Why am I alive?
 

Regardless of the concept of a soul... Whats keeping us alive?

I know all about the biological and chemical processes that, in essence, make our bodies function. But what is there that gives the spark of life?

Its almost the frankenstein question... One ive been pandering for a while, and I wanted to hear your opinions.

Hmmmm.... Maybe you shouldn't listen to so much Led Zeppelin, life would be simpler - why not listen to some REO Speedwagon?

The Spice Girls are good too.

There is no spark of life.

The word "life" is only a term of convienience. Ultimately your body is constantly following the laws of physics.

What is keeping you "alive" is the complex interaction between all of the various sub-systems of your body. Upsetting this balance will cause your body to act in a much less interesting manner (it will die).

Of course you said; "I know all about the biological and chemical processes that, in essence, make our bodies function.", but where do you want to go beyond that?

Life is not a "thing", there is no "life stuff". Life is a process. The process is caused by the aforementioned biological and chemical interactions. Why do you need to postulate a 'magical' component to yourself?

Ask a photoplankton if it feel anf spark....then answer your own question.

The conservation of momentum, mass, and, energy. The same things that keep the rest of the universe from ineluctable descent toward absolute zero.

We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.

yes I suppose thats why we all experience the spark in a slightly different way. Because we are all genetically different.

Free Will. You're choosing to stay here, to keep your current physical life on earth.

Thats it? I was hoping for something profound...

I suppose it makes sense, in a way. Hard to believe that thats it though. It just seems tooo simple. Hence the thread.

Re: Why am I alive?
 

My answer to that question would be that everyone lives for a short period of time and then is dead for eternity, if I'm going to die might as well enjoy my life as much as possible.

Upon rereading the original post I realized I answered the wrong question...

People without the "spark" die and reproduce less / children have a higher mortality rate, causing the living people to be the ones with the spark...

or some bs like that

Life is a self-renewing, self-reproducing, self-motivated system. It is what it is.

Years ago, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a TV special that was a sort of pastiche of all his novels. Towards the end, an astronaut who's been launched through time and space to all sorts of different random destinations, finds himself in a graveyard looking at his own tombstone. And from the sky God says, "See what a good job God has done." The astronaut says that he feels puny and unimportant next to God, no better than mud.

God answers, "If you want to feel the least bit important, think about all the mud that never even got to sit up and look around." Well, yeah.

Well, I think people are alive for my amusement, so that's my answer.

Define what you mean by "spark of life" that isn't answerable by biolgocial and chemical processes?

i think we all get to a stage in our lives when we start to ask big questions like this. i am there now too. we are all the creators of our own reality. the world as you concieve it is constructed from your sensory encounters (subject to all those biological processes) with your environment. maybe conciousness is just a tool for understanding and decoding our perceptions. but how does the process of decoding perception into emotion work? what is it that enables me to 'feel' the things i do?

urbanwizard, that an entirely different question. Consciousness is not a necessary condition for life.
As it happens, it is a very interesting question, but is not really within the scope of this thread.

What you need to do is three easy steps.

1) Listen to some super angry punk

2) Listen to barney and friends

3) Become Instantly enlightened...

Oh yeh baby, i'm so smart that i'm... finish that sentence for mi, i mean me.

Energy- and how we choose to apply it.

Positive energy- you keep healthy, happy, and choose to stay alive.

Negative energy- you deteriorate, not caring for your physical or mental health. Leads to illness and death- or suicide.

Things are usually only as complicated as we make it.

I'd have to break it into three levels of importance;

On a physical level, you are alive because your body is functioning correctly. The most important parts of your bodily functions are involuntary by nature, such as your heart beating, and your lungs breathing.

The second level would be instincts. They are mostly involuntary reactions that are programmed into us from birth. As far as I know, insticts arent quite understood yet, but I havent done a lot of research in that area. They are definitely with us from birth however. They keep us alive by deterring us from actions that would cause harm.

The final level is completely voluntary, and thats our mental state. Compared to most other animals, humans seem to be less ruled by insticts, and more by emotions. Since we're not always following what our instincts tell us to do, we can choose whether or not we want to live.

latest explanation I heard was that the electricity in your brain goes around and gives you that "spark"

but there is still LOTS to be discovered.

Maybe the electricity in your brain IS that spark.. :crazy:

Pardon me? Looking at this amazing, wonderful and huge world arond us, can one actually ask for anything more profound?

I'm not going to comment on what seems a secondary topic of whether our experience of reality and consciousness can be reduced to simple chemistry and physics, as I think we can break down our processes infinitely and never arise at answers to the question of why does life inherently exist.

