My purpose is to aid in the self-destruction of the Universe. Once you accept this, dear reader, we can start making use of this result.

Of course, the purpose itself is not particularly useful in answering my fundamental question (“What should I be doing right now?”). But I can follow the framework I outlined to get to my goals, and thus actions. It’s a long path, and I haven’t defined it nearly enough to talk about concrete actions (or even goals), but I have some ideas. First let’s recap the framework:

• At the root of everything there are observations of the known Universe
• We interpret these observations by unifying concepts into themes and themes into epiphenomena. We don’t ask why these epiphenomena exist because any answer would not be meaningful in the context of our Universe: we simply accept them as given. It seems to me that at the root of everything, there is an epiphenomenon of entropy increasing at an ever-increasing rate. The Universe wants to self-destruct
• Our interpretation leads us to our purpose in life. I strongly believe that such a purpose should be to contribute to that root epiphenomenon. The purpose should be stable, i.e. not sensitive to small changes in our interpretation of the observable Universe (or to small changes in the information we accept — since throughout life we refine our observations: we can see more). The purpose should also be singular — if your purpose is to do A and to do B, you haven’t really figured out your purpose
• This purpose defines our values. There can be multiple values. For example, given that my purpose is to help the Universe self-destruct, one of my values would be to cherish mankind because it’s my best bet to achieve my purpose (given the information I have right now). Note that I mean mankind, not individuals or arbitrary groups of people
• Our values inform our desires. Desires don’t need to be measurable but they need to be specific. Given that I cherish mankind and want it to increase entropy more, I should allow it to do so by harnessing energy better. The ability to control fire gave humans a significant advantage over other species; the ability to harness the energy of fossil fuels allows us to build airplanes; just think about how much more we can do if we can really take advantage of the near infinite energy of the Sun. One of my desires could be to help invent a way to extract renewable (long-lasting) energy efficiently. Similarly, I may want to replace some of the intermediate epiphenomena with their more efficient counterparts. In my post on evolution I remark on as processes that increase entropy go, evolution is inferior to intelligence, genetic engineering, or non-biological intelligence. Hence, one of my desires may be to allow humans to progress through lifting existing limits — for example, to reach singularity
• Our desires define our goals, which should be measurable and specific. Our design to achieve the goals contains a tree of subgoals, each subgoal becoming more attainable, realistic and timely
• Finally, at the bottom of that tree are actions. This is how I figure out what I should be doing right now.

Last time I presented my framework for thinking about one’s iife purpose and how it is connected to goals and ultimately every decision we make in our lives. I’ll now attempt to describe my interpretation of the world I observe around me, and thus my purpose in life.

The observable universe is enormous — trying to systematize all the observations one has is a prohibitive task. Instead, I’d much rather convert my observations into themes — create, in a sense, equivalence classes of observations in order to get my head around them better. Those themes I can then further combine into more abstract themes, and so on, until there are very few themes that permeate everything I see.

One of those themes is the concept of “betterment” — progress, improvement. We see it everywhere — cars get faster, batteries get more efficient, humans beat speed records from year to year. This betterment is a direct extension of our ability to build tools to solve our problems (which is what I perceive to be one of the fundamental enablers of intelligence: one theory posits that our ability to build tools to leverage our natural abilities allowed our brains to increase in complexity leading to the emergence of the self — the “I” — which I see as a condition that must necessarily exist in order for us to speak of intelligence). As we build these tools, we solve the most immediate problems and get ready to tackle more fundamental problems. So by “betterment” I mean mankind’s ability to solve problems at increasing level of fundamental-ness.

A unifying theme for betterment and other kinds of phenomena (such as evolution of species) is increasing entropy: as the complexity of our tools increases, so do the energy demands (it takes more energy to solve a root problem than to patch one of its instances). As a result, then, mankind’s pursuit of a problem-free universe forces the Universe to increase its entropy at an ever increasing rate.

