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Other than that, the purpose of life is to procreate the species.
The secondary purpose, which is taken care of natural selection, is to adapt to the given environment ( evolution ).

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In an attempt to appreciate that there is no distinction between living matter and dirt, I've decided to subsist on silt for a week.

You could subsist on simple proteins and vitamins too. Are they living?
Or you could subsist on Amanita phalloides, They are surely living. Wait, don't do that.

Nitpicking on the definition of life offends you for some reason, but that definition is the very foundation of this whole conversation.
And the point, that there is no clear definition is also important. It doesn't mean that it can't be defined, but our knowledge is not enough I guess. For example we still haven't found life or still unable to detect life outside our planet.
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No, it's mostly just idiots who put up straw man arguments like "refrigerators are alive" and "you must be religious" in failed attempts at reductio ad absurdum who "offend" me. I had put out the virus versus cell comparison for a reason. And yet, people are still proselytizing about the "continuum" between dead and alive long, and proteins long after the fact... It's annoying when I present simple terms and people complicate them for no valid reason with bizarre analogies.
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It's not hard to come up with starw-man arguments when it's not entirely clear what we are talking about (I fail to see how the key terms are "simple" in this whole arguing)
But whatever

The purpose of life is the pursuit of perfection.

(In every form in which perfection can be acquired: The perfection of aesthetics, perfection of body, perfection of mind, perfection of morality, perfection of talents, perfection of knowledge/wisdom, etc.)

for me, definition of life, is, "it is experiencing". If a virus is experiencing, it will be a living form by my definition, if not, it will be unliving matter.
This is a rather unmaterial definition, since it goes to theologic object such as 'experiencing'. For example, a robot, that is experiencing, would be an artificial life, but robots never experience anything, they just follow instructions derived from sensor inputs. They never feel or want anything. This also implies that one would feel 'lonely', if he was with a robot. Are plants living by my definition? Does plants experience something? Scientists are trying to answer this question and it seems they do.

http://en.wikipedia....on_(paranormal)

I think your definition of "life" is not very good because it would rule out lots of living organisms as "life" because they aren't "experiencing" something. Your definition of life would certainly upset a lot of scientists who are searching for signs of extraterrestrial life

Let's go with your definition anyways and see what it entails... "Something is living if and only if it has experiences."
Well, that definition demands that you explicitly define exactly what an "experience" is and causes you to quantify how an experience can be measured so that you can prove definitively whether or not something is living (in your definition). A bad definition of "experience" could be twisted to imply that rocks have "geological experiences" and their experiences are radically different from ours, but are none the less, living by definition (which would be counter-intuitive and also imply that everything is living but we just can't wrap our heads around their "experience" of the cosmos). On the other end of the spectrum of extremes, you'll also want your definition of 'experience' to be inclusive of the human experience or you'll risk stating by definition that human beings are not living. So, you'll have to be careful with your definition of what it means to experience something if you're going to tie your definition of life with it because it can lead to absurd or contradictory implications.