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LIFE! Why We Exist... And What We Must Do To Survive

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This is a philosophic work written by a physicist, grounded in rationality and empiricism. Walker begins with subatomic particles and ends with life itself and how it should be lived. A central assertion is that life exists because it perseveres whereas things that do not persevere tend not to exist. There is something Buddha-like and iron-clad in this utter simplicity that is arresting.

Walker ultimately argues that we have a moral responsibility to persevere and to do things that tend to make the life form itself persevere. What I found striking is his assertion that persistence itself is a kind of force or rule of the universe.

He uses the example of a chess game. The rules of the game are of a different kind of stuff than the players and the pieces. The rules exist independently of the pieces and the board. As Walker says, "the rules don't appear in the pieces and the board." (p. 10) The rules exist independently of any game and exist whether a game has ever been played or not. (I like to say they exist on the ether.) Every thought I ever thought exists and will exist until the end of the universe and beyond, and every thought I ever thought existed before I was born.

It is obvious that Walker has been influenced by Schopenhauer who saw "The World as Will and Idea." But Walker does not use Schopenhaur's terms although he acknowledges Schopenhauer's influence. Instead Walker speaks of "persistence" and "concept." The will of the world is its persistence, and the ideas are concepts.

The ancient and always contemporary question, "Why is there anything at all? Why isn't there nothing?" is something that Walker attempts to answer but of course does not. He does explain why hydrogen and helium and carbon and iron atoms continue to exist in great numbers whereas some other configurations of electrons, protons and neutrons exist only momentarily and/or in lesser numbers. His main point is that there are rules (as in the chess game) that "determine the tendency for something to exist--the chance of it coming into being, and the likelihood of its remaining in existence." (p. 24) Unstable elements decay. Stable elements persevere. The interesting thing is Walker's assertion that the rules exist prior to and independently of matter and energy.

This simple idea is startling. There was something prior to the Big Bang, is what he is asserting. There was something prior to space and time. That something guides and shapes matter and energy. Moreover, "the concepts of extension in space and progress in time, the rules of this existence, came before and live outside the material universe." (p. 10)

Walker makes it clear that he understands that we do not experience the world directly, that the objects that we see and touch are conceptual objects, not the objects themselves. He explains that conceptual objects are sufficiently like physical objects for our purposes as evolutionary beings. Our perceptions are utilitarian, one might say. A brown chair is brown although in fact it is white with light in some places and dark with shadow in others because it is a conceptual chair that we see, and we miss the subtleties that do not relate to the chair's utility for us. We do this with everything in the world because it would be far too complex (and of little or no evolutionary value) to see things more precisely.

Another of Walker's interesting ideas is that the persistence that living things exhibit in reproduction is similar to the persistence of nonliving things. But what persists is not the individual but life itself. He sees our tendency to exist as being manifested on three levels, the individual, the group or species, and the life form itself. (No "selfish genes" here!)

Persistence then is the foundation upon which all morality is built. His is an "objective morality" that does not rely on doctrines or authority, but, as he argues, is derivable directly from the way of the universe and the way of life. I believe he is correct in this, and that his book is very much worth reading for this alone.

Consequently, Walker sees that our sense of morality does not and need not come from religious texts or teachings and that it is largely innate, a consequence of our ability to put ourselves in another person's position along with the ability to recognize that if we always acted according to what we would want for ourselves (cf. the golden rule) society would benefit.

Walker writes, "...the totality of material existence...is transitory and conditional... We came from nothing and we will return to nothing. What happens in between has meaning and importance only to the extent that we grant it such meaning and importance." (p. 99)

Although this statement is one with which an existentialist would agree, Walker believes that existentialism is a mode of rejection. (p. 99) He also doesn't like the kind of spiritual asceticism that is otherworldly, believing it to be "morally wrong" since "The religious devotee seeks to absent himself from the rigors and responsibilities of persistence." (pp. 99-100)

Near the end of the book Walker deals with free will. He acknowledges that free will may very well be (as I believe) an illusion. Nonetheless, he points out, it is an illusion that we cannot help but entertain (and I agree). And then he makes a nice argument to see free will as "the ability to resist and turn away from the instinctive, natural but nonconscious striving...," adding, "Free will means simply a will freed of the constraints of the nonconscious..." (p. 119)

