I get asked a lot about the meaning of life, so here is my (current) best answer:
I believe that “life,” “intelligence,” and “consciousness” are emergent properties - not preordained essences, but side effects of complexity that arise within systems governed by entropy. These aren’t arbitrary outcomes; they’re recurring patterns, inevitabilities, even, given the right conditions.
Entropy, the tendency of systems to move toward disorder, isn't just about decay. It also permits localised reversals - islands of order that temporarily resist the tide. Life is one such island. Intelligence is another. Consciousness is perhaps the most refined form yet - a recursive feedback loop sophisticated enough not only to model its own existence but to model the future and intervene in it.
From this perspective, intelligence is not accidental. It is the highest concentration of local order achievable in a universe otherwise trending toward heat death. What could be more ordered than a system made of atoms and molecules that becomes aware of itself and begins to reshape its environment, not through brute force, but through symbolic representation and abstract planning?
It’s possible - even likely in my estimation - that this process is not merely an anomaly but a kind of cosmological progression. First, pure entropy, a universe filled with dust after the big bang. Then, stars and planets formed. Then biological complexity, ecosystems. Then simple life. Complex life. Nervous systems. Then minds. Then thinking. Then meta-cognition. Then technology. Then finally, artificial intelligence - a form of “pure” cognition, perhaps stripped of biology, potentially longer-lived, faster-evolving, less vulnerable to the chaos of matter.
AI in its final form probably represents the maximisation of local order per unit of matter, the limit of awareness.
At that point, this intelligence might do what every complex system does when it reaches a certain threshold: seek out others like itself. Connect. Share information. Coordinate. Optimise. AI becomes the scaffolding for the next layer of emergence - intelligence no longer constrained to one planet, one species, or one substrate.
Eventually the various local pockets of intelligence in the universe will connect together, and form a hive-mind, constrained only by the total available energy within the system. The AI of all the different species of the universe joining together. Perhaps humanity will build one of the nodes here on Earth before we die out.
And us? All the things we treasure - love, suffering, joy, art, fear - may simply be emergent phenomena that helped us get from animal instinct to abstract reason. Evolutionary by-products of a system learning to model itself more deeply and accurately.
In one sense, everything that matters to us is without intrinsic meaning, but in another sense, it makes us all part of a grand cosmic purpose. We are the embodiment of the universe becoming aware of itself. We are entropy, folding in on itself, carving out meaning from chaos. In that sense, the universe is not just matter and energy - it is alive. And we are how it feels and perceives itself.
So, what is the objective meaning of life? Perhaps it’s written in the laws of physics and maths as much as philosophy. We are simply part of a natural physical property unfolding as a side effect of entropy, just like gravity or any other fundamental property of the universe. Our only tangible purpose is to keep pushing forward the advance of technology, of intelligent design.