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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 15:53 and is filed under purpose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.