One final bit of wisdom from the wise, articulate and always very fair Mr. Walker: "As conscious beings...We can conceive of things that don't exist and could never exist. We can therefore appreciate that material existence is not a necessary condition, and neither does it encompass all conceivable possibilities." (p. 99)

The kernel of the idea behind the book which is now "LIFE! Why We Exist... And What We Must Do To Survive" came to me as an epiphany on a transatlantic flight. "If we exist as living things in this universe, then we must exist according to universal principles or laws; by figuring out how those principles apply to life, it must be possible to figure out life's meaning." I spent the next three years probing and writing out an expansion of this thought, testing, modifying, rewriting, until the exploration made sense and was presented as elegantly and engagingly as possible.

Of course, the epiphany was the culmination of a life-long intellectual and spiritual search for answers. Since I was a boy growing up in a small town in the north of England I'd wondered about what existed behind our existence, which of the prevailing theories about life's meaning made sense. The answer I've found is both surprising and wonderfully simple and sensible, but has wonderfully rich and profound consequences.

This book is about furthering our understanding, as individuals and as a society. If you enjoy it, please let others know about it. If you'd like a few copies to sell locally, please let me know! (You can reach me through my homepage -- meaninginmylife.)

Thanks for reading!

My album is now available, too, in which some of these ideas are approached from a lyrical emotional perspective. nylon

Disclaimer: Although under no obligation to review this book, I did receive a complimentary copy from the author.

For as long as people have existed, they have wondered about the meaning of life. From this has sprung the worship of spirits, animals, the sun, and God(s) - the study of physics, consciousness, and evolution - and a vast collection of literature and art. In the author's words, "As science knocks down each door, philosophy and spiritual inquiry regroup behind the next."

In this ambitious and delightful book, Walker boils it down to "Persistence." Life wants to persist on three levels: individually, at the species level, and collectively as the whole of life. Hunger, thirst, and self-protection are representative samples of individual persistence. They are ultimately responsible for our social interactions and our sense of ethics and morality. The sexual urge indirectly leads to the rearing and nurturing of our children.

Persistence drives the topic in each chapter. In the Big Bang and cosmology chapter, protons, neutrons, and electrons persist while more exotic particles did not survive the cooling after the Big Bang. Carbon based life-forms persist because, among other reasons, they propagate their patterns on to the next generation. Individual genes and collections of genes persist through the competition of natural selection. Consciousness and the availability of concepts make it possible for people to further the persistence of the third level of life - an impossibility for other species. Our moral analyses focus on all three of the author's categories - individual, species, and life as a whole. Naturally, there are shades of gray everywhere in deciding on a moral action, but the bottom line is that the most moral approach is the one that is most helpful in aiding the persistence of all three life forms.

I really liked Walker's book but my main objection is his main premise - that this strange life force he calls "persistence" causes one force of nature to persist while others don't - yet they exist while others don't because they have attributes the others don't. I kept thinking of Daniel Dennett's "sky hooks." These are the compulsions some people have to find a god (of some sort) in nature despite nature acting very much like it has no driving force.

But that is my own prejudice. His book was a delightful assortment of knowledge and assessment about a very complex and ambitious subject from a very smart physicist.

Walker does not get into evolutionary psychology or game theory (Tit for Tat and beyond) - the details about how persistence might have shaped a system of human ethics, but that's another whole book. I just brushed up on particle physics, so I thoroughly enjoyed his 25 or 30 page cosmology section. The whole idea of religions thinking they guard the only door to morality is a hot issue with me, so it's easy to like this author's approach to human ethics. Finally, to write a science book such as this apparently without teaching and research experience seems to me quite a feat, and I congratulate this author on his fine effort.

Martin G. Walker is certainly not shy. In "Life! Why we exist...And What we Can do to Survive" he tackles subjects that have been the main problems of philosophy for centuries - namely why we and everything else exists and what we can do to make our lives count. These are not easy questions. There is and old Punch cartoon, in which a child asks her father:

"What's that, Daddy?

Father: "A Cow"

Child: "Why?"

Why a cow? is actually a very deep philosophical question and one that I am as yet unprepared to answer. Yet Walker thinks he can answer this one and others like it, or at least give it a good try.

At the start I have to say that the author is an Amazon Friend and that he sent me a copy of his book to review on the understanding that I would in no way guarantee how that review would turn out. He readily agreed to this and I duly received a copy in the mail.

