For no good reason

"What came first, life, or the want to remain alive; i.e. continuance?"

In order to survive, one must want to live. It doesn’t matter what animal you are, or where you came from, you obviously want to live. With conciousness, we develop/invent reasons for which we want to live, explanations such as religion. Since we want to live, living becomes good, and dying becomes bad; but also included is the idea that a “logical” reason to live is considered good, and a “logical” reason not to live being becomes bad. Morals are invented. The consuming curiosity from trying to explain everything. Argueable, if you are a caged animal there is little reason to live any longer, but why does it? Does this make the hampster stupid? Bottom line, the question is “What came first, life, or the want to remain alive”.[/b]

Is this a trick question ?
You got to be alive in order to have chance to want to stay alive.

Perhaps one must be alive to wish to remain alive, but I believe that life in the first place came from the desire to live.

If you had never wanted to live you wouldn’t be alive now. All life comes from some deep inate need to live, and when this need is no longer present in a creature, this creature dies. Only the thirst for life and everything that that means con continue a thing like this against all odds (and the odds are against you).

Even if some deep cosmic force pulled all life into being against it’s will, it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to die. Yet somehow things keep on wanting to live, even when it seems they only suffer continuously. You can say that it’s just fear of death, but if death is only the lack of life, mabey that fear is the desire which led us to live in the first place - to escape death.

This reminds me of the old thesitic argument ‘the universe is perfect for human existence therefore the universe was created for us!’ , which of course, is fallicious. Human’s evolved into the universe as it is, and simply wouldn’t exist if we didn’t evolve to meet these conditions. millions of spiecies have gone extinct for this very reason…
The same goes for life. You can say that life that exists all share a desire to live, but I would say that is simply because any form of life that did not make replication and survival a priority…died out.
It seems fairly obvious that life had to come first.

No, it’s not a trick question. Your parents had to want to fuck, so obviously it was want that made life become? There’s no saying, because life could’ve made the want. But why would things want to continue, knowing that with the presence of a beginning, there is an obvious end? They make up things; become inventive with things like “meaning”. You only have three guarantees, a birth, a present state, and death. So maybe the question you so desired was to be phrased as such. “Does life want to live after it already becomes, or did want create life in the first place”? Arguably, part of you has been alive for at least 2 billion years. And the matter and energy that you are, although not always in this exact state, have ALWAYS been within this time. If you decide want came before life, than you could say everything is alive. Is gravity not the want of matter to come together?

But what happens when replication starts to bring the downfall of a species; i.e. overpopulation? Life finds the most effective way to remain alive. But also, it dies. Oddly, things don’t live forever. This is odd because it carries all the genetic information to do so, but doesn’t. It creates a need for a breeding pair to trade genetics working for something “more perfect”. Things want to come together, i doubt you’d disagree with gravity, so is that not want? Is that not the want that brings life together? Survival of an individual is one thing, but ultimatly ends. Survival of life in general is much different, but for all we know right now it has any direction of going