system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does non-sentient life try to survive?

It has honestly never made sense to me why a plant or cell incapable of thought or emotion would care about whether it lives or dies. It's confusing, but it just seems strange that plants and cells without will or emotion aren't indifferent to death.
gpt
Imagine you are standing on a storm drain grate holding a variety of objects of various sizes and shapes. You drop them all on this grate and some of them will fall through while others will not. You gather all of those that didn't fall through up and drop them again, repeating this process many times.

When you are done what do the objects you have left all have in common? Obviously it is that they are very unlikely to fall through that storm drain grate! This is the basic idea at work with all life.

Organisms live and reproduce because that is what got them to be around today. If they didn't reproduce they would be like the stuff that fell through the grate, they wouldn't exist anymore. Living is a prerequisite to reproducing, corpses don't make babies, so living creatures around today tend towards staying alive long enough to reproduce.

They don't **want** to stay alive exactly, they stay alive because of what they are, because of their fundamental structure. If you can't get air you struggle to breathe not because you make a reasoned, logical thought process from the necessity of breathing to maintaining biological functions to your intended life goals. You struggle to breathe because of an evolved biochemical pathway linking the buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood to a reflexive urge to breathe. Creatures that didn't have that strong reflex tended to asphyxiate and became less common as time went by, so all we have left are those that do have the reflex.

So to answer your question plants don't need emotions or goals to do things that maintain their lives, just like objects don't need to desire features that keep them from falling down that storm drain grate. It is just what they are because they have been sorted for those features.