Why is it the case? Why do we increase the entropy of the Universe? I don’t believe this to be a meaningful question — asking “why” about a process in a system makes no sense in the context of that system. It’s a little bit as if a creature on a two-dimensional plane (say, a piece of paper) asked questions about the three-dimensional space that the piece of paper is located in. It’s not a question that we’ll get an answer on, because it concerns concepts outside of our Universe — which, by definition, are not part of our Universe. In other words, the question is not meaningful because any answer would be meaningless (we would be unable to draw any conclusions about our Universe from it). This is very important. It allows us to stop asking “why” and it’s also the reason why there is nothing beyond our observable Universe.

So instead of asking why the entropy of the Universe increases at an increasing rate (i.e. why the Universe wants to self-destruct) I am accepting it as an axiom of my existence. This is an epiphenomenon at the most fundamental level that seems to permeate everything that surrounds us, and so my purpose is to contribute to this epiphenomenon.

My purpose is to aid in the self-destruction of the Universe.

(Actually destroying the Universe is not achievable within my lifetime, of course, but through my actions I can certainly increase the probability that its entropy reaches its maximum level faster.)

It may sound ridiculous, or crazy, or pointless (but there again, given my reasoning, there is no use figuring out what the “point” is of the most fundamental epiphenomenon in the Universe). But it has some interesting implications that are not far from what many people imagine their purpose to be (in other words, it can be thought of as a kind of “super-purpose” that supersedes a class of purposes — or maybe even all of them). For example, let’s look at the track record of mankind: in a relatively short time frame, humans went from having their existence be threatened by all sorts of natural phenomena and predators to being able to materially affect Earth (unfortunately in a destructive manner — we can, for example, release bacteria that decimates any other species, or scorch the skies thus substantially change the climate on Earth — or make it virtually uninhabitable). This is an incredible increase in the potential to increase entropy. There are good reasons to believe that mankind will soon be able to harness the energy of the Sun, and be able to affect more than just its planet. Given my goal in mind (and the lack of information on whether there are any other intelligent beings in the Universe), my goal should be to prevent mankind from destroying itself (as it may be my only means of increase entropy in the Universe quickly). Suddenly altruism is highly relative to one’s perspective on the Universe!

Last time I talked about some principles behind executing on goals. Our journey is not yet complete — since we still don’t know what our goals should be. So let’s travel upwards, determining what influences our goals, then what in turn influences that thing, and so on. Hopefully the framework is a finite one.

Our goals are influenced by our desires, our wants. At some level there isn’t much difference between goals and desires, except that desires may not necessarily be measurable. Desires are what makes our goals important: the goals then become a way to hold ourselves accountable for getting what we want.

This hasn’t made our search much easier, because we can still not know what our desires should be. At this point a lot of us have an intuitive understanding of our desires (“I want to be rich”, “I want to look good”, “I want to help starving children in Africa”, etc.) but I doubt many of us ask ourselves why this particular desire and not the other. This is particularly interesting as throughout our life our desires change.

I will single out one desire that a lot of people seem to have: happiness. I don’t like this word because it’s not very well-defined and, even worse, as one attempts to define it, one realizes that it’s self-referential (we want to be happy but ultimately we and only we decide if we’re happy). I will write more about happiness but I think fundamentally, happiness is linked very much with a concept of an afterlife (people who don’t believe in an afterlife want happiness in their life). If you think that you desire happiness, I’d encourage you to think why and what exactly you mean by this. Would you rather be content for all your life or unhappy for most of it and incredibly happy at the very end? Would you prefer to know more but be less happy, or be ignorant and happy? As you start asking yourself hard questions, I think you’ll realize that happiness is a kind of black hole that may actually be distracting from that ultimate question.

Our desires are influenced by our values. Everyone has a sense of values and based on these values we make decisions in life, specifically what we think is important, and hence what we want. Here some of us might value mankind, others may value freedom, others still may value human life (as in, an individual’s life).

