For those to follow there has to be a first

A hastily handwritten essay to speak on, with just 30 minutes left on the clock. Luckily I am late in the alphabetic and subsequently rolecall order so my turn was near the end.

A biologist jumps and says when a living matter, or any matter which shows certain attributes like stimuli reaction, it is living and that is life. A pious man thinks life is some gift that God has gifted to mankind to live happily in service of his god. A system scientist thinks that life is an open self organizing system which interacts with its environment.

Everyone is the king of their own courts and quotes

— probably me

In my opinion while their definitions stand sound in their own subject, they fail to stand onslaught by the other fields. A biologist may ask a priest how his “God Theory” explains Darwin’s theory of evolution and he would stutter. Where did God create something to serve him if he is all powerful and self-sufficient? The religious man will then prick the system scientist citing examples like doomsday and fights between gods and humans with devils, and ask the system scientist what he thinks the end state of life is but he doesn’t know. The system scientist can also pick up the biologist’s definition by stating that robots are computer programs that can be made to mimic their definition of life but are they living?

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist will answer you, I am here to live out loud”

— Émile Zola

Art and Philosophy takes a more subjective stance, allowing for each individual to try and find out the answer for themselves. Not to leave philosophy behind in my rant, philosophy also doesn’t satisfy the question with depth. Modern philosophy just named standpoints and feel satisfies and moves on. One might find themselves in conversation with a student of philosophy who might go, “Oh, then you conform to ‘stoicism’ view of life. It’s trivial, it’s trivial!”, without really delving into the implications. Art has disintegrated into a subjective abstract mess with ‘trash’ abstract art selling for millions and NFTs crashing markets. Modern Literature seeks clout, and capitalizes upon bizarre climaxes.

What do we know?

What do we know? What can we know? Imagine some prisoners chained in a cave, they can only see the shadows of what is happening outside. The shadow wall is their world, their whole reality, how do you find out something else exists? How do we know that the world is not just shadows of some other multi dimensional reality.

— Plato’s cave shadow allegory

Dreams, Hallucinogenics, Sensory deprivation tanks, Extra perceptory and near death experiences are described as a simulation. But what if those are the true worlds? And our day to day life a “dream”? I must admit I have created a track for myself to prove that a world is true. After all, What is “true”? I can be sure of only my own experience, which is perceived by me alone. As an example, I cannot even describe the color orange to someone. What is orange for me might be “yellow” for him. All orange-fruits to him are “yellow” but he calls that “yellow” color, orange and I can never find out! Let alone trying to explain to someone who is colorblind what colors are. So, if a mystic claims to have some spiritual experience he cannot make me experience or even come close to making me feel what wonders he has felt in his spiritual planes. He can only describe the effects it had on him. You cannot ask an artist to explain his art!

This non-transitive nature of experience made it to be labeled a “hardest” problem by the world around scientists, including the Nobel laureate in physics, Sir Roger Penrose. The only thing I can think of are my own thoughts and I can only describe them to others. I cannot translate the feeling or the experience to others.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am)

— René Descartes

The motivational quote wasn’t really meant that way and doesn’t hold so what he really meant was that the only thing we can be sure of existing, is “I”, because “I” is thinking “this thought”. The reason is because we are able to ‘think’ there must be something which is “doing” the thinking, therefore, I, my thinking self, exists. Everything else may just as well be a simulation. There is no way to know or prove otherwise. Like in a dream, our brain just constructs the environment and people. Why can’t the awake state be just another construction of our brain. Everything we perceive is through our 5 senses all of which can be easily compromised. Some people don’t even have all of them.

Mal: I’ll tell you a riddle. You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don’t know for sure. But it doesn’t matter. How can it not matter to you where that train will take you?

Cobb: No, no, no, no. Mal you listen to me, alright?

Mal: Your world is not real!

— Mal and Cobb, Inception

Just imagine if this was all a dream and when we “die” we awake into another world, a nirvana. And it was just a Virtual Reality game we were playing called life. The helpless feeling of not knowing, the curiosity to find out more. The more you think and know, the more you realize you don’t know.

“You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”

— Morpheus, The Matrix

“Question” — or the questions of questions, quite literally and metaphorically — drove and drives extreme geniuses, people with unsurpassable intellect.

The ones who looked too deep

Grothendieck, Godel and Erdos, after experiencing pure math and proving math can never be completely provable, turned to farming and food and drove away people with sticks who wanted to talk to them about math. Isaac Newton and Schrodinger both took refuge in biology after looking at physics in its full glory. Newton started poking needles in his eyes and theology. Schrodinger wrote a book called “What is life?” after discovering the uncertainty of Quantum Theory — you can never know whether the cat is dead until you open the box.

What the world calls mad, might just be the ones who are not mad. The only ones not living like “robots”, the only ones truly conscious, truly the masters of their mind and thought. Perhaps they were not madmen like the rest of us, driven sane by their thoughts.

My conscious has gone mad, It searches for its home

— Kabir Das

Eastern answer

In contrast, in eastern philosophy, we have always revered the “crazed”. The mystics have always been honored, whether they were cart sellers or kings. Buddha, himself, experimented with his own health to satisfy his curiosity. He realized that starving the body till the end was not the way. He found life to be an intermission for us to perform good deeds and free our conscious from attachment. Kabir Das stressed upon the “conscious” as the true meaning of life, and told us to experience higher levels of consciousness through meditative practices. Upanishads is a treatise on the “brahman”, literally translates to, the supreme self, the creative doer, the conscious experience and the “permanent” reality. They stress upon connecting with nature to better understand the self and the only thing as true. One thing they all stress is that the meaning cannot be explained, one has to be guided to learn it for himself.

Hanooz Dilli Door Ast — Though the end is near, the destination is yet far away.

— Nizammuddin Aulia

I’ve driven myself into a corner and confused my reader with grandiose visions of seeking reality. Flummoxing you even more, I do not snip the woven thread but I hand it over to you as I do not know how to answer the question, What is life?

It is a difficult question, my son, each one must discover for himself.

— Nachiketa’s Guru, Katha Upanishad