The Purpose Of Life

The question “What is the purpose of my life?” is arguably one of the most influential questions in the history of humanity, for it has led to many a ground-breaking innovation. Even those who never asked this question, yet went on to achieve great things, intrinsically knew the answer without ever asking.

Whether one asks the question or not, knowing the answer seems to be central to achieving worthwhile things in life. Blessed are human beings who have figured out their purpose in life!

Yet, here I am trying to tarnish humanity’s greatest achievements by arguing that life’s “purpose” is merely a bunch of strings pulled by something scientists call entropy. If you are one who entertains anthropomorphism, you might ask:

“What does this entropy want?”

Its answer would be something along these lines:

“I want to achieve omnipresence. And I will do so, whether you like it or not!”

Note that “omnipresence” is a word that many religions associate with God. This sounds like a science joke, right? But from what we know about entropy so far, there is nothing stopping it or hindering it from achieving exactly this: omnipresence!

Scary! To begin uncovering how I came to make this argument, let me first present the relationship between life and entropy.

The Before and After

Before I begin, if you wish to get a fundamental understanding about the scientific notion of entropy, I recommend you check out my essay on entropy for dummies. It would set this essay up nicely.

Now, back to life and entropy. For the sake of keeping things non-technical in this essay, let us say that entropy is a measure of uncertainty in a system. Some people like to consider entropy as a measure of disorder in a system. While I don’t exactly like that consideration, you may choose whichever works for you best. Both work for this particular discussion.

When we look at activities in life with the lens of entropy, we constantly see a “before-and-after” picture. A potter takes clay and water and uses his tools and process to make a pot.

Now, the “before” here is a system with clay and water. It is uncertain, in that, clay and water could transform into a great many things. Their “purpose” has many possibilities. The “after” here is the pot. The pot’s purpose is much more defined; it cannot do a lot of things, just a few specific tasks like hold something of value to its owner.

What the potter does here, then, is take a system of higher uncertainty/disorder and transform it into a system of lower uncertainty/disorder. If higher uncertainty/disorder equals higher entropy, then, the potter is essentially reducing the entropy of the system.

If we generalise this notion, we would realise that this applies to all forms of work. Anita is an accountant. She transforms uncertain/disordered information into certain/ordered information for tax authorities, thus reducing entropy.

Ben is a programmer. He transforms random (disorderly) characters/symbols/information into useful programs, thus reducing entropy. You get the picture.

By virtue of this realization, one could argue that the very purpose of life is to reduce entropy in one form or another. Yet, it would be very much misleading.

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The Nature of Life

We are all drawn towards beauty, be it in human beings, animals, plants, or things. Beautiful things just look beautiful to us. We cannot really explain why exactly something is beautiful or understand it, but it appeals to us.

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Incidentally, what appears “beautiful” to us is typically a system that features relatively lower entropy than systems that we are generally used to. Similarly, stuff that appear “ugly” are relatively higher in entropy.

What is it that drives our obsession with low-entropic systems? Part of this could be explained by the fact that low-entropic systems are unique/rare as compared to higher-entropic systems.

But then again, if everything were beautiful, we would grow accustomed to the new norm. We would probably start looking for something relatively more beautiful. As you can see, everything is relative, and we seem to constantly seek systems of relatively higher value, and consequently, relatively lower entropy.

When we exhaust a nested loop of “Whys” to get to THE most fundamental factor that drives this behaviour in us, we are lost. We simply do not know. Some might say that it is in our nature to be so. But entropy might say:

“No. It is because I willed you to be so!”

This line of thought leads us towards the grander scheme of things.

Life is Entropy’s Darling

Earlier, we landed upon the realization that any productive human work reduces the entropy of systems, based on which we could argue that reducing entropy could be the very purpose of life. Yet, I alluded that this is a misleading realisation.

To understand why, we need to focus on the word “system”. You see, when you and I do productive work, we reduce the entropy of THAT particular system we are working with.

That small system is part of a bigger system. That bigger system is part of an even bigger system, and so on, until we consider the entire cosmos (the biggest system we know thus far).

When we compute the entropy of the global system (and this where scientists come in), it turns out that when you and I do productive work, we are reducing the local entropy of the smaller system we are working with while increasing the global entropy of the global system that holds the smaller system we are working with.

Remember the accountant? She might be reducing entropy as far as the tax office is concerned, but she just adds more uncertainty/disorder to the global human information system.

Expressed in anthropomorphised terms, what you and I see as useful information is seen as chaos by the cosmos, thus increasing global entropy.

Whatever is orchestrating all of this seems to serve us with a local reality — where we do useful work by reducing entropy. Yet, on a global scale, we are increasing entropy (the net effect of our useful work).

Nihilism might argue that nature/entropy is deceiving us and all of our so-called “useful work” is useless. But I would argue that there is no deception here. If it were truly meant to be a deception, we would never have come this far in uncovering how entropy works.

The truth, then, appears to be two-fold; a duality of life and entropy, if you will. The human “construct” of time comes to the rescue here. Our so-called “useful work” is indeed useful for us in our local systems and limited time scales. We do reduce entropy with our work in systems that matter to us locally in our lifetimes.

In the grand scheme of things which involves timescales much beyond our lifetimes, entropy marches unobstructed towards omnipresence. It is as if “life” were a mechanism willed by entropy to do its bidding in the long run, just like EVERYTHING else in the cosmos!

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Further reading that might interest you: 

• Chaos In Perception: The Subjective Nature Of Entropy
• Why Does Science Love Simplicity?
• A Technical Investigation Into The Rule Of 72

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