Why does the spark of life exist? Personally, I'm not sure that question has an answer. I start my ontology starting with the fact that it does exist as far as I can usefully perceive, and as far as biology goes (and humans as a subset) that it seems to be intertwined with the part of reality that seems to self-organize, as opposed to the entropic tendency of decay.

What keeps you alive is breathing, drinking water, and eating, which your body converts to energy. Some of it leaves in the form of waste product, some of it is stored in body fat, but most of it leaves as heat.

What do you mean by "spark".


To me we exist as functioning organisms because.

a) we existed previously

b) the sum of factors contributing to keep us alive (our organs) is
able to overcome the external factors which would tend to kill us
(ie buildup of wastes, infections)

... and this is in the context of

c) a reality that has particular properties - including but not limited to
those described by (or modelled by?) classical, reletavistic,
and quantum physics

Self-awareness is another more complex issue entirely. Is that is what you mean by spark?

I was thinking that the question alluded more to self awareness, all the science concepts explain how our bodies live, but self awareness is something harder to pin down. It is fair to theorise that should my brain be stripped of all five senses I would still be aware of my existence, so I could say that awareness is a function of our brain but is set apart from it's other functions because it does not respond directly to stimuli but uses measured, considered responses- it is also responsible for forming who we are , how we interact with people and means we can ask questions like the one that started this thread

But that doesn't really answer anything. Because to breathe, drink and eat, you have to exist, in which you do, so the question is how? :)

If we look at the scientfic model of life, it goes something like: non-existing -(1)-> existing -(2)-> non-existing.
Your answer is about arrow no 2, while this thread asks about arrow no 1, the way I see it.

But what empirical evidence supports this? If you lost all five senses, WOULD you, in fact, be aware of your existance? Humans, by their very nature, require mesaurement. Time, distance, emotion... With none of your senses, how would you measure your existance? You'd think... but what would you think? Likely, you'd go mad and eventually become unsure of your own existance anyhow.

Also, regarding evidence, your awareness of existance... how does that prove or disprove that awareness in a function of the brain? Again, there is no way that I'm aware of to measure this. If there is more than just a physical entity that makes up what is normally known as you, than how can it be shown that that ethereal piece is not where awareness lives?

You see, when a man and a woman like each other very much, they have a special hug...

;)

Don't play stupid. I'm sure you understood that this was meant to be a philosophic question. Philosophy goes beyond what we already know... :)

How can a person go from non-existance to existance isn't a question that is answered when you just explain the method. If I ask "How is files stored on my computer", I don't wish the answer "By clicking on the disk-icon".
We know how a person is made, physically, but Life is somewhat more complex than that.

You are defined by your actions and your basic outlook on "life" how live life determines what you think it is or wy we are here. Some people might say you are born you die and thats it. The statement begs the questions if thats it then why go on. We just live and die nothing else to be had. Kind of a mundain existance. but life is what you want it to be for the most part. just make it good.

As it turns out, gestation and child birth are probably the most complex things a body can experience. It's a wonder of biochemistry refined by millions of years of evolution.

It sounds like your asking "At what point is a person considered a person," and that's too big a can of worms for a Friday night.

More like "What exacty happens at that exact point that makes the pre-embryo a living creature". I really don't know, it wasn't my question in the first place... :)

My feeling is that there is nothing inherently profound about life. It's something that's amazing and incredible, but it arose out of everyday, natural processes. As I've always said, we are charged with giving life meaning beyond the biochemical; there's no essence to do it for us automatically.

Great book, btw, on such things: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/019286212X/104-0256787-9252737?v=glance">Amazon.com</a>, <a href="http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/blackmrs/mememach.htm">Complete-review.com review</a>

In short, even the idea of self is flawed -- in the physical reality of our neurons, decisions are made without conscious intervention, and our 'conscious being' is made aware after the fact. The feelings of free will, consciousness, and self help our brains spread memes more effectively than without such ideas. Really tricky ideas but the book does a great job of taking you from simple experimental results to the end theory.

Really, people reside in their brains. Consciousness, emotion, and all of the senses are experienced only in your brain. If someone cuts you in the arm but your brain doesn't receive the message then you wont feel it, and you can feel limbs that aren't even there if your brain is tricked. On top of this, contrary to what a lot of people mistakenly believe, scientists HAVE mostly figured out how the brain works. It isn't some indecipherable electrical magic place, but a standard organ. The only difference between our's and those of animals are that our's has a much more complicated and developed cerebral cortex, and is designed for language.

