 4: Inanimate objects don’t take advantage of their surroundings. However, life does. Life will always seek better environments, and utilize what’s useful, and discard what isn’t. Life will even change the terrain positively for itself. For example, beavers will create dams so they can build their shelters, stay away from predators in the water, and better protect their young, and wolves will roam their territories in search of prey, and mark off areas for themselves and their pack, to keep out competing predators.
Difference 5: Inanimate objects don’t have a sense of self preservation. However, life will almost always seek to protect itself. When life detects danger or pain, it can recoil, flee, fight back, change itself, change their environment, call for help, or prepare for the coming hardship. When we get hungry, we eat. When we’re stalked by a predator, we protect ourselves. When our children or brethren are in danger, we protect them, even to the detriment and death of individual members of the tribe, so the whole survives.
Difference 6: Inanimate objects don’t have a sense of self or self worth. The gold in the ground doesn’t know it’s gold, and doesn’t know it’s more valuable than the rock surrounding it. Life, however, does have a sense of self, can measure its self worth, and measure the worth of others. Every time we eat, we measure our worth against what we’re eating. Every time we subject ourselves to danger and hardship, we’re measuring those liabilities against the benefits, measuring our current worth against potential future worth. Every time we protect our offspring, we’re measuring their worth against our own, and against the potential dangers. Through our ability to observe our surroundings, we can examine, compare, measure, categorize, rank, and judge everything, in comparison to ourselves and everything else. The greater the intelligence and ability to observe, the greater this ability. However, even small lifeforms have this ability innately, as they will still seek to protect themselves from dangers, seek out better environments, they will eat to survive, and procreate to continue their species, as they intrinsically judge themselves worthy of survival and continuation, and seek all methods to do so. However, worth is relative to the life determining it. A worm cares nothing for diamonds, but highly prizes good soil. A worm is highly prized by birds and fish, but less so by herbivores, who only appreciate the work worms do to aerate the soil and enable plants to thrive. Worth is measured and judged entirely by and for life. An inanimate object holds no worth outside of life determining that it does.
Difference 7: Inanimate objects don’t reproduce. A comet that’s torn apart by getting too close to a gravity well doesn’t procreate. It was merely torn into smaller pieces by natural forces. New comets were not gained in this interaction, as the sum total of comet mass did not increase. However, life can reproduce. Life intrinsically understands that there’s a distinction between a rock being smashed to pieces to form more smaller rocks, and with how and why life reproduces. When life reproduces, new life is created, distinct from the parents, even if only by location, and surrounding mass is consumed to produce that offspring, to perpetuate the parents and species. Even on the cellular level this holds true, as a newly created cell inhabits a new and specific location unique to it, experiences different things, observes different things, adapts to different stimuli, and lives a lifetime wholly unique to itself different from all the surrounding cells. All life innately understands that we must reproduce, or we die out. This is tied to our ability to measure our self worth, and to determine it is better for us to continue than to cease. If we die out, collectively, all of our experiences, adaptations, hardships, struggles, what we learned, what we overcame, our victories, all would have been for nothing. What use is life if it dies out in one generation?
Difference 8: Inanimate objects don’t willfully reduce entropy or use energy for their benefit. Entropy is the disorder of a system. The greater the entropy, the greater the disorder and randomness, and the more energy is spread out. Given our current understanding of thermodynamics, the entropy of the universe is always increasing. In contrast, life can and must reduce entropy, and must use energy for its benefit. Life does this by moving from one location to another, by consuming food, by changing our environment, by changing ourselves, and by reproducing. Life, by its nature, is a defiance of entropy, and it occurs at every level of life. Cells must properly order themselves, and order their environment by their cellular functions, in order to survive. If cells didn’t discriminate good things from bad, have barriers to control what enters and exits their membrane, if they didn’t control specific chemical reactions to their benefit, they would die. If a human doesn’t properly order their own life, eat the right things, build a proper shelter out of correct materials, fashion clothing from the right plants and animals, cut down trees to utilize fire to warm ourselves, cook food, and sanitize water, build levies and irrigation channels to farm, build communities with people like us, properly order and maintain our community, build traditions to promote marriage and reproduction, build tools to help us control and observe our surroundings, change our surroundings, plan for the future, ward off predators and competing tribes, then we would die out. At every stage, at every level, and for every reason, we’re creating controlled order to help ourselves, ordering the universe for our benefit. Order is the opposite of entropy. Life must be ordered or it will break down and die, and is in a constant fight against the entropic destruction of the universe itself. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that entropy in the universe never decreases. However, entropic reduction can be localized. Life utilizes the surrounding energy for its benefit, to reduce entropy. For example, a plant absorbs light via photosynthesis to promote its own growth and health, localizing the energy of the light into and for itself, as opposed to if the plant wasn’t there, the light would be diffuse absorbed by the terrain the plant covered. Herbivores consume plants for their benefit, reducing entropy in themselves, utilizing the energy the plants harvested, ordering the plant matter in itself for its own benefit, but increasing the total entropy of the entire system through its waste, destroying the order that the plants created for themselves. The more ways life can control and reduce entropy, and harness surrounding energy, the more likely it is to survive. The more advanced a lifeform is, the less it leaves to chance.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of the differences between life and existence, but it covers enough ground to see the pattern emerge.
