I asked myself the other day what the purpose of life is, and what the purpose of the life drive and death drive are.

Has anyone here read much of anything in terms of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, Dawkins, Zizek, Lacan, Jung, Freud? The psychologists/psychoanalysts/biologists really love that concept of entropy, and from what I can tell, they all seem to feel that the purpose of life is to create information, or create states that would not normally occur in inanimate matter. This seems like a natural extension of the physics of all matter, where the second law of thermodynamics essentially says that the entropy (average information content per physical state) of the universe is ever increasing. But there is a small part left out of this extension, which is that entropy production is proportional to heat transfer, and all life forms do seem to give off heat (even a snake will freeze solid in -40 temperature, and a snake eats, whereas a rock does not). So, is the purpose of life just not to create information, but to create information faster than if the matter were inanimate?

Of course, life forms require energy input in order to generate entropy (the entire process takes "useful" energy as input and converts it to "useless" energy as output), and so the entire process of entropy generation is not "free", and there are optimizations to be considered (which I suppose is why evolution occurs). So is the internal death drive just a living being's self-correcting desire to leave said useful energy for the use of the others, because this living being feels that the others are more optimal at entropy generation (a la Hamilton's rule)? Is the external death drive a way for living beings to correct others who are not optimal (by accident or purpose)?

When you analyze the interaction between humans or animals or plants or bacteria or whatever, is it all just a giant game of "let's see who can generate the most entropy given a unit of input energy"? Is this why we idolize creative people, like Picasso (considering the vast difference in his oeuvre's subject matter as he went through various periods, such as blue = death, rose = life, we are not totally loathe to admire depictions of death)? He created many thoughts, memories, etc. that are all encoded in peoples' brains, and each of these thoughts and memories do consist of a set of distinct brain/whole body physical states, after all (memories and thoughts are not actually ephemeral ghosts without a physical presence).

I will probably get a lot of heat, but here it goes anyways.

Look for Jesus Christ, he has the answers you're looking for:

Good luck

The way I understand it, evolution has no goals and is not a form of general optimization, except for the specific pressures of natural selection, which are in constant flux. Looking at the process backwards, evolution gives an illusion of having forethought and goals (although often in absurb and insane ways).

Also, "life" is a somewhat vague term. Is a virus alive? Is a prion alive? What about Avida, or Terraria, or the many other artificial life simulations? Many would probably say no to the latter, although they exhibit many (most? all?) of the characteristics that a biologist would define as "living".

So I don't think there is any fundamental "reason" or "goal" of living systems, they are just a natural process like any other that happens to have a lot of complexity.

It's up to us, as humans, to decide to develop reasons and goals to make our lives feel more meaningful.

laztrezort, you bring up some good points about what defines a living system. Do all of those systems you mention spontaneously generate heat? What does a virus "eat"?

I understand that teleological explanations for natural selection are absurd, and counter to what Darwin was thinking. You could say that natural selection is a bit of an optimization process, because it is about survival of the fittest (or that's what comes out of it anyway), and well... if you don't survive, it's because you're dead, and being dead is an inoptimal way of generating heat compared to being alive. It sounds a bit circular, I know.

It occurred to me that if the purpose of life is to increase the entropy of the universe in an optimal way, by increasing the occurrence of heat transfer, and that life will be impossible in the far future because the universe will be in thermal equilibrium at maximum entropy, then life really is geared to race toward its own doom at an accelerating rate... which leads me to say...

acotoz, I couldn't care less about anyone particular religious affiliation, so don't worry about getting "heat" for it. Now that you bring up religion though, I realize that Mani was a post-Christian prophet who was very adamant that the natural progression of the universe is toward maximum entropy. Perhaps he was somewhat right, that the purpose of life is to accelerate this process, to race faster and faster to our own doom... to reach heaven? That last part I'm unsure of, but we all have our own ideas of what occurs after life, and I'll leave it at that.

CryoGenesis, I find that explanation hard to accept, because I'm not looking for an existential pat on the back. There are clearly differences between living and dead matter, and perhaps what I should be asking is "what is living matter better at than dead matter, on a purely physical level". I'd say that spontaneously generating heat is one thing that it's better at.

Dwarf King, I find that explanation hard to accept, though it is definitely worth considering.

Also, "life" is a somewhat vague term. Is a virus alive? Is a prion alive? What about Avida, or Terraria, or the many other artificial life simulations? Many would probably say no to the latter, although they exhibit many (most? all?) of the characteristics that a biologist would define as "living".

A virus is not considered a living thing, a bacteria is

Seems to me kinda like asking "What's the purpose of gravity?" We can say what it does, how it affects other things in the universe, and what has come to be as a result of the properties of gravity. But it doesn't have a purpose. It just is.

Life is life. It is what it is and does what it does. Why would it need a purpose?

There is no 'purpose'.

Any attempt to ascribe a 'plan' or a 'reason' onto the universe is simply human arrogance and fear.

Arrogance that in such a mindblowingly large amount of space we are that important.
Fear because no one wants to stop existing.

Both give rise to religion.
Religion is a crutch.

Maybe one day we'll finally get rid of it...

But a purpose to life?
Nope, there is none - we are just chemical processes.... once you realise this life gets much simpler