Preface
“What should I do?” It’s a question I ask myself a lot. It’s a stressful question, because if I find myself asking it, it means I must decide a course of action and I don’t want to regret picking the wrong one. As a kid, the answers were easy: ask mom, dad, or someone smart…they always knew what to do. As an adult, the answers are less clear, and typically, there’s no one to ask.
In this writing, I outline a way to model the world. Specifically, I look at a model for how humans spend time and engage in activities. By the end of it, and given the premises outlined in the model, I conclude an overarching purpose of life. This purpose is what drives my activities, and the answer I come back to when I ask myself: “What should I do?”
Mental Models
Mental Models Introduction
It is important to first understand what I mean when I say “mental model”. When you look at the world around you, you do not experience the world as it truly is - you experience your brain’s interpretation of the world. That interpretation is a type of mental model. You also have mental models about things you don’t directly perceive with your senses.
For example, if you can visualize the solar system in your mind, you have a mental model of it. You have never seen the real solar system, but, you know things about it that let you have a sense of how it works.
Models are inherently limited. No person is capable of modeling the storms of Jupiter, or the location of all the fish in Earth’s seas. We leave out details because they are not relevant to the context we are considering.
There are unique mental models that are fun to think about:
One, is your mental model of someone else. You must model their mind and predict how they will behave, thus your mental model of another person contains mental models of their mental models.
Another is the mental model of mental models. As children, we typically do not reflect on our thought patterns. The preceding writing about mental models explains how they work, and if you’ve never considered them before, you now have a mental model of mental models.
Modeling Time
Our brains are very good at modeling physical space. They are less good at modeling time. When it comes to resource limitations, we have more than enough space for the foreseeable future… however, we never seem to have enough time. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to put additional effort where our natural skills fall short, and model time intentionally.
The most common approach to modeling time is to slice it up into chunks, and name those chunks. “Monday”, “April”, those are all chunks we have named. We also have unnamed chunks, or, chunks that we would name by the activity done during those chunks. For example “nap time”, “eating dinner”, or “commuting” are slices of time that don’t have formal names.
If we think about a visualization of this model, we can visualize it as one activity which follows another:
image of timeline coming here
Beliefs and Evidence
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<Mom was confused by “the right thing to do”. To her she interpreted it as “the right thing to do as judged by her friends”, eg would her friends think she had done the right thing. She did not understand that I mean “right thing to do” in a universal, laws of physics, 1+1=2, now and forever sort of way. I should clear this up>
Content
Every action we take can be subdivided into smaller pieces. Imagine brushing your teeth. The activity can be subdivided into picking up your toothbrush, unscrewing the toothpaste cap, squeezing the paste out, and brushing. Even each of these actions can be subdivided further. The brushing portion can be divided into the outsides of your teeth, the insides, the tops. Even those actions can be subdivided, push the brush backwards, pull the brush forwards. And again, even those actions can be subdivided into split second subdivisions, the brush moving from tooth to tooth, and further subdivisions.
The reverse direction also applies. Brushing one’s teeth is typically part of a morning routine, and may precede a shower and may have come after breakfast - each of those activities are also possible to break down the infinitesimally small subdivisions. Your morning routine may be bookended by sleeping and commuting, and those may fit in to the schedule for your day. The plan for your day may fit into a larger plan for a project at work, which fits into a larger plan for your career.
All of the actions we take have a purpose, a reason why we do them. However, if we ask “why” we are doing something, our answers may only survive one or two rounds of questioning.
How can we know we are doing the right thing? If we squeeze ketchup onto our tooth brush instead of tooth paste, we’d probably have judged that we had done the wrong thing. However, it’s only the wrong thing in the context of the purpose of our action. If the purpose is to clean our teeth - we’ve failed. However, if our purpose is to perform part of a sketch comedy set, we’ve succeeded.
It’s generally considered easy to determine what is the right thing to do in smaller, day to day actions. It’s much harder in actions that are larger spans of time - which job should I take, or even, which career should I pursue? How can we know which is the right thing to do?
These things can be viewed as part of a larger action: your life. However, how can we know what we are supposed to do with our life? How can we know that, when it’s over, we will have done the right thing?
The answer is: we can’t. There isn’t a way to know what’s right and what’s wrong. As far as we have discovered, there is no guidance baked into the universe about what humans should with their lives.
So how do we know how to act? We don’t know, which brings up an important point, either: 1) there is a right way to act, a “right thing to be doing” or, 2) there is no right thing.