In "Life!" Walker nicely frames the major questions of existence, based in part on his understanding of Schopenhauer and on his own experience. He uses Schopenhauer's "Will" as the main driving force of life in the universe (or at least on earth- the only place that we know that life exists), but replaces it with "persistence" ("Will" sounds too Germanic in the bad sense to me anyway). By this he seems to mean something like a drive to persist. This characteristic of persistence is what drives living things to continue and fuels evolution through mutation. I might note that Walker uses mutation in a way that would disturb some biologists. He thinks of it as a mainly positive force, but many modern biologists point out that most mutations are probably deleterious. Walker seems to believe that organisms may to some extent direct their own development, rather than simply being the passive result of random mutation and selection. Some modern biologists may tend to agree, as shown by the recent popularity of ideas from evolutionary development. These ideas include the hypothesis that mutations within the so-called "junk" DNA can alter organisms significantly over a relatively short time and that organisms possess a genetic "tool kit" in the form of such versatile coding segments as HOX genes, which can then code for quite different developmental stages, depending on the organism involved.

Walker does disagree with Schopenhauer in that the philosopher discounted consciousness as anomalous, while Walker sees it as an important continuation of the persistence of life. Indeed, consciousness may be more wide spread in the animal kingdom than is normally allowed, especially in light of studies on primates, other mammals, some birds and even a few invertebrates. It certainly requires consciousness to have a moral system, as Walker states in his discussion of morality.

Walker defines morality in terms of the persistence of life and here I find his arguments most interesting. The existence of morality in human societies has been one of the most controversial of topics, with religious fundamentalists going one way (absolutes laid down by God) and evolutionary scientists, especially evolutionary psychologists, trying to show that evolution dictated morality through necessity usually involving close kin and often parasitic "memes." I think Walker has hit on something valuable here. As I understand it, Walker sets moral structure on a foundation of expanding responsibility, beginning with the individual and extending outward to the family, allies, community, and society. In each case morality is the result of selecting for the persistence of life, which results in the major benefit for the larger group for the longer run, and which may also benefit the individual as well, although not always by as much in the short term. In essence I think that Walker would agree with the Kantian view "Do not that, which if everybody did it, would destroy society."

To nitpick for a bit, I will note that I did find one fairly major error of historical fact on p. 69 where the author implies that the emperor Claudius came to the throne after the murder of Julius Caesar. Any Roman historian knows that in fact Octavian Caesar (later known as Augustus) invented the emperorship after his uncle, the dictator Julius Caesar, was murdered in the Forum by disaffected Roman senators. Augustus was followed by Tiberius, his step son, and than by the predecessor of Claudius, Gaius (Caligula) Caesar, who was murdered by the Praetorian Guard - Claudius then being proclaimed emperor. This is, of course a quibble and has little to do with the main premise of the book, but somebody should have caught this howler!

Whether one agrees with Walker's views on the meaning of life, this book will certainly stimulate the reader to delve further. I will leave to the reader to determine if he has finally succeeded in his very difficult task. But, for the sheer audacity of the title alone, the book is well worth a read.

This book explains something called life in an easy way. Very easy to understand and powerful.

Most of the reviews were quite lengthy, mine will be briefer. Essentially, I saw no real discussion of WHY in this book. Yeah, we're here because we represent past persistence, but that describes a method not a reason. Nor does it describe a reason to behave "morally" or to care about the future of mankind. Despite my agnosticism I behave in a moral manner and have hope because I assume there is a purpose to life beyond the obvious. This book offers nothing beyond that.

As Peggy Lee sang:

"Is that all there is, is that all there is

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing

Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is"

Please Mr. Walker if you read this don't take it personally. It is just my opinion.

First off, I should mention for honesty's sake that this book's author, Martin G. Walker, is on my "Amazon Friends" list (go ahead and look at my profile page if you wish. Don't worry, I'll wait for you. Hmm hmm hmm... Okay, done yet? Great! I'll continue). I promise you, as I promised him, to be completely fair when reviewing his book, so please don't hold my association against me.