Finally, our values are set by our purpose. I see the purpose as the singular value that we hold most dear, find most important. From the purpose we can derive all our values. Our purpose is usually also something that doesn’t change — once we figure it out in the first place, that is. This is also another reason why figuring out your purpose is incredibly important — the entire framework is a kind of a chaotic system where small changes to one layer can snowball into huge differences in the layers below. For example, if our values shift a little, our goals may be entirely different and so our actions will be nothing like what they were before (often they will be opposites) and they will permeate our lives. For example, if I start valuing quality relationships over their diversity, I may decide to stop commuting from the City and live in Connecticut instead.

Can we keep going? What influences our purpose? I think that we come up with our purpose based on our synthesis of our interpretation of the observable Universe. In other words, we absorb information through observation, analyze it, and find themes. As we continue synthesizing, we determine a very high-level model of the universe and with it, our place in it.

The reason this is a useful framework is that it is not infinite — you can’t ask “why” forever, because information is a fundamental phenomenon — we observe things about the universe, which we can treat as exogenous.

However, this doesn’t make thinking about purpose easy. You still have to take information in, and process it; find themes and reduce it to a model that you can reason about. You will likely encounter the metaphysical layer pretty quickly. While you may not be able to reason within that layer, you will probably be able to do some metareasoning.

Specifically, as you start asking yourself “what’s the point of all this that I see around me?”, you will have to answer an inconvenient question. I think I found a way to phrase it that gets to the bottom of a lot of the questions people have about the Universe. Do you believe in an afterlife which can be materially affected by the things you do in this life? (note that you may believe in an afterlife and still answer “No” to the above question!)

If you don’t, your purpose in life will naturally be larger than you — it will be about affecting the universe in a way that’s not simply localized to your life. For example, I believe, your purpose in life should not be to have a house, a well-paid job, and a family — these things affect mostly you and nothing else.

I think it’s much easier to think about the framework you should apply when thinking about your goals and purpose than to actually come up with the purpose. I’ll attempt to provide the framework I came up with. A nice thing about the framework is that it should be independent of one’s values, goals, and purpose — there may still be multiple different frameworks but they should be equivalent; modulo perhaps some things they are trying to optimize for (some framework may try to help you come up with a design more efficiently than some other, for example).

At the most fundamental level, this framework will help us answer a very simple question: “What should I be doing right now?”. We all ask ourselves this question many times (or wish to, but don’t): “Should I be working at my current job or not?”, “Should I buy a house?”, “Perhaps I should be helping poor children in third-world countries…”. We make some decisions but often we’re not sure whether our reasoning for our choices is correct. Ultimately, then, this will be the framework to guide us in making decisions in life.

Let’s start with goals because I think a lot of people viscerally understand what goals are. Goals are not the most concrete item but also not the most abstract (i.e. they influence other things in our life (for example, our actions), but are also shaped by other things), so we’ll have to explore goals in two directions — down (to the more concrete) and up (to the more abstract).

You may have been taught that goals should be SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. I’d actually simplify this mnemonic a little and say that a goal needs just one thing: to be measurable (i.e. you have to know when you’ve achieved it). For now I’ll assume that you already have a goal in mind that is measurable. Most likely it doesn’t have a timeline attached to it, and you’re not even sure if you can achieve it (other than a visceral feeling you have). This is fine, we’ll handle all these problems shortly.