At the very core of the differences between life and existence, life seeks to survive and change. At the most basic level this requires free will, even to the smallest degree. Even though less intelligent life doesn’t realize they have free will, they still do. We can all move from one location to another, change ourselves, sense our surroundings, change our surroundings, protect ourselves, measure our self worth, reproduce, and utilize energy and reduce entropy for our benefit. Life which does all of these things will be rewarded with life and continuation. The better life can do these things, the more likely it is to thrive and proliferate. Weaker forms of life are more likely to die out, due to environmental pressures and competing life.
As life lives, as it reproduces and dies, generation after generation, it changes and improves. Change isn’t inherently good or bad, however. A change that may be good for one life isn’t good for another. A choice to change may result in worse outcomes, by chance or by failure to observe, prepare, and adapt. Negative changes are punished. Positive changes are rewarded. While bad changes will impair or kill those that pursue it, the good changes are built upon themselves, individually, communally, and generationally. Even very small changes, applied over a large population or time frame, can drastically alter end results. A predator may adapt better fangs and claws to hunt prey, but if formed into the wrong shape or too large, it can impede the goal of the change, limiting the changes to successful iterations which impart positive outcomes on the life. Bad changes lead to death. Good changes lead to life.
Life follows a dendritic pattern, growing like an infinitely complex tree. Life explores outward from its current position, built upon by previous iterations, branching out further still in all directions, exploring new paths to discover what’s true and what’s false. Given the nature of truth, most paths lead to failure and death. True paths are narrow, and life grows along these precise lines. Life explores iteratively, building upon itself.
Thus, the sum total of life is to change for the better, to improve endlessly, to pursue perfection, individually, communally, and generationally. Life is mortal, finite, and imperfect, living in a universe that’s immortal, infinite, and perfect. Life struggles to understand the truth inlaid in the universe, so it can live in accordance with truth. This struggle to improve never stops, and it never can, lest the destructive and chance forces of the universe destroy us, or competing life overcome us. Even though we, as imperfect beings, can’t achieve perfection, that is where our endless improvement is aimed toward. We’re all pursuing the same goal. We will improve, or we will die.
The question of the meaning of life is often pondered, but the proposed answers are usually wrong. For example, some suggest the meaning of life is the pursuit of happiness. This idea holds some merit, but happiness is a vague term, and it requires further reconciliation, consideration, and definition with the necessary hardships of life, and narrowing the specific form of happiness to what’s intended, while discarding all others. Without that narrowing definition the pursuit of happiness, intended or not, it almost always devolves into hedonism, into the pursuit of pleasure, a death spiral of increasing degeneracies and addictions, a never ending pursuit of dopamine. Exercise is a hardship, but is necessary to maintain health and strength. Cooking and eating healthy food is better, but more difficult than eating junk food. Raising children is more difficult than being single, but necessary to continue one’s genetic line, community, nation, and species. Maintaining a healthy community is more difficult than being atomized, but is necessary to experience the fruits that a healthy community provides. In all of these hardships we’re improved, in one form or another.
Another proposed example is that the meaning of life varies from life to life. This holds some merit, too, as all life is unique and different, individually and collectively. However, there are similarities between all life. The meaning of life is a commonality that all life shares.
We are to pursue perfection, even though none of us can reach it. It’s perpetual improvement along all paths, to see what works and what doesn’t, to learn what’s efficient and what’s not, to figure out what leads to life or to death, what promotes health or sickness, what instills safety or insecurity, what builds abundance or destitution, what is right or wrong, what is true or false. It’s like a tree sprouting branches dendritically out in all directions from a central locus, exploring outward into infinity, seeking truth. The branches that explore into what’s false wither and die. Only the branches that find truth survive, grow, and branch further outward.
