One's raison d'etre is exactly one's own. I'm reminded of a time when I was at a friend's home and his sister complained about not knowing her purpose in life. to which her father responded sharply, "Your purpose in life is to not die. Everything else is gravy."
Gravy...
To reduce it to the most basic level, human beings seek to
survive and to
thrive. Indeed, faced with an inability to thrive on his or her own terms, one might contemplate suicide. We know this from being observers of humanity. Of course, '
on one's own terms' is key here. I've been told on several occasions that my spartan lifestyle is quite unappealing. I, of course, find it satisfying, but I can accept that it wouldn't be for most.
We're binary thinkers by nature, yes or no, right or wrong, good or bad, one or zero... But any rational human being should accept that these are relative concepts, not absolute, universal ones. Still, we'd like to put it in some kind of mathematical framework if we could.
Understanding survival is simple; there are two states: life and death. You're either in one or the other as far as we can tell from our human viewpoint. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that the following is true:
Signs of death or strong indications that a warm-blooded animal is no longer alive are:
- Cessation of breathing - a
- Cardiac arrest (no pulse) - b
- Pallor mortis, paleness which happens in the 15–120 minutes after death - c
- Livor mortis, a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body - d
- Algor mortis, the reduction in body temperature following death. This is generally a steady decline until matching ambient temperature - e
- Rigor mortis, the limbs of the corpse become stiff (Latin rigor) and difficult to move or manipulate - f
- Decomposition, the reduction into simpler forms of matter, accompanied by a strong, unpleasant odor - g
We can then say that if none of the above conditions are met for a certain person, then that person is alive, meaning he or she is surviving.
So now, again for the sake of simplicity, let's define a state of death where only if all of the above conditions are true, then there is a state of death. And, let's call this state 'non-survival.' Sounds silly, but it makes things simple. We can represent this as a variable x, where x is a state function, x(a, b, c, d, e, f, g). If any of the conditions a, b, c, d, e, f or g are true, we assign that condition variable a value of 1, and if not true, a value of 0. For example, if a person is still breathing, a = 0, and if they're not breathing, a = 1. So, if we have x(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1), we have a state of death. We can define a general life/death state as
$\delta\left ( x \right ) = \begin{Bmatrix}
0, & x(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)\\
1,& x\neq x(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
\end{Bmatrix}$
where $\delta \left ( x \right )= 1$ means survival, and
$\delta \left ( x \right )= 0$ means non-survival.
Can we construct a similar function for thriving? And, if we can do that, can we construct a single, combined function that expresses the two (survival and thriving) mathematically?