The next step is to come up with a way to achieve that goal, a design. This is where art comes in. There is no formula for coming up with great designs. There are some properties that great designs have, however, and your design should also exhibit these properties:

• A good design is not sensitive to small changes in the inputs: if you miss some deadline, or if you catch a cold, a good design should be able to withstand it
• A good design anticipates any problems you may run into when trying to satisfy your goal
• A good design can be iterated upon so that it can be fine-tuned and altered
• A good design is modular — it consists of a list of subgoals that connect logically

You should be able to prove that your design satisfies your goal. This is usually hard, which is why having a modular design is a good idea — you should be able to prove at a high level why achieving subgoals X, Y and Z will achieve your goal G. We’ve just replaced our goal with three subgoals and a thin layer of “proof” connecting them all. Each subgoal needs a design, so yes, it may seem like there is much more work to be done, but these subgoals X, Y and Z are now most likely easier to measure (perhaps instead of a binary — “Have I achieved this goal?” — you can come up with a continuous — “How much of this goal have I achieved?” — measure). They may also be more timely (it’s good to get early feedback and if all you have is a binary goal and five years to achieve it, you are risking a big waste of time!) and specific, and, most importantly, they feel much more attainable (because they require less work to fulfill). And so as you come up with your tree of goals, the lower you get, the more SMART each goal gets. Ultimately, then, to fulfill your goal you just need to fulfill each of the “leaf” subgoals (and make sure that your logic for connecting subgoals is correct at each level). If at any point you are unable to come up with a design, you have an unrealistic or unattainable goal and you should alter your design.

Now that you have a design you can start executing on it. But you won’t get perfectly lucky — problems will arise that appear as outcomes in conflict with the outcomes you expected. A very smart man Ray (usually I fake out the initials but I hope he won’t mind me unanonymizing him) taught me a way to use these outcomes to refine the design (in fact, I owe my inspiration for coming up with my framework to him). The idea is simple: observe the outcomes, compare them to the outcomes you expect based on your design, and if the outcomes are in conflict, you have a problem. You can work around the problem, or solve it superficially, but the most effective thing to do is to alter your design based on fundamental, root causes of the problem. For example, if you’re a poor driver and keep smashing into walls, the solution is not to buy you a stronger car; it’s to improve your driving skills. If you alter your design according to the superficial causes, you are likely to encounter more problems that are due to the same fundamental cause.

In fact, in a robust design, you can anticipate all problems, diagnose them and change your design even before you started executing on it!

As you achieve your subgoals, you should make sure that your higher-level design is still correct by re-evaluating whether achieving your subgoals leads to a fulfillment of the overarching goal. It’s possible that your “proof” was weak and you didn’t take into account some inputs that have changed since you originally came up with your design. Or it was insufficient and you actually need to fulfill more than the subgoals you originally came up with.

Hence, assuming you know your goals already, you should be able to successfully execute upon them with a help of a simple design.

Now, to the much more interesting question: how do you come up with your goals?

Now I should be able to provide the proper context to what I’m going to be doing in the next four months.

To recap, I decided to spend the next four months (until October 10, 2009) figuring out my purpose in life, and testing myself on my ability to achieve goals.

Why the urgency, and the diligence? That is a good question — I agree that a normal expectation is for people to take their time figuring out their purpose in life. However, I believe it’s because the expectation is that most people are already pretty much on the right track (note that I think that’s the expectation and not necessarily the actuality). Once they figure out their purpose, there will probably only be a small correction necessary. Likewise, they don’t need to test themselves on the purpose because it’s achieved naturally and has wide acceptance criteria (i.e., it’s hard to screw it up).

While this may be the thing I do, I don’t think this is my purpose in life. In fact, a thought that my purpose in life would in some way be highly correlated with how I set up my life doesn’t resonate with me. I feel that my purpose in life should be greater than myself. It’s not a well-defined thing yet, just a gut feeling, but I’m going to go with it for now (unless I prove myself false). I think it has something to do with respect for mankind.

Given this I can no longer safely say that I’m on the right track (perhaps I need to be doing something entirely different with my life). This provides the task of figuring out my purpose in life with a notion of urgency. Similarly, I can no longer be sure that I’ll be able to achieve my purpose in life. Hence, I want to test myself.

I don’t think this is unique to me, necessarily. I believe that for most people their purpose is greater than themselves. I would encourage everyone to figure out their purpose in life as soon as possible just in case I happen to be right.

