The Solution in your Head
Entry question: What is the purpose of life?
Warning: This is a highly, highly experimental essay. It’s probably gonna be useful only for the new directions of thought it provokes, not for anything it presents in itself.
Update: December 2022 - I see a lot of mistakes in this essay, such as talking in terms of unobservable variables (“the Solution in your Head”), but I’ll leave it up for the point it makes about how you’re not really looking for a box with the “purpose of your life”.
Setting it up
In “The Big Problems”, I started talking about the biggest obstacles on our path to getting what we want. What I left out there was the most important issue - what do we really want?
What is it that we’re searching for? What is the “purpose of our Life”? Is there any “meaning to Life”?
We’ll answer all these questions and more.
The necessary first step
Let’s look at the problem in more detail (long long time since I’ve been saying this).
What would the Solution look like? If I said there was someone behind the door who had the Solution, what would you guess about the nature of the Solution, without knowing anything in particular about that person?
Ground rule: We talk only in terms of… words? dictionary definitions? references to philosophers? Nah! Only Impact.
Ok, assume I have a gift-wrapped Box with me. In it lies the answer to all the questions you’ve been asking about goals and purposes and meaning and stuff.
The essence of all your questions basically is - How should I live my life?
We want something that will tell us what we should do at each point in life.
Well, the Solution inside will tell you exactly how you should best live your life.
I hand over the Box to you. You are free to open it after a minute.
What happens now? What will the Impact be? Why do you want the answer? Why not just throw the Box away?
Planning Ahead
What will happen when we have the Solution?
We may not know what the Solution will be, but we’re expecting something we can use, right? We don’t expect the “Solution” to be “42”. That doesn’t tell us anything. It is of no use to us.
Remember what I’d written a long time ago, in the overconfident exuberance of my youth, about solving Hard problems?
When you have banged your head about for what seems like forever and have bruised your head to the size of a pumpkin, you may NOW go to a person in the know and ask two or three pointed specific questions.
These questions should be like door-keys.
You should be confident that once you have the answers to these questions (aka the keys), you can basically go straight ahead and open the door to the safe.
You should have figured out just about everything else.
Once you get these answers and turn the key in the keyhole, everything else should click into place and the safe should open.
It’s like you have a safe which you know is opened by some combination. A genie appears in front of you. When you ask the genie what the combination to the safe is, you know the answer is gonna be somewhere between 0000 to 9999 (or whatever). Or, worst case, the safe could be tricked up such that no combination opens it. Cool. But these are the ONLY possibilities. The genie’s answer can only be one of these.
Which means, you can decide on actions for each eventuality, well in advance. If the genie says 1376 is the key, you will punch in 1376. If the genie says 8365, you will punch in 8365. If the genie says there is no combination, you will call in some heavy machinery and drill the shit out of that safe.
Your plans of action have already been decided. All you need to know is which plan you need to take forward.
And remember, there has to be an answer to the questions you’ve asked. There has to be a best way (or several best ways) to live your life. Not all life outcomes are equally valuable, right?
So, assume that the gift-wrapped Box contains The Solution, the right one.
Contemplating the Ifs
What will you do if the “Solution” says that life has no meaning?
What will you do if the “Solution” says that the purpose of life is to go to the “Why this Kolaveri Di” Youtube page and watch it again and again?
Let’s kick it up a notch. What if the “Solution” says that the purpose of life is to go and shoot everybody else on the planet?
What if the “Solution” says that the purpose of life is to kill your parents, siblings if any, relatives, best friends, and any babies you find along the way?
What if the “Solution” says the purpose of life is to cut off your legs and toss them into the ocean?
What if the “Solution” says the purpose of life is to kill yourself as soon as possible?
Legitimately Wrong
First off, recognize that every single one of the above “Solutions” is a perfectly legitimate answer to your question.
“What is the purpose of life? Kill your loved ones.” You can imagine a world where this answer could be right. It probably won’t be anything like our world, but it is possible.
And yet, every one of them is laughably wrong. There is just no way any of them is the real answer!
But how could you know that?!
You don’t know the real answer to the question. You could be mistaken, right? People in the past were mistaken about what revolved around what, and whether the Earth was flat, and stuff. Why couldn’t we be wrong about what the “purpose” of our life is?
What’s happening here?
A Method to the Madness
This means we already have some information about the Solution, which constrains the set of possible solutions. The Box can’t contain any arbitrary goal and proclaim it to be the “purpose of our life”.
I claimed at the beginning that the Solution is basically something that will tell us what we should do at each point. It will give us the answer to the question: “How should I live my life?”.
But here, we overrode the advice the Solution gave! That means that the Solution is not the final adjudicator. We make the final decision. We are using a different Solution in our Head to decide what we should do. That Solution in our Head is what we’re really using to decide how to live our life.
This means that, for all practical purposes, there is no point in saying that Solution X is the real way we should live our lives. Why not? Because it is not gonna have any Impact. If it contradicts with the Solution in our Head, we will not do anything Solution X says. The Solution in our Head is the one we are going to use at the end of the day.
Dude! I know you’re struggling here, but you seem to be making a basic error. The Solution in your Head is what you will use to decide how you live. But the Solution in the Box is what you should use to decide how to live.
