# The meaning of life

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2015/05/17/the-meaning-of-life/
- Published: 2015-05-17T13:20:54+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

The reason for our existence is to defeat time, in life’s eternal battle with it.

Each death, from a random cell to a random human, is the victory of time in a small
battle with life.

> There is only one goal in evolution: to develop time resilient beings.

General intelligence is a defense mechanism against time, just like metabolism, 
immunity, or the perpetual growth that makes us old and fragile.

Time creates more entropy. The natural effect of the passage of time is disorder:
things fall apart. Yet, if there is one thing that can be said about life, in any
form, that thing is _order reigns_. All forms of life have such particular configurations,
that the slightest update gives fatal results. The low entropy in living systems
is a state-of-the-art set of rules, which became possible in the original element
soup formed on the surface of young Earth. We are essentially that single point 
of existence that the big bang originated from, because that is absolute order: 
everything — not contained but described by one dimensionless point.

Life as a phenomenon happens when you have enough entropy in a small enough space
region. It is as if life is the cancer of time. Time creates this entropy that suddenly
falls into the most perfectly ordered system which in turn starts moving in the 
reverse direction of time, from chaos to rules. We are created by time and now we
fight it inside our every cell.

> Time is the probability function that turns possibilities into events.

Given enough possibilities there is one event which is the reverse of time. A function
of inverse probability that turns events into possibilities. Time creates the past,
while life creates the future.

But while time acts globally, life acts locally. It is a niche which is also the
secret of its resilience. Life doesn’t intend to perfect everything, but just life
itself. Time creates the past of the universe, while life creates the future of 
life. Because time acts globally, life must protect itself by making a perpetual,
self sustaining process, to guard its local order from time’s global disorder.

The void has in theory the highest level of entropy. Matter randomly spawns into
existence, then back into non existence. Can’t get any more chaotic than that.

Life is mathematically bound to happen given enough entropy and a precisely sized
space region. The moment life appears evolution proceeds. Evolution is the formula
of the inverse probability function that life is. Evolution is self referential.
Given a wide enough spread it then starts to self sustain perfecting ways to conserve
local stability.

Think about it. Life spawned out of lifeless matter and kept adding features. Since
it has no preset direction, nor an intelligent goal, then it means that the sole
reason for evolving was to increase the span of time life lasted.

> The ultimate goal of our intelligence is to live forever.

All the ethical and philosophical problems connected to living forever simply crumble
when the possibility of living forever arises. When it is just theoretical, we can
find fault in it, but when it is actually a thing then we have in sight, it suddenly
makes all the sense in the world. It does because that’s what we were created for:
to outsmart decay and somehow self conserve.

The first thing we conserve is life itself. We reproduce and have a strong binding
to this. Even without children all sane people support this perpetuity of genetic
material somehow, they help the ones that have children. Everything truly evil is
that which tries to irreversibly stop life, life itself or its diversity. For example
the holocaust was the evil, not the war itself; the long term effects of an atomic
bomb are evil, not the tactical decision to use it; killing entire species is evil,
not eating meat.

The apparent freedom that comes with our general intelligence is the real treasure.
Life will not stop if we, as a species, fail. But as a self referencing system it
will not produce us again. If we fail, we are gone for eternity. We don’t only gamble
our faith, but the faith of this system itself, the system of reason and emotions,
of artistic expression as way of creation, the system of non hormonal emotions and
very low chemical conditioning, the feeling of freedom and the ability to act upon
it. Our failure will be the feedback that loosely regulated systems don’t handle
time well.

It is heavy to realise, but we are inside a giant mathematical thing which keeps
going. It doesn’t “learn”, it simply keeps on executing based on input. We should
be careful what we feed into the inverse probability function which creates the 
future. Our future.