find_purpose.exe
Searching for larger meaning in an uncertain world.
If you found out that the Christian God was real, and all the things in the Bible were true, would you change your behavior? What if, instead, you found out you are in The Matrix, and you could take a pill to escape to the real world?
I suspect that such revelations would instantly change your values and actions. You would know that the concerns of this universe are less important than the bigger Universe1 that contains it.
Currently, we don’t have any such revelations, so most people align themselves with the smaller universe. They value smaller values, and act toward smaller goals.
In this post, I will argue that we ought to pursue bigger values and goals, even though we don’t know they exist. In order to mindfully choose what to type into The Terminal, we must consider what we know, what we don’t know, and the grandeur of what we might gain. The unknowns of the Universe beckon us toward a purpose that transcends than our current pursuits.
You likely don’t agree with me yet. Many of us have adopted a common framework for purpose, one rooted in existentialist ideas. But this logic, while intuitive, may limit us. Let’s examine it together—including its limiting assumption—and explore a more rational, open-minded way to view the universe.
The flawed popular logic
Many people today answer the question of purpose like this: We should pursue goals like authentic freedom, social justice, creative expression, happiness. These vague goals, while admirable, are based on limited understandings of the world. They assume that conscious experience is the most important aspect of reality to maximize. Is this a safe assumption? Do you share it? Here’s how the logic works:
Premise 1: The universe began at the Big Bang and will end with the heat death.
Premise 2: Reality is limited to what science currently describes.
Premise 3: Meaning is tied to temporary conscious experience.
Conclusion: Therefore, temporary conscious experience is the only source of meaning in all of reality.
I understand the appeal of this logic because I once believed it. It tries to derive meaning from our current scientific knowledge. That’s a noble approach, far better than attempting to glean meaning from ancient religious texts.
But let’s examine Premise 2 more closely. “Reality is limted to what science currently describes.” It can be phrased as Russell’s teapot: we should not believe outlandish claims simply because they can’t be disproven—a principle that once helped me argue against religions. The problem is that it implies that our understanding of the universe is complete, which is simply false. Recent discoveries like quantum mechanics, dark matter, dark energy, and gravitational waves show how much remains unexplored.
Reality is mysterious
These advances in physics should challenge the notion of a closed, fully understood universe. There is more to discover. We currently only have guesses about what caused the Big Bang. While any single guess—simulation, divine creation, cosmic Darwinism—might seem as speculative as Russell’s teapot, we should not ignore all of the possibilities. Premise 2 assumes too much certainty, yet the flawed popular conclusion relies on it. If there is something more to reality than the universe, then we can’t be certain that conscious experience is the most important source of meaning.
Why should these possibilities change what you type into your terminal? Here’s an example based on a short story I wrote2. Imagine you are a conscious human skin cell. To you, the world is a pulsating mass of cells, indifferent to your existence. If cellular conscious experience is all that matters, you might decide not to continue tediously making skin proteins. But as a full human reading this, you know cellular conscious experience is not all that matters!
It is good3 that our individual skin cells continue making skin proteins. By doing so, they contribute to higher purposes than they could on their own. Similarly, individual humans should strive to contribute to higher purposes if they exist. Just as the cell is unaware of its role in a larger reality, we may also be acting within a purpose we don’t yet understand.
The cell will never understand its role, but we might, especially as we build more advanced instruments. Bigger particle accelerators could uncover more fundamental phenomena. We first detected gravitational waves only nine years ago, and proposed projects will eventually measure waves from just after the Big Bang, peeking behind the opaque CMB curtain for the first time. There are clear scientific directions to pursue, which might reveal to us a bigger cosmos and clarify our place in it.
Uncertainty in purpose
Of course, we don’t yet know whether higher purposes exist. How should we handle such uncertainty? To be rational, we should use expected values. This means we should assign a numerical credence to each possibility.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you are 99% certain that there is no higher purpose. That leaves a 1% certainty that higher purpose does exist. Now we assign relative values. First, if humans progress at current rates and don’t discover higher purpose, we can give that a value of 1. So there is a 99% chance we will get 1. After multiplying together, we can expect to get 0.99 in value.
The second value is the value of discovering and fulfilling a higher purpose. I would set this very high. Think about the skin cell. A lone cell makes very little lasting impact on reality, but the human can create ripples that propagate for decades, centuries, millenia. Is the human’s purpose more important than the skin cell’s by a million times? A billion? More? It’s a big number in my view.
Multiply that big number by 1%, and you get much more than 0.99. The expected value of the unlikely-but-grand purpose can dwarf the expected value that we are currently pursuing with the flawed response. If there’s even a small chance this purpose exists (as proper Bayesian reasoning mandates), seeking it allows us to avoid missing out on something vastly more meaningful4. This calculation ought5 to change how you (and everybody else) pursue meaning in the world, and what you type into your terminal. Helping humanity find its purpose might be the most mathematically meaningful thing you can do.
So what should you do?
The skin cell does not need to consciously pursue its higher purpose because the process of evolution has streamlined the cell to do so automatically. You are not so lucky—nor so limited. Unlike the cell, you can reason your way to higher purpose. You can and should aim to be like the contributing skin cell, not the cancerous one that pursues its own ends.
If we are indeed part of a larger whole, then survival, cooperation, and discovery become paramount to our purpose. Here are some foundational steps you can take, which won’t require you to abandon your smaller but still important goals (and may even support those goals):
Protect humanity’s future
Pay attention to existential risks (global risks that could cause our extinction). If humanity doesn’t survive, you can’t contribute to higher purpose, so you ought to prioritize our survival. Practically, this may mean voting for candidates who promote stability, or donating to groups who think about existential risks (e.g. Effective Altruists or rationalists).
Expand understanding
Learn about the world. You are constantly doing this, of course, but it must be mentioned. This involves remaining mentally flexible, allowing your understanding to change with new evidence.
Support fundamental discovery. Higher purposes may be uncovered through physics, requiring large-scale tools like particle accelerators and space telescopes. Public funding is essential for such projects, and they often yield unexpected benefits, from medical advancements to technological breakthroughs.
Foster unity and stability
Become more mindful. Our brains are being yanked around by capitalist forces, like social media, ads, and the news. While it’s natural to engage with these, it’s important to work to avoid actions that reduce social stability and the likelihood of collective action. For example, see this post for a discussion on mindfully resisting Donald Trump.
Advocate collectivism. Like the skin cell, you can’t do it alone. Push for unity, collaboration, and cooperation at every level—from communities to nations—so humanity as a whole can work toward our higher purpose.
This is a lot to ask, I know. But since you’ve read this far, you must see some merit in it. Or you disagree, in which case I hope to hear from you in the comments. Either way, stay tuned. Next week’s post will dive into how our political systems can evolve to help us explore this complex, beautiful Universe together.
I will use the lowercase “universe” to refer to the observable universe, and the uppercase “Universe” to refer to the larger reality, which includes the universe and may include more.
This story is available to friends upon request.
More on goodness and how to define it in a future post.
The logic here is similar to Pascal’s Wager, though we have the advantage of not being committed to any single source of higher purpose.
I intentionally use the word “ought” because I do believe that how the world “is” tells us much about what we “ought” to do. So I am an ethical naturalist. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in a future post about this topic.