Purpose

Okay. So this is going to be a difficult topic to write about. Difficult, because I need to do some soul searching to write about purpose, this thing that propels me to wake up, do something and navigate this journey called life . To put simply, what is the purpose that I seek in my life other than the act of mere survival? And i want to do all this in a way where i am not just doing virtue signalling or projecting an altruistic version of myself, but instead it becomes an attempt at trying to make an accurate and honest assessment of my thoughts on this topic so that it becomes a marker of this time that i can later revisit.

I will be a complete jerk if I am not cognizant of the fact that I am somewhat privileged to be in a position where I can even ponder about these things. For a significant proportion of the world’s population, surviving day to day itself is a daunting task. I feel it’s somewhat disingenuous then to speak about the problem of having purpose, a no-nonsense colleague of mine typically categorize my thoughts on this subject as “First world problems” . In a way he is true, in the wide scheme of things my ramblings are about something at the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs .

For a large chunk of human history, our needs were mostly physiological in nature. Food, Shelter , sex etc were the only things that early humans predominantly cared about. There were few folks who had extra time and did art such as the folks who did Lascaux Cave paintings , but even for them the larger theme of life should have revolved around these items in the lower part of the pyramid. With each generation, the wisdom and progress that came with it made the task of getting the basic needs satisfied relatively easier. So with passing of time we started adding new stacks to our pyramid of needs and what was a relatively uncomplicated algorithm for “living a good life” started becoming complex, confusing and unsatisfactory. The missing piece of the puzzle is self-actualization which is right at the top of the pyramid and where this discourse on purpose would also land. This has been a void (or is it?) that has helped a booming “self help books” industry to grow, people have spent tons of money and time on getting to know the recipe to crack this. Most people have failed and this essay is not my proclamation that I have figured it out. Instead it is my reflections and thoughts , the ebb and flow of which had led to many sleepless nights.

So If you ask me what my purpose in life, it will be hard to give a straightforward answer since it’s just not one traceable signal, it is a combination of various signals that create this sense of meaning in my life. In computing there is this idea of breaking down a signal into individual components which when summed up would approximate for the original signal, this essay is an attempt at trying to decipher this larger signal running through my brain through my own version of Fourier’s Analysis and uncover some of the tiny individual signals it is made up of.

The theory of Thalavara (തലവര )

I grew up religious and all religions make a claim on providing a manual for getting purpose in life sorted out. The simplified version which most religions use is that “God has a plan for all of us”. Amma speaks often about തലവര , which is the malayalam word used to mean fate. If something is happening in a certain way, that’s because it’s their തലവര / fate. This is an easy idea to comprehend, the fact that god already has drafted the plan for us means that we needn’t really worry or think deeply about purpose, our purpose is predetermined, we can’t do a course correction and are nothing but wooden logs passing through a river whose direction is controlled by the stream that god creates. “What is expected to happen shall happen” is the key idea here and this is a simple explanation that strikes a chord with most people. This made sense to me at a certain point of life, i think it is the simple explanation of the concept that makes it popular with people.

Religions(CULT + TIME) also tend to add another layer of abstraction over this idea , while sequence of events that will happen in life remains deterministic in nature , there is a prize at the end of all of this which is much larger than life itself. It could be moksha - an escape from birth/death cycle or it could be the bliss of reaching heaven. There is often a moral code of conduct , a set of do’s and don’ts that are laid out by religions which determines the eligibility for the final prize. So a life lived following the do’s and don’ts as stipulated by our belief systems could be equated to a purpose driven life also.

In Devs , a TV series that i saw recently this idea of determinism is explored in an interesting way. The series revolves around this tech company that builds a quantum computer, this special machine can do a lot of number crunching in a scale that is unprecedented and they are able to model cause and effect with remarkable precision, this leads to an important discovery , a true WTF moment in the show where protagonist learns that life is deterministic and concept of free will is an illusion . I think watching this show kind of made me think deeply about the theory of Thalavara and i can’t make my mind up fully whether it is BS or there is something there which can’t be explained by the slicing and dicing of rational thought.

