Rude Q&A

You probably have a lot of questions about everything I have presented in this book.

The ultimate objective of the book is probably one of the oldest known to mankind, but the approach I have taken is somewhat unusual. So, it is perfectly reasonable if you are confused or even incredulous. Maybe even annoyed.

I have tried to anticipate some of your questions and objections, including some that might sound rude, and attempted to address them in advance. If you have a question that is not addressed here, please ask and I will add it to the list.

A) Who are you? And why should anyone listen to you?

As far as this book is concerned, it shouldn’t really matter who I am. And I am not asking you to listen to me or take my word for anything that is presented here.

The beauty of proposing a framework based on evidence and reason is that it does not require that I claim to be an authority in the ideas presented. We don’t follow arguments and conclusions based on evidence and reason because some authority gave them to us. We follow the arguments and conclusions because they directly make sense to us, without requiring a middleman. Anyone can verify the ideas and reasoning presented in this book for themselves and agree or disagree based on whether their own exploration of the ideas convinces them.

I am not claiming to be a philosopher or even an accomplished writer. I am just a curious person at heart and an engineer by training. I started learning English in 5th grade, and somehow still developed a liking for writing in English. I have no particular authority in any of the fields I have talked about in this book, but I am a lifelong student who likes to dabble in a variety of subjects and I am fortunate to have had the time to spend on doing so.

Of course, it is quite likely that I have made mistakes in my construction of the MSE Framework, and in that case, I hope to hear about it, learn from it, and improve the framework accordingly. Doing so would be in line with the PBR methodology that the framework is based on. This is one of the reasons why I have published the book directly on the web.

This brings us to the next question.

B) What should someone do if they disagree with the arguments presented in the book?

I love honest disagreements. That is how I discover new information and advance my base of knowledge. So go ahead and air your disagreements with me. I am happy to engage in any meaningful debate.

Unlike many other debaters, my aim in every meaningful debate I engage in is not so much to win the debate but to discover new truths. (This is another benefit of being evidence- and reason-driven rather than authority-driven.)

In fact, I believe that when someone wins a debate, that means they have just wasted their time because they did not learn anything new! One should prefer to lose an honest and rigorous argument, because that would mean that they learned something new and thus deepened their own understanding of the issue. In my opinion, this is a far more interesting outcome.

Now let us talk about some similarities and differences between the approach presented here and the other well-known approaches to answering the hard questions of life.

C) Are you against faith or religion or spirituality in general?

Not at all. If someone believes in religion (or spirituality in general), I have no problem with that. I am not trying to convince them to give that up.

Religion and spirituality have withstood the test of time, and for very good reasons. They have provided a source of meaning, purpose and hope to billions of people. I am trying to bring those benefits to those who have already lost faith in religion or even spirituality. If someone has already moved on from their faith or never got too deep into it in the first place, and ended up having a meaning crisis as a result, then I hope my book will help them, just like it helped me.

Also, as I have noted earlier, there are some clear overlaps between what I have presented here and many religions and philosophies. Some of the final outcomes are very similar, except the methods used to get there are different, and, as discussed earlier, there are many significant and serious benefits to the methods used here. Using an approach based on evidence, reason and first principles allows us to understand why we are saying the things we are saying. We don’t have to take leaps of faith or take someone’s word for it. This approach allows us to challenge all the assumptions and the reasoning, and, whenever we learn something new about our reality, we can improve our assumptions, reasoning and even results and recommendations.

This brings us to the next logical question.

D) Is what you are proposing a new philosophy or ideology?

No.

What I am trying to define is just a scientific and engineering framework. I am not a philosopher or theologist by training, so I wouldn’t presume to make any serious proclamations in that area.

In my wildest dreams, I imagine that efforts like this will develop into a new field of science and engineering that deals with “Meaning Seeking”. Maybe we can call it Meaning Science or Meaning Engineering. I believe that we need something like this pretty badly at present and would love it if books such as this one motivate people in this direction.

Someday, maybe we will have high-school or college-level courses in this area. Such a course could probably parallel or follow immediately after students have gone through a good amount of STEM coursework. It could even provide additional motivation for students to take up these subjects because they will understand how the subject matter relates to reality and life.

I am not alone in undertaking this type of effort either. There are many others (as I have mentioned earlier) who have been working in this space. I am just another voice in that conversation. But this gives me hope that such efforts could turn into a movement in the near future.

E) Are you an advocate for scientism?

Scientism is the belief that scientific methods are the only way to obtain any truths about reality. And since scientific methods are based on evidence and reason, and the MSE Framework is also based on evidence and reason, it is reasonable for someone to think that I may be advocating for scientism.