Why is the meaning of life the pursuit of perfection? It’s derived by comparing life to existence. What can be said of life that can’t be said of existence, of things that aren’t alive. Life exists and is alive, but things that aren’t alive only exist. By figuring out and enumerating those differences, a commonality emerges, which points directly toward the meaning of life.
Difference 1: Inanimate objects have no control over their own movement. They are purely ballistic, dictated by all of the rules of reality, like gravity, momentum, speed, direction, the rules of collision, and so on. A rock has no choice where it goes. However, life can choose where to go. Life can move from one location to another, contrary to the forces acting upon it. This doesn’t necessarily mean life always acts against the forces acting upon it, but we have the choice and ability.
Difference 2: Inanimate objects can’t change themselves. They can be acted upon by outside forces and collisions with other objects, but not by their own will. However, life can change itself, regardless of external stimuli or forces. Life can grow stronger through exercise, or become weaker by laziness, or can become healthy due to eating better food, or learn new skills to pursue specific goals, like a predator becoming better at hunting certain prey, or a man fashioning a stick as a tool, or learning where to find certain foods, and so on. Even very small life, like bacteria, can improve themselves, by adapting to different situations, so that they’re more likely to survive, or move to different locations in search of food or a better environment. Individually and collectively, life can change itself.
Difference 3: Inanimate objects are not sensitive to their surroundings. A rock will never swerve away from an oncoming collision, or protect itself from constant erosive pressures. However, life can sense its surroundings, through things like sight, hearing, touch, and taste. We use these senses to figure out what is good and bad, where we should go, to detect dangers, and so on. The more we can sense, the more we can protect ourselves, and the more likely we’re able to survive and procreate.
Difference 4: Inanimate objects don’t take advantage of their surroundings. However, life does. Life will always seek better environments, and utilize what’s useful, and discard what isn’t. Life will even change the terrain positively for itself. For example, beavers will create dams so they can build their shelters, stay away from predators in the water, and better protect their young, and wolves will roam their territories in search of prey, and mark off areas for themselves and their pack, to keep out competing predators.
Difference 5: Inanimate objects don’t have a sense of self preservation. However, life will almost always seek to protect itself. When life detects danger or pain, it can recoil, flee, fight back, change itself, change their environment, call for help, or prepare for the coming hardship. When we get hungry, we eat. When we’re stalked by a predator, we protect ourselves. When our children or brethren are in danger, we protect them, even to the detriment and death of individual members of the tribe, so the whole survives.
Difference 6: Inanimate objects don’t have a sense of self or self worth. The gold in the ground doesn’t know it’s gold, and doesn’t know it’s more valuable than the rock surrounding it. Life, however, does have a sense of self, can measure its self worth, and measure the worth of others. Every time we eat, we measure our worth against what we’re eating. Every time we subject ourselves to danger and hardship, we’re measuring those liabilities against the benefits, measuring our current worth against potential future worth. Every time we protect our offspring, we’re measuring their worth against our own, and against the potential dangers. Through our ability to observe our surroundings, we can examine, compare, measure, categorize, rank, and judge everything, in comparison to ourselves and everything else. The greater the intelligence and ability to observe, the greater this ability. However, even small lifeforms have this ability innately, as they will still seek to protect themselves from dangers, seek out better environments, they will eat to survive, and procreate to continue their species, as they intrinsically judge themselves worthy of survival and continuation, and seek all methods to do so. However, worth is relative to the life determining it. A worm cares nothing for diamonds, but highly prizes good soil. A worm is highly prized by birds and fish, but less so by herbivores, who only appreciate the work worms do to aerate the soil and enable plants to thrive. Worth is measured and judged entirely by and for life. An inanimate object holds no worth outside of life determining that it does.
Difference 7: Inanimate objects don’t reproduce. A comet that’s torn apart by getting too close to a gravity well doesn’t procreate. It was merely torn into smaller pieces by natural forces. New comets were not gained in this interaction, as the sum total of comet mass did not increase. However, life can reproduce. Life intrinsically understands that there’s a distinction between a rock being smashed to pieces to form more smaller rocks, and with how and why life reproduces. When life reproduces, new life is created, distinct from the parents, even if only by location, and surrounding mass is consumed to produce that offspring, to perpetuate the parents and species. Even on the cellular level this holds true, as a newly created cell inhabits a new and specific location unique to it, experiences different things, observes different things, adapts to different stimuli, and lives a lifetime wholly unique to itself different from all the surrounding cells. All life innately understands that we must reproduce, or we die out. This is tied to our ability to measure our self worth, and to determine it is better for us to continue than to cease. If we die out, collectively, all of our experiences, adaptations, hardships, struggles, what we learned, what we overcame, our victories, all would have been for nothing. What use is life if it dies out in one generation?
