I came up with this question out of thin air:

Do we live, because there will be death; or we will die, because there is living?

Let's analyze this logically.

First take a look at the statement, "we will die because there is living." In other words, death is a necessary condition of living. This seems to be the biological causality. However, its contrapositive actually goes "If we will not die, then we do not live." This seems odd — I will actually happily accept living forever! Let's call this pair of statements Causality A.

$$"CausalityA:"quadquad("Living"=>"Death")<=>("NoDeath"=>"NoLiving")$$

The converse, "we live because there will be death" makes more sense subjectively, which has a saner contrapositive of "If we do not live, then we do not die." Let's call this Causality B.

$$"CausalityB:"quadquad("Death"=>"Living")<=>("NoLiving"=>"NoDeath")$$

Causality B is true in the sense that we cannot die if we do not live in the first place.

Moreover, why do we choose to live? I boil it down to two arguments:

• I fear the uncertainty and pain of death; and/or
• I value my current life, only because I know that I will die someday, and is unlikely to get a second chance to live.

So it seems that we subjectively choose to live because we know the existence of death (Causality B). However, objectively, we definitely will die eventually as long as we live — In other words, death is a necessary condition of living, so Causality A appears correct biologically.

Which one is actually true then?

Logic

In the logical sense, "if we do not live, then we cannot die" and "if we live, then we will eventually die" both appears to be correct, and are from two different statements. We can actually say that the existence of life is logically equivalent to the existence of death at this point. This is because

$$"Death"<=>"Living"$$

by combining the two causalities.

Causality

However, I intensionally mixed up subjective expectation of meaning of life and objective existence of death over my previous arguments, and note my misuse of tenses! Logic doesn't care anything about time, but causality does.

Logic only treats $"Death"$ and $"Living"$ as timeless, meaningless symbols. In the reality with the arrow of time, only the following causality holds:

$$"Living"=>"Death"$$

i.e. we will die because we lived. This is because that the statement "we will live because we died" is not sound.

Philosophy

What about my SUBJECTIVE comments before? That is purely a philosophical argument. My current philosophy tells me that

$$"Death"=>"Living"$$

is more true, as I ask myself why I choose to survive and the arguments laid out above. This is more of an evaluation on the order of appearance of the two as notions, rather than physically assessing which one came first.

Therefore, logic, causality and philosophy can give contradictory answers to the same question.

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P.S. I have to admit that my initial use of the term "causality" is indeed misleading. Logical implication and causality does not equate each other, but I guess that ambiguity is one of the reasons why language itself is not strictly logical!