Have you ever thought of our destiny in life? Come to think of it. Just imagine yourself to be disembodied and observe the life that you have lived so far. Yes, you are a small man living a very average life just touching the lives of a few people in whole of your life. What effect do you expect you can have on the physical world? In a rational way, the continued 'Copernican revolution' has reduced man from 'Gods chosen ONE' to an insignificant bunch of atoms coordinated to work in such a way to function as a whole for a fleeting time (in earths age) and then dissolve. Even the molecules that we call constitute our body changes every microsecond and we are materially different from what we were, say 5 weeks ago. In this despondent view of life from afar, our life doesn't hold much promise here. It is also incredible to think that our material bodies and all complex matter that we observe is a remnant of a supernova explosion some 7 Billion years ago. Life is an unaided self organization and goal oriented sustenance of matter, in a very broad sense.
I was reading a book "Fabric of Reality" by David Deutsch, which sort of offers a consolation to the purely positivist reductionist thought about the futility of our lives. It is carefully argued that knowledge once created is a true agent of change in this universe. The beginning of knowledge, as the author puts it, is filled with infinite possibilities for its actualization. What survives the special organization of pure matter (a technical term for life) is this knowledge embedded in a system of molecules that we call brain or computers (if we ever store for posterity, our systematized knowledge). This transcendence of the ephemeral material existence of our body, while our disembodied knowledge, which can be considered as the distillation of workings of many generations of minds, lives on with or without the necessity for a material body to actualize it. This is how we survive and we ought to survive. Our souls, the ones that see no death, is our knowledge or ordered information.