Difference 8: Inanimate objects don’t willfully reduce entropy or use energy for their benefit. Entropy is the disorder of a system. The greater the entropy, the greater the disorder and randomness, and the more energy is spread out. Given our current understanding of thermodynamics, the entropy of the universe is always increasing. In contrast, life can and must reduce entropy, and must use energy for its benefit. Life does this by moving from one location to another, by consuming food, by changing our environment, by changing ourselves, and by reproducing. Life, by its nature, is a defiance of entropy, and it occurs at every level of life. Cells must properly order themselves, and order their environment by their cellular functions, in order to survive. If cells didn’t discriminate good things from bad, have barriers to control what enters and exits their membrane, if they didn’t control specific chemical reactions to their benefit, they would die. If a human doesn’t properly order their own life, eat the right things, build a proper shelter out of correct materials, fashion clothing from the right plants and animals, cut down trees to utilize fire to warm ourselves, cook food, and sanitize water, build levies and irrigation channels to farm, build communities with people like us, properly order and maintain our community, build traditions to promote marriage and reproduction, build tools to help us control and observe our surroundings, change our surroundings, plan for the future, ward off predators and competing tribes, then we would die out. At every stage, at every level, and for every reason, we’re creating controlled order to help ourselves, ordering the universe for our benefit. Order is the opposite of entropy. Life must be ordered or it will break down and die, and is in a constant fight against the entropic destruction of the universe itself. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that entropy in the universe never decreases. However, entropic reduction can be localized. Life utilizes the surrounding energy for its benefit, to reduce entropy. For example, a plant absorbs light via photosynthesis to promote its own growth and health, localizing the energy of the light into and for itself, as opposed to if the plant wasn’t there, the light would be diffuse absorbed by the terrain the plant covered. Herbivores consume plants for their benefit, reducing entropy in themselves, utilizing the energy the plants harvested, ordering the plant matter in itself for its own benefit, but increasing the total entropy of the entire system through its waste, destroying the order that the plants created for themselves. The more ways life can control and reduce entropy, and harness surrounding energy, the more likely it is to survive. The more advanced a lifeform is, the less it leaves to chance.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of the differences between life and existence, but it covers enough ground to see the pattern emerge.
At the very core of the differences between life and existence, life seeks to survive and change. At the most basic level this requires free will, even to the smallest degree. Even though less intelligent life doesn’t realize they have free will, they still do. We can all move from one location to another, change ourselves, sense our surroundings, change our surroundings, protect ourselves, measure our self worth, reproduce, and utilize energy and reduce entropy for our benefit. Life which does all of these things will be rewarded with life and continuation. The better life can do these things, the more likely it is to thrive and proliferate. Weaker forms of life are more likely to die out, due to environmental pressures and competing life.
As life lives, as it reproduces and dies, generation after generation, it changes and improves. Change isn’t inherently good or bad, however. A change that may be good for one life isn’t good for another. A choice to change may result in worse outcomes, by chance or by failure to observe, prepare, and adapt. Negative changes are punished. Positive changes are rewarded. While bad changes will impair or kill those that pursue it, the good changes are built upon themselves, individually, communally, and generationally. Even very small changes, applied over a large population or time frame, can drastically alter end results. A predator may adapt better fangs and claws to hunt prey, but if formed into the wrong shape or too large, it can impede the goal of the change, limiting the changes to successful iterations which impart positive outcomes on the life. Bad changes lead to death. Good changes lead to life.
Life follows a dendritic pattern, growing like an infinitely complex tree. Life explores outward from its current position, built upon by previous iterations, branching out further still in all directions, exploring new paths to discover what’s true and what’s false. Given the nature of truth, most paths lead to failure and death. True paths are narrow, and life grows along these precise lines. Life explores iteratively, building upon itself.
Thus, the sum total of life is to change for the better, to improve endlessly, to pursue perfection, individually, communally, and generationally. Life is mortal, finite, and imperfect, living in a universe that’s immortal, infinite, and perfect. Life struggles to understand the truth inlaid in the universe, so it can live in accordance with truth. This struggle to improve never stops, and it never can, lest the destructive and chance forces of the universe destroy us, or competing life overcome us. Even though we, as imperfect beings, can’t achieve perfection, that is where our endless improvement is aimed toward. We’re all pursuing the same goal. We will improve, or we will die.
I also directly say this in subsequent chapters on "How to Improve" (follow truth, or "good" as you say), and the chapters on truth.