Life is not an empirical phenomenon. Life is whatever you experience at each moment. That experience cannot be measured or observed. All life is whatever that living being experiences at each moment, and that includes whatever phylum, whatever kingdom, whatever class or species of organism that being is filtering its life through. An organism is the means by which consciousness has an opportunity to experience the world in a particular way. Each organism provides a different experience. Each organism of the same species provides a similar enough experience so that the beings that are attached to these same species' organisms have the sense that they understand each other and do not experience their lives in total isolation. Each organism of the same species is also different enough from each other so that the beings that occupy each of these different organisms has the capacity to surprise each other so that they do not experience their lives in total boredom. Variation within a species also provides more survivability in the face of environmental threats. This is another benefit of variation, but certainly not the only one and not, necessarily, the most important one.
Science's insistence on studying purely what is observable, means that science can never study life, but only the apparatus, the organisms, that beings use to be able to experience their lives in particular ways. The being that occupies an organism is not what is observed, but the observer. Science does not acknowledge this being so that within the organism there is no one that science recognizes who is enjoying the amazingly complex equipment whose workings scientists so elaborately describe.
Darwinian evolution is an attempt to describe life simply as material organisms and the awesome complexity of life due merely to an endlessly long and fantastically improbable series of molecular accidents. From this perspective, consciousness, the ability to experience things, which is the very definition of life, is something that accidentally emerged by molecular mutation and stayed around because it yielded a survival advantage over non-conscious life. But non-conscious life is death. Non-conscious life is an organism which is no longer the vehicle for anyone's experience, in other words, a corpse. If evolution has anything to do with survival of the fittest, then that assumes that there is some entity that prefers surviving over not surviving. The material world has no preferences. The only entity that prefers one state over another is a conscious entity, therefore, consciousness must be part of the definition of life from its inception.
When you say something is red, I can agree with you, but I have no way of knowing that the experience that you call 'red' is in any way similar to the experience that I am having when I call something 'red.' We can agree on many terms to label the size and length and weight and color and emotional quality of our experience, but what any of these things actually means to each of us is beyond our knowing. The only thing of which I can be sure is the self. Everything I experience, I experience from the perspective of a unitary consciousness, which is me. I am the non-physical bowl, the context, of my own experience; as you are the context of your own experience.
Desires are part of the milieu of consciousness. All living things experience the world through the filter of an organism and each organism needs various things from its environment in order to survive and for their progeny to survive. Although living beings need things from their environment in order to survive and propogate, they are not often consciously concerned with their survival. They are concerned, however, with a series of desires whose fulfillment insures their survival for the longest possible time. These desires include the desire to eat and the desire to eat specific foods which just happen to be the nutritionally best foods, or the best foods among whatever is available in their environment, to insure their survival. The same with thirst, which is the desire for water. The same with fatigue, which is the desire for rest. The same with the experience of heat, which is the desire for coolness, and the experience of cold which is the desire for warmth. The same with the experience of pain, which is the desire for that experience to end, and the experience of pleasure which is the desire to seek out and prolong that experience. And it is the same with sexual desire, whose satisfaction unwittingly results in the production of progeny and the survival of one's species.
And each species is born with a particular set of desires that are perfectly suited to that species. A male hippopotamus in heat, will trot past the most alluring human females to get to the watering hole where the real action awaits him in the form of a female hippopotamus, which will assure the production of progeny in a way that wasting time with Scarlett Johansson would not. The dung beetle will march right through the kitchen past the smells of baking pies and roasting meats to go directly to the septic tank, drawn there by the truly alluring scent of human waste, which just happens to be the most nutritionally perfect food for the dung beetle.
And each species has a way of organizing their experience, whether it is with the help of a brain or not, into which things are attractive and which are repellent, which are safe and which are dangerous, which are familiar and which are foreign, and who are kin and who are friends and who are enemies.
From the perspective of life as a way of experiencing the world, we understand that we inherit not just an observable brain and organism but a set of species specific desires and species specific ways of defining the things and the other organisms that we encounter in our environment. These desires and definitions are not a product of the genome and the brain, but rather, it is the genome and the brain which are organized to deliver a consistent and hopefully satisfying way of experiencing the world.
This is a way of looking at the universe as starting with consciousness. This may seem fanciful to those of a materialist bent, but how would materialists imagine the origin of the universe? Our imaginations are limited by the boundaries of time and space. To go beyond those boundaries stretches all of us, no matter what our perspective is. Do you think things began with an explosion, a Big Bang? Yet what is it that was exploding? Was it forces and not matter? What was the origin, then, of those forces, and the precisely calibrated laws and ratios of forces that allowed a physical universe to materialize? There are only two possibilities. Either you postulate that there was nothing, as in literally nothing, no time, no space, no matter, nothing, and then, suddenly there was something, and something that was perfectly calibrated and designed to engender a physical universe (in fact that would have to be at least two somethings, since nothing could be engendered by one thing in isolation, it would have to be one thing reacting to at least one other thing), which seems, at least to me, to be utterly impossible; or there was something that is not a thing that has no beginning (and no end) which is consciousness, and the material world is an expression of that consciousness. This is a much more satisfying explanation to me, because I realize that I am, in essence, of that very same stuff, consciousness; and I realize that, although my surroundings and my thoughts and my feelings and my body has changed many, many times in my lifetime, I still remain, in essence, the identical, unchangeable consciousness that I was when I first began. I also realize that everything around me that is constructed by humans, is a manifestation of the conscious will and desires of humans. The subtle creates the gross. So I live in a world that is based in consciousness and is driven by will and intention. I do not deny my most essential reality, consciousness, and I do not think of my 'self' and my ability to observe and experience the world as the product of a molecular accident, but as the very reason that I and the world around me exists.
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