I think before I can say more about what I’m going to be doing for the next four months, I should provide some historical background on what ultimately motivated me to come up with my goals (which are to (a) find my life goals and (b) test myself on the ability to follow-through on goals). It’s an interesting case study that I hope will inspire other people.

On October 5, 2008, my twenty-fifth birthday, I decided to come up with 25 things to do while I’m 25. I decided to ask my closest friends to give me their recommendations for what should make the list. I wanted to avoid bias of any kind — so I asked my friends not to collaborate, but once I received their suggestions, I resent them all to everyone (the idea being that more information should only yield better recommendations). At first I wanted everyone to vote on what they want to see on the list, but W.G., a friend of mine, pointed out that such a scheme would provide me with all the mediocre suggestions (since they are most likely to be voted on by most people) and really not capture the spirit of the idea. Instead, I looked through my friends’ recommendations, and assessed how well they understood my goal (unfortunately that exposed me to some bias but I tried to be very careful about that). The responses were interesting — G.D., one friend of mine, gave me anti-suggestions (things from the aggregated list that he does not want me to do).

At the end I picked 10 of my friends’ recommendations and selected the other 15 (there was overlap between the two which allowed me to fill my list with more than the initial 5 items). I didn’t want my friends to influence my fulfillment of these goals so I didn’t publish the list with the intention to publish all goals that I met on October 5, 2009.

I found myself be incredibly disciplined around this list. For the first 7 months I’ve been working at these goals, and while I wasn’t going as fast as I would have liked to (plus, even though the goals were measurable, they were all different; some of them would take an entire year while others would literally take a couple of hours), I was very pleased with myself. I had a direction (at least for the next year) and I was going in that direction.

This is when I realized the importance of having goals, something to strive for.

And then, one day, I started thinking about this list. The goals were not logically connected; they were a laundry list of skills I wanted to gain, places I wanted to go, things I wanted to make. While they were measurable (an important property of any goal!), I felt that they didn’t tell any story, any narrative. I started asking an important question: why was I doing all this? True, there is a superficial element of being able to check off items as I do them (a sort of a game), and also an important element of me understanding my friends better and thus understanding myself a little better, but that understanding was an outcome of the initial exercise of them giving me their suggestions. Who cared if I actually achieved these goals?

I decided to take another look at my plan. I wanted to come up with a unifying theme, something that could be used to derive the goals on my list. Some had to go as they didn’t fit into any theme. The rest made a lot of sense and seemed to connect to one another. I had a visceral feeling that these are the right goals, and that they drive towards something I wanted to achieve.

That’s when I came up with my two goals. I aligned the surviving items from the original 25 in a taxonomy that made a lot of sense to me that connected neatly with the goals. I added more. While I wasted some time (I wanted to retain my original deadline of October 5, 2009), I felt much better about the new list.

Which highlights the importance of the iterative approach.

Two goals, really. I don’t like multiple goals (because we should really only have one goal; other goals should derive from it) but I don’t feel too bad about it (I’ll explain why).

(1) Find my life goals. (2) Prove to myself that I can execute on goals.

The timeline is fairly arbitrary; essentially I need enough time to have sufficient data points for (2) and not too much time so that (1) doesn’t drag on. And, specifically, let’s say that the deadline is October 10th (the Saturday after my birthday; the time around my birthday is symbolic).

(1) seems daunting. There is an element of intellect and an element of experience that are important to attempt to find my life goals. I feel that at this point in life I have enough of both (or, rather, enough of experience and still enough of intellect). I’ve been introspecting a lot more in the past nine months than I have been in my life before, and based on the kinds of thoughts I’ve been having in the past three months I feel ready.

The reason why I listed two goals and not one is that (1) becomes simply an intellectual exercise if I can’t follow through on my goals. Hence (2). Technically then I should do (2) first and then (1) but there is synergy in how these will be achieved — I will need to change the way I see and do things in order to do (2) successfully, and thinking about (1) will provide me with a framework to help me in this behavioral modification.