system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does life "want" to reproduce? When did this come about?

I know this is a very strange and abstract question and I cannot articulate it as well as I can through text, so here is my attempt.

Given that the general evolutionary reason that life wants to reproduce is to simply "continue" itself, my question tries to stem from a more existential and logistical perspective: the causal core behind why it wants to continue itself, how this idea was conceived, and where this innate drive began. Seeing how this drive to reproduce comes well before the advent of sentience, what exactly caused the first and most primordial and rudimentary being to *want* to reproduce as opposed to... simply **be** and then run its course and end its life.

Did it conceive of the thought that more of itself will provide for something better? How? Did some positive feedback loops come about randomly and thus was born the world of reproduction? Did the rise of competition of, say, certain chemical reactions embed itself into this being and carried forth into reproductive tendencies? When did the first virus or piece of life suddenly say to itself that it would harness the energy or power of certain physical phenomena and proliferate itself? And how did this idea of reproduction carry onto further generations enough to where architectures of cells and viruses are devoted solely to it?
gpt
There was no 'thought', and it started before anything was even 'alive', i.e. reproduction has been around longer than life, as the chemical precursors to life reproduced and evolved.

Things that are good at copying themselves make more copies of themselves than things that aren't good at copying themselves. It's that simple. It is a positive feedback loop, if you like. And things that make imperfect copies of themselves adapt better than things that don't make copies (which don't adapt *at all*): Adapt to changes in the environment or to take advantage of others.