Simulation Hypothesis

Okay, so this is a theory that I had thought about a lot ever since college. The hypothesis here is that life as we know is a simulation. if you started thinking about the movie Matrix, hold onto your thoughts; let’s look at Simulation Hypothesis through another lens. So I read this short story by Issac Asimov which is called the last question when I was in college, it had a lasting impact on how I thought about this hypothesis. In the story humans build this super computer that is tasked with finding a solution for the impending doom of the universe. As humans continue to build it over many generations, the system always gives the same answer.

“THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”

After the eventual death of civilization and the universe, the machine which now exists in another dimension still continues to crunch numbers to find a solution to the problem. Finally the super computer finds a solution to the question, but it has no one to report the answer to. In conclusion the system announces.

“LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And there was light!! This is one of my favorite endings for a short story. The idea that creation of the universe itself is an act of experiment, a simulation that is run by a supremely intelligent being is surprisingly coherent with ideas that we see from religions. It is just that God (the supreme being) here is the programmer/ scientist who is running this simulation. The Issac Asimov story is special since it takes a spin on this idea and goes on to say that it is we humans who set things in motion in the first place.

There are many folks who believe that there is a chance that we are living in a simulation. Some of the famous supporters include Nick Bostrom , Elon Musk etc. Even though it sounds outlandish, I have an inkling that there is something credible to the theory. This year I tried to build a small simulator program that simulates a certain phenomenon, even if the simulation didn’t mimic the exact process I was convinced that given enough domain knowledge and computer power thrown at it, it should be possible to do really good simulations . One might ask, is it possible to mimic the complex patterns that we see in the world?

Take the case of Conway’s Game of life, a very popular program. From a very simple set of rules, interesting patterns emerge which appear to be completely random but are clearly deterministic based on the initial configurations. Another example that comes to my mind is how video games have evolved over time, even when the representation of the world has been 2 dimensional they have surprisingly got more realistic over time. If we take our physical world, everything that we see in it is built from a finite set of elements that we can neatly categorise in this thing called periodic table, a rule about filling electron shells leads to the formation of compounds and everything that we see around us. So I would say yes, it should be possible for complex patterns to emerge from a simulation.

But let’s come back to what it would mean for an individual’s purpose to realize that there is a good chance that the world we live in is a simulation. For me personally, if the simulation argument is proven to be true it would mean that the rich meaning that i seek in life is probably non existent. You can very well think of life as a game and you are a player who can strategize to maximise or minimise a state that you care about. Different states could be money, fame, knowledge , adventure etc or it could be a combination of these states.

In this case the purpose is whatever the individual seeks, it could be building a business that makes a ton of money , it could be running an NGO that helps the poor, it could even be becoming the president of the United states. Irrespective of the purpose, every player in the game would eventually run out of his/her time ; some might get more time, some less, the simulation doesn’t care. There is no differentiation from a simulation’s perspective on measuring some as having led a good life or not. There are no brownie points that take us to a heaven or a better place. There are no negative points for being a xenophobic head of state who clings on to power by polarizing people based on identity. Once you are dead, from a simulation’s perspective you are now just an entity that is removed.

This is the troubling thing for me about the simulation hypothesis. I think the world becomes immoral if every individual just thinks about maximising or minimising the state. I have often felt that It is this moral sense of right and wrong within each individual that guides us to create a good society and therefore a better world. So yeah it will be kind of a bummer if we are indeed living in a simulation even though as a sci fi enthusiast i find the idea interesting.

We are a fluke

While simulation hypothesis is something that we can debate over whether it’s just science fiction or not, one thing that is undebatable is this fact that our existence is an especially surprising piece of luck. This is obvious especially from biology when the science of reproduction is discussed, of the millions of sperms that are in contention for fertilization of egg, only one makes it and if let’s hypothetically say another sperm had fused with the egg instead then our genetic makeup , our features and even gender could have been different. In other words the odds of us being us was very low, and it is an incredible luck that it is us who had the opportunity to arrive in this world.

