Beyond Descartes? (difficult questions, please help!)

Please fell free to answer the questions, or indeed point out any flaws in my thinking on this. Script below.
“Cogito, ergo sum” (Latin for “I think, therefore I am”)
Is there anything beyond this in terms of simplifying certainty?
Well I think perhaps so, but it is going to lead to some uncertainty.
Now, what I am going to say next heavily depends on life being a necessary to facilitate thought, one could argue our computers have no life, but then again they need electricity or chemical reactions to be powered on, in order to “think” much like our brains require power, so maybe the computers are not so different after all?
Even if not exclusively occurring in life, for the sake of argument let us assume for a moment, that life (as in occurring in life) IS a pre-requisite for thought to occur.
“I think therefore I am” sounds about as simple as it can get, however, in order to produce a fine thought like that, or indeed any other thought at all, there first has to be the will to do so.
Perhaps the will to life? If as we assume, life is necessary for thought to occur.
So, deeper than the thought itself is will, the will to be, the will to live, without this yearning to exist there can seemingly be no thought at all.
So let us redefine our certainty -
“I yearn for life and so I think, I am?”
Which begs the question, what is the will of life yearning for?
What exactly is thought?
In regards to the origins of thoughts, beyond the external scientific processes of how the biology operates we know next to nothing about them.
I.E, the internal operations of where they come from, what they are, how we form them.
Once they come, they are immediately flavoured by our experience and emotions, but from whence they came it is very difficult to say, which leads to perhaps a greater conundrum.
Just what is will, or the will to life?
Why do we, yearn to be?