Why do living things try to survive?
Living things try to survive because the patterns that pay to hold themselves together are the ones that remain, and nothing in physics wants anything. A living thing keeps paying, holding its readings steady out of a finite budget. Its trying is a policy, a rule for dividing that budget between fixing itself to match what the world reports and changing what the world reports. The two buy different things. A bacterium that retunes its receptors until nothing reads as news can starve in water with no food in it. On a system of four states, no amount of private self-repair reaches an outcome that one write to the shared record reaches with certainty. Survival takes both kinds of spending, and the patterns here are the ones whose readings kept fitting a world.
Also in Chapter 39: Why Is a Bacterium Freer Than an Atom?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 38: Why Does Anything Try to Persist?watch a universe make its own particles