If #2 is true, then any action we take is an acceptable action. We can never be wrong. If there is no ultimate right thing to do, then there is no solid reason to do anything.
However, if #1 is true - if there is a right thing to be doing - and we don’t know what it is, then the only course of action that makes sense is to figure it out. The best thing we can do, is to figure out the best thing we should be doing.
Thus, we are faced with a choice: assume that our actions are neither right nor wrong and therefore there is fundamentally no purpose to living OR have hope that possibly there is something we are supposed to be doing, enshrined in the code of the universe, and that we have to figure it out.
It makes sense to me that the only option here is hope. Since we don’t know either way, we can’t just assume there is no right thing - we wouldn’t be justified until we have solid evidence.
Putting the pieces together
When you consider what a monumental effort it will be to discover what it is we are supposed to be doing, you begin to realize this is likely a multi-generational search. It took humanity thousands of years to explain the motion of the stars and sun in the sky - and those were things we could see and measure.
Performing the science necessary to detect the rightness or wrongness of actions currently seems impossible. As I’ve stated, it may in fact be impossible. So, therefore, it’s likely that this search will last longer than our lifetimes. However, we can’t know, and the only rational thing to do is to begin the search immediately (how else could you justify any other action?).
Therefore, since the search for the right and wrong actions is what guides my life now, and will likely guide my life forever, it’s clear to me that:
The purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life.
Or, in other words: The best thing to do, is figure out the best thing to do. This is a powerful concept because it provides a framework, or mental model, to justify all of our actions. Why am I doing something? Because it furthers my search for the best thing I can be doing. Why am I not doing something? Because I’ve done it before, or perhaps because it is damaging to me and would limit my search in the future.
Implications
There are so many implications that come from understanding “discovery of the purpose of life” as one’s own purpose of life. In particular, optimizing life for opportunity is a big one. Opportunity can be measured by the number of distinct actions, and actions subsequent from those actions, we have available to us.
We can’t be in a comfortable position to search for the purpose of life if our immediate needs have not been met. Needs like food, water, air, safe temperature, socialization, physical safety, etc will all take priority over the search for the purpose of life. Isaac Newton could not have discerned the motion of the planets if his life was instead spent looking for food. Thus, if we are to be productive in our endeavor, we must ensure that our immediate needs are met, and, there is sense in ‘stockpiling’ resources so that we may continue our primary search, uninterrupted.
In today’s society, this generally means amassing large amounts of wealth - typically monetary. With large amounts of money, many base-level biological needs can be met. Large amounts of money also have the side benefit of being influential. A wealthy person can encourage activity of others (if by no other means than paying them). Given the difficulty of determining if there is a purpose to life, getting as much help on the problem is advantageous.
Unfortunately, there is one element of maximizing opportunity that we have yet to overcome. Death is the ultimate end to opportunity for us all - no actions can ever be taken again after we die. Thus, if we aim to discover the purpose of life, it seems sensible that the first item on the agenda is overcoming death. Once death is beaten (or at least seriously limited), we can begin to make much longer term plans.
As I mentioned above, getting as much help as possible to solve this problem will be advantageous. Therefore, another implication of understanding this point of view is explaining it to others. Hence, why I have written this.
To be continued…
An Algorithmic Approach
If we were to design an AI, and wanted to give it total freedom (eg not something as specific as a car driving AI), what goal would we give it?
Some might say ‘self preservation’. However, self preservation assumes that staying alive is the right thing to do. Some might say look at biology and say ‘procreate’, however that assumes that procreation is the right thing to do.
We simply do not know that the rightest thing to do is. Therefore, the rightest thing to do is figure that out. And, hence, were we to design a completely free AI, the rightest goal to give it would be to determine what goal it should have.
Humans are not completely free. We have requirements, like socialization. We also have more basic requirements like food and water. Were these requirements removed, what would we do?
What if I’m Wrong?
In coming up with this idea I’ve discussed it with a lot of people and the majority give me blank faces, or “hmm that’s interesting"s. The lack of enthusiasm or interest really makes me doubt myself. So I begin to wonder: what if the purpose of life really isn’t to discover the purpose of life?
Well, if I’m wrong and we know what the purpose is, then, we win!
If I’m wrong and we don’t know what it is, then, the most important thing to do is to discover what it is. And thus, the purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life, and I am reassured.
Depression
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Approaches By Other Ideologies, and their limitations
Religions
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Political Ideologies
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