The BIG Question.

A lot has been said about life, God, origin, evolution, et cetera on my blog recently. People appreciate that the theory of evolution makes sense. But they say that still there are questions that science hasn't answered yet. The biggest question that popped up from the discussion and remains unanswered as yet was, What is life?
Talking objectively and not opining on what people believe or don't believe, here's what I've understood of life.
We are all made up of matter. For elaboration on that click here to learn it from Sumedh.
So is everything around us. Then what precisely makes us different from any other spatially and temporally bound functioning packet of energy? Its this ability to ask this question perhaps. Its the ability to see the colour of this font and call it by a name perhaps. Its the ability to be more than a passive functional unit and change the course of physical events as 'we' please. The ability to be aware of the physical and the abstract, to be aware of awareness itself makes us different. Its not just the series of physical reactions (i.e. chemical reactions at a finer level) that a stimulus initiates in the functional unit that 'we' call as 'our' body to present to 'our' cerebral cortex its form. I mean, the stimulus' visual, auditory, tactile or chemical form. I mean, its physical surface, its chemical composition and its spatial orientation. Thats just perceiving the sense of it. And as you know various associations start forming in 'our' brains following that and we react. Awareness works not just while identifying or learning about a stimulus, it works in knowing it. It percieves the object in an abstract frame.
Abstract is something that cannot be defined in physical terms. Its not the physical terms that we cannot understand, I'd like to clarify. But even abstract thinking is most of the times a logical chain of thoughts. And thoughts are various circuits activated together simultaneously.
It is actually the awareness of a living organism of itself that makes it different from the non living. What psychologists use for the seemingly most intelligent species, the ID or the EGO exist in every unicellular organism and perhaps in 'living' viruses and prions too. It is the awareness of the self , the basis of which is that the self is different from the non-self. Now it makes perfect sense that living 'substances' require a system to perceive the differences between the self and the non-self, to identify the differences and another system to express their reaction to the differences. So there are the sensors, the processros and the motors.
Life formed in such a way that it was programmed to identify and protect the self. Its the same kind of programme that fuses hydrogen nuclei to form the Sun. This is the divine knowledge, in fact, knowledge itself is a property of life. But again its the physical forces that act in enabling life to be life.
A new-born child is only aware of its self. So it cries when its hungry. Because it has been programmed to identify the stimulus it recieves and classify it as good or bad for itself and react to protect itself. As she grows up, millions of stimuli shape her knowledge of the self. She defines good and bad more frequently now. Then she understands others' perception of hers. She compares her understanding with theirs and now she knows herself in a different and so-called more mature perspective.
But there is a still higher entity in the structure of life. Self is mine. There is a ME. When I address myself, I am aware of me and not just myself. Its not just the difference between me and my surroundings, its me. Its not my name, my sex, my nationality, my race, my physical form or a combination of these. It is me. In one word, its the consciousness thats me.
Hmmm... The mist seems to be forming again. What is consciousness? What am I referring to when I say I? My body, my thoughts, my emotions, my will? Am I just a thought, i.e. , a collection of neuronal circuits simultaneously activated in my brain? If so then where do I produce will from? Is my will only an expression of what my instincts (as yet unlocalized circuits) say is good for my self? Would I not have any will if I couldn't be aware of my physical or abstract worlds? Or do my worlds exist only because I do? The world is as it seems to the observer. I am the observer. Awareness, consciousness, self, I, will, would define life by their definition. Dive into the mist of the mystery called life to get the answer or surrender by accepting anything that anyone has to say.
You make the choice, while I pop-up a pill of Valium!