The question “What is the meaning of life?” has occupied philosophers for thousands of years. In classical Greek philosophy alone, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus… all had their say, finding meaning in the pursuit of virtue, in knowing the ideas of truth, in attaining happiness, in pleasure…
The ancient thinkers' ideas are not dated, but each one speaks to the meaning of life for a single person. And that, you must admit, seems rather small beside the meaning of life of — say — all of humanity.
On that larger stage whole philosophical schools have grown up: religious and metaphysical philosophy, cosmism, existentialism, nihilism… All of these currents are fascinating, but on reflection even this is still rather shallow, because life is not confined to humanity alone. We somehow forget that besides us living humans there exists an unimaginable multitude of every kind of living being and entity, known and unknown to science — and not only on our Earth, but on other, still undiscovered planets and worlds of the boundless Universe! I intend to reflect here on the meaning of this all-embracing Universal Life (with a capital L).
First, we need to understand how any living being sees the world (the Universe). Everything a living being is capable of perceiving, it perceives through its own subjective Context — the sum of its knowledge and ideas about itself and about the Universe.
Let us take the simplest creature, familiar to all of us from school biology: the single-celled amoeba. Recall that this simplest of bottom-dwellers lives in freshwater ponds and feeds on the organic matter abundant in the silt at the bottom. What “knowledge and ideas” does an amoeba have about the Universe?
Here they are. From the point of view of a brainless amoeba, the boundless Universe consists of fresh water (within certain ranges of temperature, pH, organic impurities and so on), bordering on the silt of the pond bottom (with a certain content of bacteria, single-celled algae and other tiny protists). And that is the whole Model of the Universe of the species “common amoeba” (Amoeba proteus) — where by Model of the Universe I mean the integral Context of all individuals of a given species.
How close is this Model to Reality? Very far, without question — but… it works one hundred percent locally! Or rather, wherever this Model of the Universe becomes inadequate (that is, beyond the edges of the pond), our amoebas do not survive — and therefore simply do not live there.
In essence:
Model of the Universe — a reflection of the behavioral scheme that living beings have adapted in order to maintain their homeostasis.
For example, when water acidity rises to a certain level, our amoebas know how to shrink—reducing their membrane's surface area while thickening it—and this keeps them alive. When acidity rises beyond that level, shrinking no longer helps, and the amoebas die a martyr’s death: the real Universe no longer corresponds to these creatures' Model of the Universe.
All right — but what about multicellular organisms? Or let us aim higher straight away: warm-blooded animals. From the point of view of, say, penguins, the Universe is immeasurably more complex than an amoeba’s. Here there is already the cold, salty ocean-sea, and all manner of fish in that sea, and ice, and predatory killer whales and sharks, and of course other penguins of one’s own and the opposite sex… Still, the penguin Model of the Universe remains fairly primitive — hence our heroes’ range: only the coast of Antarctica and the southernmost parts of the neighboring islands and continents…
One could say that over many hundreds of millions of years nature has launched countless “startups” — families, classes, species and subspecies of animals, plants, bacteria and so on — which have in fact been competing with one another the whole time for a place in the sun. Each of these “startups” had its own “business model” (that very Model of the Universe), and the more successful — the more adequate — the model, the higher in the food chain the corresponding “start-up” eventually ended up. In essence, then, it is Models of the Universe that compete, and the best — the most adequate — of them wins.
And here one more term has to be introduced:
Collective Model of the Universe — the most adequate representation of the Universe that has been able to take shape within a given ecosystem.
It would be a mistake to think that in the ecosystem “the nature of planet Earth” the most adequate Model of the Universe was formed by human effort alone. No: the Collective Model of the Universe of Earth’s ecosystem is the product of several billion years of the evolution of Earthly Life, from some prokaryotic bacteria to modern humans. Humans (with the exception of my upstairs neighbor) are merely the champions: they have arrived at an incomparably more adequate Model of the Universe than any other living beings we know of. Yet, in evolutionary terms, the species Homo sapiens stands on the shoulders of all its ancestors, who fed on plants and animals, which in turn stand on the shoulders of their own ancestors, and so on. So the most adequate (Collective) Model of the Universe results from the ecosystem's collective evolution.
It is therefore logical to conclude that Life (with a capital L) is the competitive process of honing and perfecting the Collective Model of the Universe. Or, put differently:
Life is the continuous process of ever deeper cognition of the Universe.
And if we look at this process in its ultimate perspective, its direction can be formulated as a striving toward a Fully Adequate Model of the Universe:
The goal of Universal Life is to discover a Fully Adequate Model of the Universe.
Whether this goal is achievable lies beyond the scope of this text. What matters is that we have answered the question, “What is the meaning of Universal Life?”
None of this, of course, diminishes or cancels the meaning of an individual human life — still less that of humanity as a whole. It simply offers a perspective on the direction in which we are developing and helps us understand the foundation into which the small grains of our individual achievements are being laid. Each of us, in expanding our own Context, adds a grain to the Model of the Universe of the human species, which expands and deepens the Collective Model of the Universe of the Earth’s ecosystem, which — I hope — step by step and unswervingly draws closer to a Fully Adequate Model of the Universe.