As for the spark of life, it's already been answered, there is no need for it. If you want to understand how life works the best place to look is at where it is made: the "miracle" of birth. A single cell contains the blueprints for the body. Food is broken down (using chemical processes) into raw materials which are then assembled into various tissues. These become the bones, muscles, organs, etc. The assembly of tissues grows larger and larger as more and more materials are added until it has formed into a baby. This being continues to add more materials and grow to full size. You spend your life simply adding more materials (by eating) to replace the old ones, thus sustaining the organism, which is little more than a bundle of chemical processes. Over time you "shed" the vast majority of your body and replace it with entirely new materials. The only parts of the body that you were born with that are left over are probably the nervous system and the brain. The rest of your used materials are gone.

Life is about nothing more than replenishing those materials and keeping this mound of chemical processes alive. You eat, you dispose of the excess, you reproduce to create more self-sustaining bundles of chemical processes, you maintain a stable condition to foster the continuation of these processes. That's all that life is. Emotion and consciousness are simply byproducts of the intelligence humans needed to fill their niche.

Free will is an illusion. Everything happens for a reason, right? If I throw a ball I naturally expect it to follow it's course until the end right? It wont suddenly turn around, grow wings, or explode? Everything is cause and effect. Everything in the universe follows an exact path. The processes in your brain occur in an orderly fashion. There is only one possible way for them to behave. To say otherwise is to say that if I throw a ball it would make perfect sense for it to sprout wings and fly away. If there is only one possible outcome, then there is no choice. If there is no choice, then there is no free will.

And even if there was by some supernatural force the freedom of choice, what is it that determines your choices? You just want to please yourself. Fulfill all of those instincts, like the desire for a partner and the love of others. How are you free if your inevitable goal is always the same thing?

I'll need some evidence of that
Brain cells are always bieng lost, drinking kills hundreds of em in one fell swoop . It is unique in many ways but it is still cell based like our other organs
They are also two very different things, emotion can easily be seen as a reaction to instincts - consiouseness is something that has not satisfactorally explained by scientists. I could create a highly complex machine designed to react to various different stimuli in a multitude of different ways aimed at preserving a set of goals, upon observation it may seem intelligent but it would not be consious no matter how complex it was.
This is an argument against free will, not consiousness

I think we'd all agree that it's possible to be alive without being self-aware.

Animals, bacteria and so on are alive. An organ such as a heart is 'alive' during the transplant process yes? Because a heart can beat independantly of a brain. The classic frog legs experiment (legs moving in response to current but not attached to a frog), the concept of "brain-dead" humans and so on. All imply that life can exist without consciousness as we know it. No single case is 100% proof, but taken together I think that the reasonable position is that life is independant of consciousness.

Moving to consciousness. I'm not familiar with all debate that has occurred on this... I'm still reading philosophy (my background is physics) which is interesting, but to some extent a big debate without much experimentation. We are lucky today in that we have so many more tools available.

Overall it seems to me that we have a clearly demonstrated correlation - in that stuff that directly affects the brain also affects consciousness. Psychoactive drugs, poisons, accidents, operations, electrostimulation. Some of these things do not affect the rest of the body. Those cases where surgeons implant electrodes are much more clear than say alcohol, in that few areas of the body are affected. Just the brain and thinking... oh and the scalp. : >

To a lesser extent, my view here is the same as with the "life/consciousness" issue. While no one case is conclusive - taken together, there is strong evidence linking consciousness to the brain.

In this case we can postulate tricky scenarios where the brain is a receiver or link to another external (or internal) mechanism, be it a soul, astral being or whatever. However... these arguments are torturous and complicated. They presuppose that the universe is trying to trick us.

In the absence of other evidence existing at this time, I would argue that a rational person would see consciousness as arising from the brain. In fact, this hypothesis seems to be the basis on which drugs and medical treatments are developed - with positive results so far in my view.

Within that... well I suppose that a very interesting question is "when does self awareness begin to operate in humans". When do these feedback (?) mechanisms become operative in the brain... Given that babies have poor control of their limbs/eyes - this seems a difficult thing to test. My gut feeling is that they'd have self-awareness pretty early - even if they don't retain memory of the period or can't display it to their parents.

Is self awareness the same as consciousness... (Probably not)

Is self awareness an on/off/indivisible thing I wonder, or can we have 50% self awarness (and/or consciousness)?

I would think that under the influence of some drugs, we certainly have less self awareness / consciousness at some times than others. Are we conscious while asleep? If not... then my candle or spark has only just started recently.

Now that's a really big question..I think we should all find the meaning of life for ourelves.