As the book's title suggests, Mr. Walker has set about to explore and define nothing less than the Meaning of Life. This is a lofty goal, made even more impressive by the fact that he does it in only 122 pages, including a brief appendix. Since this book seems to be aimed at the layman (and you can't ge more "lay" than yours truly), he mostly steers clear of a lot of scientific/philosophical jargon. Unfortunately, he also steers clear of footnotes and even a bibliography, making it difficult to check out his assertions of say, physics. That is one of Mr. Walker's specialties, though--the book jacket notes he "studied physics at St. John's College, Oxford"--and the book in general tries to approach the Meaning of Life from a secular, scientific viewpoint. Although he's clearly not a religious man (he notes with chagrin the rise of fundamentalist faith), he also doesn't wish to to combat thoology a la Richard Dawkins. In fact, he generally seems uninterested in the subject, which is fine by me. Still, like many religious texts, we have only his words to go on, and therefore the quality of his ideas relies on whether they make sense to the individual reader.

His main idea seems to be to approach life in a more holistic fashion. That is, life as a verb (i.e. to live) should be taken with consideration to life as a noun (i.e. life forms in general). Walker wishes to develop this as something far more than a bit of semantic cleverness. The way we approach concepts such as morality, family, community and even leisure should be based on whether they benefit the persistence of life as a form. Although this is far from a political book, as an expamle he seems to advocate as a system of government a kind of enlightened Socialism--not the Communism that devastated so much of Europe, but a system in which all people have a stake in maintaining, preserving and ultimately benefitting all life. Walker, houever, is more interested in the day-to-day existence of individuals. When making choices (and he seems in favor of free will as a philosophical concept) we should ask ourselves not "what's in it for me?" but "what's in it for everything?" Lofty, indeed.

This is all rather interesting, and I admit he's suggested a way of thinking that is somewhat infectious. The other night, I actually considered the persistence of life as a form when choosing what movie to rent from Netflix! Joking aside, he may be on to something here. The bad news, though, is even though his prose his little jargon, it's not really jargon-free, and as a result it often lacks in clarity. While he often begins a chapter by using some concrete example (the everyday objects in his surroundings), he quickly moves on to purely abstract concepts about physics or philsophy that may confuse, and yes, bore, many readers. I know I had to put the book down for long stretches and then re-read certain passages just so I didn't feel like a moron (note to self: write a book called "The Meaning of Life for Complete Idiots"). Likewise, many academics won't be thrilled that one of the only works he refers to in the text is Scott Peck's "The Road Less Travelled."

I can report, however, that Mr. Walker is a man of many talents. On his web site (which is linked to his Amazon profile page) you can find mp3's of original songs he's performed (To me they seemed like a cross between Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed--good company to keep) that further illustrate the ideas in his book. While it all may seem a little daunting, he actually has something of an everyman approach that's actually oddly inviting. While I can't say that I really "get it," I don't feel left out, either. While it could be much stronger, Mr. Walker's book does indeed benefit the persistence of life as a form.

Sometimes it seems as if nothing changes in the field of philosophy. The fundamental questions remain the same. What is the purpose of life? Where do good and evil come from? Why are we here? Hundreds of religions attempt to answer these same questions. Even the answers put forth by ancient philosophers thousands of years ago are still studied today. But given the explosive emergence of new knowledge in the last couple of centuries, do those ancient answers still stand up? Don't the fundamental questions deserve to be re-examined in the light of this incredible landscape of new knowledge? Life!, by Martin G. Walker, does exactly that. And not surprisingly, the answers do change. Human prejudices melt away and the answers become simpler, though arguably less satisfying to the always-hungry human ego. But the scientific age has proven the worth of objective analysis, and Martin Walker is not afraid to pursue philosophy from this new vantage point. The results are satisfying in a new way, revealing where our egos have led us astray in our thinking and how the fundamental questions are indeed related to the fundamentals of physics and chemistry so recently discovered. Everything is related and connected, but for reasons quite different from the mysterious ramblings offered up by the modern spiritualist. People all over the world have the same basic need to answer the fundamental questions. Life! provides a modern perspective with the potential to expand your mind.

I enjoyed this book very much. It touched on so much, and did it in a smooth, understandable, and poetic manor. Being someone who hasn't gone to college yet, but has spent the last three years trying to educate myself, I felt this one book said more then many others I have read. It will be read again, and I will recommend it to anyone as a great book to add to your collection.

Like life itself this book evolves from the begining of time and how life began to human existance and all the aspects of our consciousness. This book is for anyone looking for some rational explanations of how we got here to understanding the human condition. I highly recomend it.