WHAT IS LIFE?

The magazine Philosophy Now asked two people, Tom Baranski and Courtney Walsh, to define what life is.

Tom Baranski from Somerset, New Jersey, believes that life is the aspect of existence that processes, acts, reacts, evaluates and evolves through growth (reproduction and metabolism). The crucial difference between life and non-life (or non-living things) is that life uses energy for physical and conscious development. Life is anything that grows and eventually dies, ceases to proliferate and be cognizant. Can we say that viruses, for example, are cognizant? Yes, insofar as they react to stimuli; but they are alive essentially because they reproduce and grow. Computers are non-living because even though they can cognize, they do not develop biologically (grow) and cannot produce offspring. It is not cognition that determines life: it is rather proliferation and maturation towards a state of death; and death occurs only to living substances.

Or is the question “What is the meaning (purpose) of life?” that is a real tough one? But Tom Baranski thinks that the meaning of life is the ideals we impose upon it, what we demand of it. The meaning of life is to: Do good, Be Good, but also to Receive Good. The foggy term in this advice, of course, is “good”; but he leaves that to the intuitive powers that we all share.

There are, of course, many intuitively clear examples of Doing Good. Most of us would avoid murdering; and most of us would refrain from other acts we find intuitively wrong. So our natural intuitions determine the meaning of life for us; and it seems for other species as well, for those intuitions resonate through much of life and give it its purpose.

On the other hand, Courtney Walsh from Farnborough, Hampshire, defines life as the eternal and unbroken flow of infinite rippling simultaneous events that by a fortuitous chain has led to this universe of elements we are all suspended in, that has somehow led to this present experience of sentient existence. Animal life (excluding that of humans) shows that life is a simple matter of being, by means of a modest routine of eating, sleeping and reproducing. Animals balance their days between these necessities, doing only what their bodies ask of them. The life of vegetation is not far from that of animals. They eat and sleep and reproduce in their own way, for the same result. So life is a beautiful and naturally harmonious borrowing of energy.

Yet we have taken it for granted. We have lost the power to simply be happy eating, sleeping, reproducing, believing we need a reason to be alive, a purpose and a goal to reach, so that on our deathbeds (something we have been made to fear) we can look back and tell ourselves we have done something with our lives. Life has lost its purpose because we have tried to give it one. The truth is that we are no more significant than the sand by the sea or the clouds in the sky. No more significant. But as significant.

No matter what your race, religion or gender, when you first step outside your door in the morning and feel the fresh air in your lungs and the morning sun on your face, you close your eyes and smile. In that moment you are feeling life as it should be.

Adaptado de philosophynow.org.