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

... 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.[/quote]Entropy will increase to it's limit with or without life being present in the universe -- this is just the great cooling down of the universe, and we are a part of that cooling down. In the process of all the suns burning up, the generation of intelligent life is a mere footnote, almost invisible compared to the other entropic forces at play.

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).[/quote]The heat-transfer definition turns out to only be an approximation of modern entropy. It's also possible for life to decrease entropy in our local region -- in fact, that's what most of our lives is spent doing -- forcing things into a specific arrangement (like a work of art) is a decrease in entropy, not an increase. Entropy is disorder, or the amount of possible ways something could be arranged in -- a work of art is a very ordered and specific arrangement of matter, the opposite. This doesn't violate the 2nd law, because that local decrease is offset by a much larger global increase (such as the burning of the sun's fuel that keeps you alive to perform your transient art).

This turns your idea on it's head, as it seems that the main activity of life is actually to attempt to decrease local entropy by building more and more specific structures.

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).[/quote]What force would possibly guide evolution to select based on entropy-generation? It's common knowledge that Darwin's only guiding force was whether an organism lived and reproduced or died. Anything beyond that is "intelligent design" superstition.

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?[/quote]As above, a Picasso paining is in a much lower state of entropy than a blank canvas and tins of paint, so no, you've got this backwards.

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.

"Better" implies selection -- natural selection occurs in organisms as some are killed by the environment -- are you suggesting that the universe itself has a hidden force that somehow select organic arrangements of molecules and promotes them, in order to optimise for entropy?
This is an unnecessary addition to any theory -- we can explain the existence of organic compounds without invoking magic and superstition.

As for the differences between living and dead -- this again is a human concept... If you look at them on another scale, they look the same. At the cosmic scale, they're both just dust on a pale blue dot. At the atomic scale, they can both be made up of the same elements, and at the quantum scale, everything starts to look pretty much the same.
In fact, the very concept of saying "this is one object, this is a separate object" is again a human invention. If some form of M-theory is right, then the entire universe may be able to be described with a single geometrical description, without boundaries between different "objects" that even allow for the concept of "separation".

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[/quote]Yes, live will be impossible in the far future, but that's going to happen regardless of whether it gets there in the most optimal way or not.
If the universe wanted to optimise for heat transfer, why doesn't it generate more efficient-burning stars, instead of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little ants on a tiny, tiny, tiny, little blue rock? Humans seem incredibly inefficient at a cosmological scale. In fact, if the parameters of the universe (i.e. the curvature of the other 7 spatial dimensions) were tuned optimally for this, then the element of carbon would've been impossible to form, and the stars would've all burnt up before even making a single planet. We know this isn't the case though.

Surely living things act spontaneously. When you reached for that giant cheeseburger, it was due to an internal stimulus. A rock doesn't do that.

That's debatable. It's a common view that humans, and all life, are still just deterministic machines. Indeed if you study biology, it's hard not to see the different components of cells as microscopic robots.
If there's no magic soul duality going on, then indeed, we're just the same deterministic stuff as the stars -- and our behaviours are indeed just as predictable as the falling of a rock, just with an order of magnitude more variables involved (meaning WE will likely never be able to make those predictions).
In fact, if human actions were truly spontaneous and inexplicable by physics, then we would have proof of God meddling with the affairs of the universe... unfortunately, physics can explain our actions without invoking God.


Let's imagine the universe as a perfect circle, with circular particles inside it. It started out in a big bang as a dot, and grew over time into a big circle.
If we stack all the future states on top of each other, we've now got a 3D cone that represents both space and time (i.e. space-time). Looking at this new geometry where time is just another axis, or location in a coordinate-type, is much more beneficial than the illusion that you perceive of a slice though that axis.


You're currently exist at a particular point in the cone, and your life is a series of these points, forming a line. That's your world-line, and it already exists.

Time is another human concept, and is just an illusion. What you're experiencing as the past is your memories, created in a process that follows the arrow of entropy (not the arrow of time). The laws of physics work just as well backwards as they do forwards in any axis, including the time axis. The point at the start and end of that line are just as "objectively real" as the point you find yourself at right now; this is a fact of physics, and is why many physicists shy away from supporting the idea of an "objective reality" at all, preferring only the realities defined by their models...
However, this doesn't mean that your "fate" is fixed and there's no "free will" -- when looking at a particular point on a world-line, to explain that point's past, you've got to examine every world-line that could have possibly led up to that point, calculate their quantum probabilities, and sum all infinity of the terms to take interference into account. This means you don't just have one past, but every past that could have produced this moment is equally real. It's only during the quantum decoherance in that pile of qubits in your head that you end up with the illusion of a single reality, instead of the truth of a superposition of realities. All that's imagined and all conceivable, does actually exist somewhere in this superposition of the universe.
Same goes for your future, where at every point/event on that line, an infinite number of future lines branch out and are equally "real".

The illusion of there being a lot less degrees of freedom than there actually are is just a predictable by-product of the design of your machinery.

Why is there anything at all? Why is there matter and not 'nothing' .. I don't think anyone knows yet, but I'm sure the answers will be interesting.