Nobody can answer 'why is there life' objectively- I'm going to take a leaf from Dennet's book and go with 'we're asking why because our consciousness fooled us into think it was an important question'.
Why are we humans smart and other animals not? It's just been a competition of who can dominate the other species and I guess we humans took things a bit too seriously in the competition of dominance, and started to cheat using tools
Despite being an advocate for the consideration of other animals as a '
eople' type of being, this actually allows me to say that the 'cheating using tools' isn't a bad thing.
One way of expressing intelligence is to say that seeing as we acknowledge different kinds of intelligence across humans, so too can we acknowledge the same for other animals as a whole. Different animals can use different bits of information that is relevant to them in different ways to us.
We've become so complex that we no longer only have the jobs of hunting and conquering, but now have an extremely complex society requiring millions of different jobs. Every job in one form or another is to dominate the other guy.
This is a very deep observation because while the answer may be simple ("competition as a driver of life"
, it is still mind-boggling.
I've got a passage from a novel I'm writing on-and-off (it's not my main project), where the protagonist has a similar thought process...it even takes place while he's driving the car:
"...But beyond the issue of how one could continue to perform their own job if it was meaningless, was the grand scheme that each one of those people fit into. What was it that produced that noise from the radio, the car I was sitting in, the highway it traveled on, or even that building I was traveling from? What was going on in the minds of every occupant of every other car that streaked down that same highway, or across the overpass I was going under, or even in the city, state, or country? I could just imagine myself awakening, for the first time in many years, gazing in utter astonishment at this world, wondering what was I doing here, and how, just how did we manage to land ourselves in this situation, here, today? To think of our origins, back through history and even prehistory, and of the great procession of milestones of human achievement- the advent of tools, of fire, of civilization, language, rational thought, science and the arts, electronics, and how from simple beginnings things built up like the sounds cluttering my car, piling up on the floor amongst the artifacts and paraphernalia, rising above my neck and rattling in my ears until it threatened to drown me in a cacophony and I had to desperately fumble at the dial and switch the damn radio off, and blink and catch my breath as I returned, dazed, to the world around me. It was so alien. And to my mind, it was horrifying."
