There isn’t anything essentially different between a structure which self-replicates and one which doesn’t. The same laws and forces act on both, it’s just that those laws and forces cause there to be more copies of the self-replicating structure over time, and less copies of the non-replicating one.

The structure does not need to have the intention to replicate. It doesn’t even need to be something capable of having intention. A virus self-replicates despite being just a tiny speck of inert genetic information; by some definitions, it isn’t even alive. The structure doesn’t even need to be physical at all: cultural ideas and trends can be considered to self-replicate, as they are in the study of memetics.

Is it even right to say “self”-replicating? Again, that implies the structure causes its own replication, but it doesn’t. The structure doesn’t have any influence over it coming to exist, because by definition it can’t have influence before it exists, and then when it does exist, the laws of the universe take over the rest. “Self-replicating” is just a property it passively has, an aspect of its shape that interacts with its environment in a certain way. Because of this, we can look at the world from the perspective of any structure we want. We can think of ourselves as wanting to pass on our genes, which are just inert information; or we can think of the genes themselves being in charge, and our actions being under their control. We can think of an egg as a way for chickens to replicate, or chickens as a way for eggs to replicate. There is a trippy centrelessness to everything.

The thing is, I still feel the urge to locate some lasting structure. When we talk about life, we often use the word “survive”—we imply living beings want to preserve themselves in some way. I intuitively feel that chickens must be trying to, via reproduction, preserve chickenness or the concept of a chicken. However, thinking about it more, I’m not so sure. What even is “the concept of a chicken?” Since the discovery of evolution, we know that “a chicken” is something that’s constantly changing and did not always even exist. In other words, we know for a fact that a chicken is not creating copies of itself. Nor is it “trying” to produce a perfect, archetypal chicken. It’s just going through a process that, in a million years, may again result in nothing like a chicken existing at all. So what can be said to be self-replicating? What is the fixed thing that’s actually copying itself? It can’t be the chicken or the egg. Is life itself the thing that’s self-replicating?

What the hell is actually going on?? Is everything in the world actually working together on one goal? Is everything that looks like competition all actually a kind of cooperation towards some hyper-objective? What is that objective? Increasing entropy? God? Or is there no goal at all? Am I just a huge collection of cells which happen to work together practically by accident? Do any of my cells “want” to be there at all? (How inconsiderate I am, to have never asked them.) Life requires genetic variation to evolve, but the ultimate source of that genetic variation is mutation, an apparent mistake; can we even say life “intends” to evolve at all?

I recently stumbled upon 27 Notes On Growing Old(er) by Ian Leslie, where he writes:

Every organism, including the one which is you, is a revolt - an organised rebellion - against the universe’s fundamental drive towards disorder. […] The universe wants us to be dust and will eventually get the job done.

How can we possibly say what the universe wants? And if we were to, why would we say the universe doesn’t want us to exist? I think Ian is looking at things from only one, arbitrary perspective. We didn’t come from outside the universe, so we should be considered just as much a part of it as dust is. Why can’t life be part of “the universe’s fundamental drive”? Of course, he’s right that everything will eventually be destroyed, but we don’t have to use a narrative where that’s what the universe wants.

When I’m depressed, I sometimes feel completely lost and separate from everything. I feel non-human or like a freak or an anomaly that’s “not supposed to be here,” but now I’m starting to think that doesn’t make any sense, on a fundamental level. There is no such thing as what a human should be. There is no fixed pattern that a human being is meant to replicate. Each human is, at the same time, an attempt by humanity to stay exactly as it is and an attempt by it to become something completely different. There’s nothing to belong to, or, we belong to everything. We are all different parts of a long, long lineage of things which just so happened to have a certain shape, and which exist because they can.