The answer was serious also. I suspect you are looking for something more complex and scientific. My suggestion is to stay with the simple but you are welcome to my ruminations on life and "what it is" even though you are sure to encounter more abstraction and mystery than the kind of concrete explanation you seem to want.
Let me start here. You have two problems. First, its a sociological problem. Every sociologist knows that you can't really know about something until you have incorporated it in your experience at an essential level; but, as in the study of cultures, once you have done that you have become to some extent a native of it. You can't adequately describe something that you are a part of, to people who do not have a comparable experience with it (color to a blind man). Once you are soaked in it, you can no longer view it from an objective position.
Secondly, there is the old, as within so without phenomenon. That is, you must realize, reveal, experience the phenomenon of life to know what it is, yet the temporal world is largely illusory. So, how does one cut through that to know the essense of life vs non life. The biological rules satisfy that to some extent (organize protoplasm, reproduce, etc). The question then becomes is there something beyond, physics, chemistry, biology that is essential to life. Something that is a life force being breathed into a fleshy mass or being withdrawn from it.
The temporal aspects of creation, with the organization of physical and biological laws are more of an expression of life than the cause or explanation of it.
Why do you need to have experience at all? Why solve problems, why struggle with issues, why respond to challenges, why worry about whether that leaf has vital life or is dead? Conscious or unconscious, all living things are experiencing their own life, in their own way.
The first question that you should ask yourself is: What would it do to you if you found out that the "thing" that is life, is not physical or temporal? If you can consider that possibility then to proceed, you have to stop trying to find scientific explanations, since they are limited to the physical and temporal. If you can't consider that possibility, then you are talking to the wrong guy. |
