Philosophical Ruminations on Life

Without being too scientifically punctilious, we all know ants come in what can essentially be described as three sexes. The only female of a colony is the queen ant. She mates once, storing the sperm for her entire lifetime in her own bloated body. She is doted on by worker ants that make it possible for her to dedicate her remarkably long life to egg production, fertilizing each with the stored sperm. In some species she might run this egg factory for dozens of years before dying, in the world of arthropods: an age, an epoch, a very long time indeed.

The workers make the second sex of three; they are in-fact, sexless, incapable of sex since, like bees, evolution has turned their originally female genitalia to other purposes. They also can have very long lives, six, seven even eight years, though their life style often means they are squashed or eaten long before reaching old age. The third sex, of course, is the male. The example of the species I happened to be watching as I lay in the hot water of my tub, flew out with apparent joy along with thousands of his brothers to hurriedly mate while flying frantically around any light source, its instincts telling it the artificial light must be the moon since up until recently the moon was the only light at night time. Whether or not their lives culminate in the climax of injecting their sperm into the queen, within thirty minutes of being born, their four wings fall off & their bodies shut down.

The feelings my observations anthropomorphically instigated were that emerging from the pupal stage with wings & immediately aiming directly at the moon was a joyous moment. But when I considered a little further I recognized the impossibility of the sense of joy in an ant brain when in fact, they don't even have a brain, & must make do with a rudimentary bundle of nerves which allow them very little experience or sensation. I began to think about it & came to the conclusion that their design really only allowed two activities. They needn't feed themselves as the energy necessary for their short lives has been given them by workers since they were legless, sense-less larva. They don't have any means of defense & appear in-fact, at least to casual observation, to not even have the sense or capacity to try & evade their predators. So what are they capable of? Well, of moving from one place to another, locating the female & mating with her, nothing more. Despite the honor of having sex with the queen, it seems, in my judgment, a rather dull & uninspired existence.

But then I considered still further my summary appraisal & asked myself which quality was it exactly that allowed me this opinion of the male ant's life when compared to my own? What was the actual substance of the difference between the two versions of the experience we shared, the one we define as life. It is obvious to me that despite the importance that ant might have had to the hive, had he actually managed to find his queen circling another light source outside of my bathroom. Or even to the gecko that might have fed on him, why was his life insignificant while mine wasn't? Was it a question of longevity? Does the fact I may live seventy years compared to his thirty minutes define the difference between us? Well, though thirty minutes is a tiny multiple of seventy years, when viewed within the big picture, the age of our planet for instance, or even just the age of our species, the difference in longevity pales.

In this context one might even consider the fact that there are many more species of ants alone within their genera, than there are animals within the class of mammals, & most of them have been around much longer.

If we are to include longevity as a measure of significance, than what of the lichen that lives thousands of years without another living thing in sight of its frozen habitat, finding sustenance quite literally in the chemicals extracted from rocks. As successful at aging as lichen may be there seems to be, at least to the human mind, a complete, absolute & unmitigated lack of purpose & therefore significance to its life, & yet it seems to want to BE with a will at least equal to our own.

What's more, since physics has proven that time as a constant is a human concept with no real meaning outside of human perception, maybe that male ant experienced a human second as equivalent to what it takes a human a year to experience. In fact, when I stop to think about it, time is not even a human concept as I described it above, but rather a human invention, the proof being that without calendars & clocks to tick away the time in a constant manner, man would have no way of knowing how long a day was or how long he had lived. A cave dweller, who spends a hungry day stalking an animal to kill & eat, would later recall that day as much longer than the one that followed when he lay in the shade of a tree digesting it.

So if that difference, a blink of an eye in geological time, is negligible, what else might it be? Might it be the difference in intelligence? Well, if level of intelligence is a possible explanation for the difference in significance between the life of a male ant & my own life I suppose I would have to examine the purposes & uses of intelligence.

One example of the consummately astonishing results of human intelligence is that billions of people around the world, every second of every day, (with the tiny exception of a few hundred) decide to stop the ton of metal they are conducting at lethal speeds instead of smashing them into one another, simply because of a flashing red or green light. But then ants, which make up a full 25% of the bio-mass of much of the tropical areas of the world, sometimes live in colonies of millions of individuals with supremely intricate cooperation & they not only possess no intelligence as defined by humans but they do not even have brains... hmmn... OK, shelter, weapons, care of the young, herding other species as food source, storing food for the future & a hundred other examples of human intelligence are equaled if not excelled by ant societies, but there is one aspect of intelligence that we beat them at: the consciousness we exist. In fact our intelligence in that context is so sophisticated we are even capable of believing we don't exist.

The first thing to consider when examining this concept is the obvious one that though each individual ant seems no more than a chemically programmed automaton, perhaps the ant colony is actually a highly couth & mature intelligence made up of unthinking individuals just as humans are made up of unthinking cells that don't even know they form part of us. Indeed, the ant colony as a whole may be so far advanced in its intelligence & self-awareness that it cannot conceive of a manner functional enough in its crudity to communicate with us poor individual humans.

Putting aside the theoretical possibility of that supposition, the entire history of recorded human philosophy (& I refuse to give theology more respect or credence than this single parenthetic mention) consider human self-consciousness an indication of a higher level of evolution than any other living being, since we don't recognize it in any but our own species. This could be it! This might be the proof there is indeed some significance to my life that the ant, whose entire life I witnessed, lacked. How exciting! But we would have to define the purpose of life to prove or disprove whether self-awareness qualifies as a significant factor.

Proof is a far rarer thing in philosophy than is a disproof, a refutation. But I would argue thusly: if all of the estimated 30,000,000 living things on this planet have only one thing in common; without any exception, not one single other quality that all life shares, mustn't that be the most likely purpose of 'life' in the abstract?

As it happens there is one easily defined characteristic: reproduction, or when examined more closely, replication. If we can agree on that then the whole enigma quickly unravels to a simple & obvious solution, ergo- the life form of greatest objective significance is the one that is most successful at replication. The intelligence & self-awareness, that made me capable of the thoughts & ideas I have just written down, or that allowed you to read & understand them, are simply & entirely irrelevant. The list of most significant 'life' would be topped by bacteria, followed quite a ways further down by ants & somewhere well below them by me lying in my bathtub considering it all.