That isn’t the real point. The point is, does it matter?!
How does it affect anything in any way what the Solution in the Box is? You will not do what it says. At the end of the day, the only Solution that you will use is the Solution in your Head.
In fact, suppose I came to you and said that the real, true, ultimate purpose of your life is to go kill your family members. Not for any good reason, like “you will get insurance money”. Just do it because it is the “real purpose” of your life. You will laugh in my face. There is no way it is happening. Why? Cos it clashes with the Solution in your Head.
On the contrary, if I said that part of the “purpose of your life” is to have fun with your friends and hang out with members of the opposite sex and stuff, you will agree in a jiffy. What happened? Yup. It agreed with the Solution in your Head.
Inescapable Reality
Think about what this means. The Solution is not out there somewhere. It is in your head. In fact, it cannot be outside your head. No matter what is shown in front of you as your purpose, you will always judge it using… the Solution in your Head.
In f*cking fact, you cannot do anything different!!
There is no way on Earth you can judge something without using the Solution in your Head!
Your view is FOREVER coloured!
Kissing girls - awesome (for boys)!
Kissing the backend of a syphilitic donkey - yuck!
Murdering loved ones randomly - yuck! No!
Hanging out with friends - yay!
Giving some of our hard-earned money to a friend in need - Right.
Having sex with someone against their will - Wrong.
All else being equal, no matter how eloquently some Solution X tries to convince you that you must go and rape innocent people, you will not do it. You will just show it the middle finger.
There we go! We do have information about the Solution. It’s right here in our head. There is already a GPS in our head guiding our path through life.
Mapping the Territory
Is that all there is to it?
Remember, if we already have the Solution in our Head, then there is no use in opening the Box. We can just throw it away. It is not gonna give us any new information. It won’t change anything. We will still do exactly the same thing we were gonna do anyway.
Hmmm… So Humans should basically want and do the same things no matter when or where they are… right?
But are there any discrepancies? Yeah! In the non-normality essay, we saw how our notion of what is “normal” had kept evolving over the ages. No to Slavery, No to Disenfranchisement of Women, Sorta-Ok to Living it Large while Lots of Other People Suffer… yup. Normality has been evolving. And that is nothing but our good old friend, Mr. Solution in our Head.
Killing another man in a duel over some trifling matter wasn’t too much of a big deal earlier. It was honorable, even. Now it is considered a very bad thing to do, other things being equal.
The Solution has evolved! Or, rather, our understanding of the Solution in our Head has evolved.
It is like a rough map of some terrain. Initially, it just marks out some hills and a river (“Don’t kill me, I won’t kill you. Let’s hunt together”). Nothing is to scale. There are vast parts unmarked (“how to treat women, blacks, gays, etc.”). Then, as we gain more and more knowledge, we fill in the vaguer parts of the map (“Ah! Black people are basically just like me. It is wrong to treat them like slaves”).
Make no mistake, we have just explored a tiny bit of the territory. There are huge sections of the map still hazy and blank.
Not only can we discover things we didn’t know, we can overturn beliefs that were wrong. People in the past firmly believed that it was ok to beat children like hell. Now, people are changing their minds.
In essence, it is like there is this actual territory out there which we are slowly capturing in our maps. Step by step, we are evolving our maps towards the actual territory. We are upgrading our understanding of the Solution in our Head.
Important Takeaways so far
Yes, I know, I’m sucking at this. That’s fine. It’s what I signed up for. Will get better with feedback (*nudge nudge, wink wink*).
The crucial part is that nobody can come up to you and tell you that they know The Right Way (TM) to live life and that you should follow that way whether you like it or not. The Right Way (TM) - the Solution - is already in your head. The best somebody can do is help you uncover more of the Solution in your Head, to draw a more accurate map of the real territory.
What is more, the Solution in our Head is inescapable! You cannot avoid it. No matter what new Solution X you consider, you will always end up judging it through the lenses of the Solution in your Head. At the end, you will only accept whatever it agrees with. Which means, the only Solution you will accept will be the Solution in your head. Nothing else. Lots more on this later.
Note, however, that you don’t know the full extent of the Solution in your Head. Your understanding of the Solution keeps evolving with time. As you experience life and come across new arguments and stuff, you will overturn old beliefs and adopt new shoulds. You will come to better understandings of how you should live your life.
But, you can never escape the Solution in your Head. Even if you change your mind about how to live, it will still be in accordance with the Solution in your head. It is just that earlier you were mistaken in your understanding of the Solution. Now, it is just that you understand it better. Whatever the Solution says, stays. The Solution is King.
In fact, looking from the Impact, there is no point in differentiating between “you” and the Solution in your Head. They are basically the same. “You really want” what the Solution says is right. And the “Solution says is right” what you really want. That means that our Ethics, our Solution, our Right Way (TM), come from within, not from somewhere else. We already possess them.
Does that mean they are not real? Are they just something we can change at any time? What is up with all this shit? And why do we care? Is it all just happening in our head?
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
– Thalaivar Albus Dumbledore
(to be continued)
PS
Struggled like hell with this!
Finally got a breakthrough in the form of the Inescapable Reality thing. That was the crux. More clarifications and ideas and Impacts coming up.
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