The Untold Meaning of Life
If the universe had a FAQ page, the first question would undoubtably be “What is the meaning of life?” Countless philosophers have pondered the answer to this question and I thought I would throw my 2 cents into the conversation. My premise is based on a belief that scientific inquiry can yield answers to those big questions. If you don’t share that belief, you may not want to read further.
Defining Life
To properly interrogate the ‘meaning’ of life, we must first understand it. A simple Google search for “scientific meaning of life” returns the following:
“Life is a characteristic distinguishing physical entities having signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not.”
If we put this definition into simpler terms, something can be considered living if it is self-sustaining and if it has signaling processes (electrical and chemical processes that allow the organism to respond to certain changes in itself or its environment).
Entropy and Life
Erwin Schrodinger, nobel laureate physicist, and proud owner of the most famous cat in physics, proposed his own definition that combined concepts from physics and biology. Schrodinger recognized an interesting property of life: it maintained a highly ordered state in a universe racing towards peak disorder. It does this by expending energy to keep itself orderly and in effect concentrates order within itself.
The second law of thermodynamics simply states that in a closed system, entropy (a measure of disorder) always increases. The consequences of this increasing entropy can be seen in everyday life:
- Your home becomes dirty (disorderly) very quickly if you put no effort into cleaning it. It takes a constant input of energy over time to keep things clean. The same is true for our cities.
- Your headphones always get tangled. There are far more tangled states than untangled states available and when they move around in your bag it’s inevitable that they will fall into a more disordered state over time. It then takes energy to get it back to an orderly state…until next time.
- It takes one second to break glass and days of effort to glue every piece back together. In other words, it takes enormous amounts of energy to return a disorderly pile of broken glass into its original ordered state.
Rocks erode as water rushes past them, but the skin on a salmon never wears away. Life resists the inevitable decay. It sustains itself. And it is only when life finally dies, that it finally becomes disorderly.
Schrodinger and the work of those who came after him have brought me to a definition I find to be the most pure: A living thing harnesses and expends free energy to decreases entropy and maintain order within itself.
The Neverending Story
When most people travel to New York City they are impressed by the scale of the buildings, the Statue of Liberty and all spectacle of the Big Apple. For me the most impressive thing is that for the most part, everything works. Stop and think about that for a minute: New York WORKS!
Each day that New York doesn’t ground to a complete halt is miraculous. Every train, bus, taxi, street cleaner, trash truck and police officer knows their place and does their part. Day after day. There’s an army of men and women rebuilding and maintaining the concrete jungle. But left to nature, without a constant input of energy and human attention, New York would be destroyed by our oldest enemy and the one we rarely talk about.
Disorder. Entropy. Decay. Whatever you want to call it, it’s always there and it never takes a day off. In a way, it’s encouraging that we’ve become so numb to its onslaught that we hardly take notice of it anymore and can enjoy the other wonderful things New York and the rest of the world has to offer.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende features one of my favorite antagonists of all time. A dark cloud called The Nothing that is ominously spreading across the magical world of Fantasia. The Nothing erases everything it touches and is slowly engulfing their magical world. In the novel it represents the apathy and cynicism of the world and can only be defeated with imagination, knowledge and compassion. The Nothing is real — and it’s all around us.
We are on the front lines of a campaign as old as the universe itself and the battle is ongoing. Life sorts the universe into regions of order and disorder. From repairing our own bodies to building thriving metropolises, we are all fighters in this war with the Nothing.
Knowledge: The Newest Front
For billions of years the battle has been waged on a purely biological level. Life perpetuated itself even when met with a multitude of devastatingly disorderly events like astroid impacts and volcanic eruptions.
When modern humans began to evolve 200,000 years ago, a new front in this battle was opened: a fight for knowledge and understanding. It’s one thing to resist increasing entropy within our own body, that’s comparatively easy, but finding the order in a set of information is considerably harder. That requires intelligence, creativity and curiosity.
Is Knowledge Created or Discovered?
This is another age old question, but one that we have to touch on in order to continue our interrogation of life’s meaning.
