In the post, Statement of Purpose, I shared 5 questions. Let me share the working answers about these questions. These are working answers, so I may change my answers as I get more clarity. In some of the questions, I continue to believe the several answers may be true, however, I work with certain assumptions day to day while exploring the options.

1. What is life?

Life is consciousness. The ability to have free will. The ability to make a choice. A thing that is not alive makes no choices. Everything is predetermined according to the physical laws and they simply act out the script written for them. If you throw a rubber ball a million times with a consistent force, it will go a certain distance and bounce a certain height. It has no choice in the matter or the outcome. An alive thing makes a choice. If you are sitting down and decide to get up and move about, the precise moment on when you decide to do so is your free choice. By the way, this can be one way to differentiate a robot from a person. The robot makes no choice, it follows a script and will get up according to the script (the script may program a pseudo random variable) which will make it appear that it is making a choice to get up at a particular point.

Of course, there are many unanswered questions. This working answer is good to differentiate a rubber ball from a human being but what about lichens or for that matter plants. Are they making any choice?

2. Is there a purpose to life?

I believe their is no inherent purpose to life. However, everyone who is alive lives in a way that extends their life and extends the likelihood of passing their genetic code to the next generation. Hence the fear and sex are two biggest influencers in free choice of living creatures. This is understandable from the perspective of survival of genetic pool that favors such behavior. If there were two genetic pool one which avoided actions or situations which produced death while another did not. The chances of the survival and reproduction for the first will be much high and over millions of years, it will become the dominant blueprint for life.

I believe that most religions support empathy, “good deeds”, unity with supreme consciousness, etc., as all these things enable you to live more in harmony with other living things. Each of which has the ability to “choose” to harm you. So religious guidance is more or less about enhancing the longevity and security of the life form.

3. Is the purpose set by somebody other than ourselves, e.g. God?

As stated above, since there is no purpose to life, other than life itself, there is no question of it being set by someone other than us. Since we have the ability to choose and the ones choose to live and propogate thrive, hence we have set this purpose and are driven by it.

4. What is God?

God is the collective consciousness to make a choice. Or the collective consciousness.

5. How should one live to obtain the purpose of life?

One should live to enlongate ones own life and make it as “happy” as possible. This may sound like the hedonistic view. The difference is that hedonistics view may be too short term. Having an extra beer may feel good then, but how does it impact you next morning. Or impact you if you drive after that and end up having an accident. If we take a life long view, we will reach the same conclusions that most religions preach. Also in the extreme case, it allows to protect the gene pool.