Another place where this luck is very obvious is Astronomy. Anyone who has gazed up in the skies has wondered if someone else is up there right? The scientific community has put a name to this general doubt as Fermi’s paradox. The paradox here is given the vastness of the universe and the billions of stars and planets in various galaxies, why haven’t we come across any other life forms / aliens ? There have been many explanations that have been suggested but the one that makes sense to me is that it is not easy as it sounds for life to take shape in a planet. Lots of interesting things have occured in a very specific order to reach a point where earth can harbour life. For instance Earth exist in this special region called Goldilocks Zone, in simple terms our planet is at the right distance from its star (sun) so that the temperature is just right and there is liquid water. Without this defining characteristic there is no way life would have emerged on earth. And surprisingly it’s not just earth, even our moon has a huge impact on stabilizing earth’s orbit and ensuring that we have predictable weather patterns etc. Now zoom back and think about big bang, what are the odds of the formation of milky way galaxy , what are the odds of the formation of a solar system where our planet comes in a goldilocks zone, what are the odds of having the perfect moon that stabilizes the orbital tilt and helps in creating weather patterns that facilitates life. Add on to this all the luck that our species had while various life forms started emerging and then to become the dominant species that can read and write essays like this, i wonder isn’t this all some form of sheer dumb luck? A series of miracles spread out into antiquity.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle

~ Einstein

Some argue that the fluke argument also is definite proof that things exist by design and hence the proof for existence of God. I don’t subscribe to the the creation by design argument, but i am willing to concede that the fluke argument also can be seen as another outcome of the simulation hypothesis argument where these miracles are just a bunch of states that the simulation designer had programmed to happen. Anyways this realization of incredible luck that we see in our own origin and the origin of our planet does affect how we look at purpose in life. Personally for me it is this realization that life is this very rare gift, while it seems to be a ride with lots of ups and downs along the way, the very fact that we are alive right now and inhabiting this planet with another 7 billion people is something that one needs to be grateful for.

With this incredible luck, there is also sadly this feeling of isolation when we look at the cosmos. While many people who haven’t got the memo yet, think that the universe runs around them, in reality the cosmos doesn’t care about our existence, our actions are insignificant in the larger scheme of things going around in the universe. This transition from everything revolves around Earth and us special humans (Geo-Centric model) to we are this insignificant species in a tiny pale blue dot that has no realistic chance of making a dent on the universe has been painful for humanity.

Rather than focussing on the insignificance of our actions, I think we can use this knowledge to take better care of our planet and its inhabitants. Once in a while I listen to this monologue called Pale blue dot which touches on this subject , every time i listen to it i feel a sense of calmness and it also kind of give a renewed purpose and outlook towards life.

I think Carl Sagan sums it up beautifully in these final words

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

~ Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

In our natural world, we observe a few patterns that keep on repeating, none of them is as significant as the pattern of growth and decay. We see it on the plant that has just bloomed and given a beautiful flower. The beauty of this flower exists only for a fleeting moment in it’s growth phase and it eventually succumbs into the decay phase. This is a pattern that keeps repeating over and over wherever we look. Wisdom from the ages has been that there is no escape from the eventual doom as this growth and decay is a fundamental tenet of our universe. Everyone who is reading this will bid bye to this world eventually, it is more a question of time than if. Despite the gloomy end there is a silver lining here, and that silver lining is visible when we understand that maybe life, it’s not about the individual, it’s about US as a collective, the story of our species and it’s survival over trying circumstances, the fact that we are playing a small part in keeping the greatest show running on Earth.

With the modern amenities that we all enjoy, we sometimes forget how fragile our world really is. There are external cosmic events which could wipe out our existence in seconds. But let’s not worry about them since the odds of any of such events happening is quite low and if they do happen there is very little we can do , so it’s better we don’t worry too much about them at this point of time. More than the external threats , the internal threats caused by us humans are more worrying. The risk of doom by nuclear winter, prolonged damage to our ecosystem through climate change etc are more imminent risks that we need to work collectively to find a solution for. Finding solutions to these problems are challenging because they need the collective effort from all our fellow beings without looking at their personal/regional interests and that is next to impossible for a society which glorifies individual achievement more than collective achievement. On the knife edge is the survival of our species and the rich biodiversity that we are part of, it should be a common purpose for all of us despite our various ideological / religious / social differences that when we leave this world, we are leaving it better than how we found it. So taking care of our planet so that we don’t screw it up for future generations and being kind to one another should be a collective purpose for all of humanity. I guess this is an obvious thing to understand but I often feel frustrated on how very few get it.