I believe that all knowledge and art is discovered, not created. Knowledge and art can be expressed as information.
- A novel or scientific paper-> a series of characters
- A painting -> a collection of pixels
- A song -> several channels of sounds as waves
And for any set size, it is easy to determine the total number of possible permutations one would have to try before stumbling upon or ‘creating’ the final product. For instance John Lennon’s Imagine is ~3 Megabytes or (2.4 x 10⁷ bits). That means there are 7.8 x 10⁷²²⁴⁷¹⁹ possible songs that could fit into that same size. Most of them would be gibberish and inaudible, but Lennon and countless other artists are skilled enough to routinely find order in the chaos. They find the rare beauty in the static of The Nothing.
The same principle can be applied to text, which raises an interesting and very metaphysical question: Am I creating this post or am I simply discovering it? The Library of Babel is a project that gives some semblance of an answer to that question. They allow you to search the void of possibilities for any text and tell you where in their library of ‘everything’ it would be found. In the library is what amounts to 10⁴⁶⁷⁷ (a 1 with 4,678 zeros) books to sift through.
- The first paragraph of this post can be found on Wall 2, Shelf 1, Volume 28. It was there for me to find all along.
- Shakespeare’s famous “To be or not to be” Hamlet soliloquy was plagiarized in its entirety from Wall 2, Shelf 5, Volume 16, Page 90
- The phrase “energy equals mass times c squared” (E=mc^2) can be found Wall 1, Shelf 2, Volume 14, Page 139. Did that knowledge exist before Einstein discovered it just waiting to be found?
Modern science is as much a battle against disorder as was biological perpetuation. From an unfathomable amount of data, we find meaning, relationships and order. Everything we write, sing and paint is less a process of creation and more a process of discovery. The picture was already on the canvas, artists are just the only ones with the vision to paint it.
When we make discoveries we expand our arsenal in the fight against disorder. We give ourselves the capabilities to discover the solutions to other problems, expand our reach, and ultimately advance in our conquest against The Nothing.
The discovery of knowledge and art is beautiful and comforting. What we are really doing is looking out into the endless void of possibilities, cold, frightening and usually uninviting and surrounding ourselves with the parts that mean something…even if only to ourselves.
A Commentary on Scale
“We have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama. Perhaps someone else has. Perhaps no one else has. In either case, we have good reason for humility.”
-Carl Sagan
The endless campaign we find ourselves in the middle of today started long before there were humans. We may be the first species on Earth to become fully aware of the nature of that ongoing conflict between order and disorder, but we surely will not be the last.
In the Douglas Adams book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Earth is actually a giant biological supercomputer designed to calculate the answer to life, the universe and everything. Although it was meant as fiction, I think in a way Adams was right. We are a part of a larger machine, the entire ecosystem of the planet Earth works in consort to stay orderly and defend against the raging epidemic of disorder in the universe.
As such, we do ourselves a disservice when we think of all the life on Earth as ‘independent’ species. We are all cogs in a larger machine. The trees supply the oxygen, the bacteria keep many biological processes in animals moving, the plants are giant solar generators that introduce energy into the food chain, and for now humans are the ones fighting entropy on the knowledge front.
We have a problem understanding scale. We tend to believe we are the center of our worlds and we fear our own deaths. But we are part of something much more beautiful and much more meaningful than any one body could ever hope to be.
Instead of thinking of ourselves as individuals, it is truer to think of ourselves the same way we think of the cells in our own bodies. We do not mourn the millions of cells that die every minute, because others will take their place, and at the end of the day, we still survive. We would do better to think of ourselves as the cells in one organism: life. Right alongside every plant, animal, bacterium. That’s where we belong.
Humanity has always craved to understand the nature of its own meaning. We want to know why we are here so badly that we’ve created many many answers for ourselves. I believe the one we have found through this interrogation of nature is the truest, purest and most likely to lead to good outcome; for our species, our planet, our brand of life and this oasis of low entropy we call Earth.
The Meaning of Life
Find order and beauty in the darkness, and spread only that light.