I want to make it clear that I am not advocating for scientism in any way. Here are the ways that what I have presented in this book differs from scientism:

• I am only claiming that meaning, purpose and hope can be obtained even if you choose to stay within the bounds of evidence and reason. For a long time, we have been made to believe that evidence and reason are insufficient for obtaining things like meaning, purpose and hope. I am simply trying to debunk that specific claim, while making no grand statement about that being the only way.
• I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that there may be other ways of obtaining meaning, purpose and hope in life. I just want to add one more way to the list.
• I have repeatedly acknowledged that rationality has limits and that reality contains a lot of unknowns and nebulosity that science has not been able to capture (and may never be able to capture fully). As a result, I have proposed Present-Bounded Rationality as the methodology for this book and suggested that engineering is a better way to approach things like meaning, purpose and hope than pure science.
• I have also advocated for a humble approach that accepts that we don’t know everything, but we can still find a way forward, and keep looking for new ways to improve or even correct our understanding of reality. This is a big difference between any kind of “ism” and the approach taken in this book - I am not proposing any final or ultimate solutions.
• Finally, I have talked only about meaning, purpose and hope, which is a small subset of “all of truth”. I am not making any claims about all of the truth in this book.

I hope that should clear up any confusion about my views on scientism. Now let me address an objection that may come from the opposite direction.

F) Are you just putting old wine in a new bottle?

Some people might say that the conclusions we have reached based on the MSE Framework look a lot like the teachings of many religions or philosophies that have existed for a long time. What is new here? Is this just old wine in a new bottle?

Let me use that analogy itself to explain what is new here. Suppose you want to get a great bottle of wine for some special occasion. You have 2 options: You can go to the local wine store and ask the wine expert there for their recommendation and simply buy whatever they suggest. Or, you can browse through the aisles and read the descriptions of the wines there, wondering, “What do all the terms and ratings actually mean? Are they trustworthy? Why? What makes one wine better than another? How is wine even made? How are grapes grown?”

If you want to know the answers to all these questions, you will need to learn quite a lot about winemaking, viticulture, soil chemistry, geology, human taste and flavor perception, marketing tactics, and so on. Essentially, you will need to understand winemaking yourself from “First Principles”. Of course, this is a lot harder and time consuming. But if you do that, you won’t have to take the wine expert’s word at the store.

What if the wine expert isn’t as knowledgeable as they look? What if the expert is trying to push some wine at you because the winemaker gives them a kickback? What if the industrial wine manufacturing process is so bad that the entire inventory at the store is mediocre? What if there is a totally new way of winemaking that is far more robust and authentic? How would you know? Only after having studied winemaking from first principles would you understand enough to answer these questions honestly.

Now, I can totally understand someone who might say, “Why bother with all that? I’ll just drink the recommended wine and be happy!” I have no problem with that. But I also understand that there are people like me who don’t want to take the word of the expert and want to get a lot deeper. As I explained in the “Motivation” chapter, people like me don’t just want the answers, they want to know why those are the right answers. We want to understand the story behind the story, the principles beneath it, and why those specific principles, to the extent possible. If we do that, then we not only discover concepts and principles that are far more reliable, but there may also be ways to communicate them better, to improve them, to resolve conflicts and so on.

G) What is special about engineering when it comes to this topic? Why not call it just “science”?

There is no doubt that science and engineering are joined at the hip, with a lot of overlap. But I would like to point out a few things that are different about engineering and how they make a big difference to the MSE Framework.

The simplest reason for talking about engineering is that I am focused on finding a practical solution to the meaning crisis, which, as I have explained earlier, is a real and pressing problem for the world as well as for myself. Finding practical solutions to real-world problems is the domain of engineering. Science only helps us understand the rules of the game, that too only to the level possible via abstractions. Engineering is where the rubber actually meets the road.

Engineering is far better at dealing with the complexity, nebulosity and unknowns that permeate reality than science. This isn’t so much a weakness of science, but a difference in their objectives and methods. One can think of science as providing the bone structure, while engineering provides the muscles, blood vessels, nerves and skin.

As we saw in the chapter on our methodology, if we are going to build something that deals effectively with the messiness of reality, we need something like Present-Bounded Rationality to do that. And engineering is far more aligned with this methodology than science. Moreover, while the objective of science is to create abstractions that are fully buttoned down before making any serious claims, engineers can (and do) produce products and solutions that are in “beta” form. That means they are useful in their current form, but still being worked on and will keep improving. This is exactly what I am doing here.

H) Aren’t meaning and purpose really the domain of religion or even poetry? Isn’t it well known that science, let alone engineering, is simply incapable of getting there?

I’m so glad you asked this question because it lets me vent about a deep injustice in the history of human thought.

Imagine that there is a big table at which all the upper-class people get to sit and eat. Lower-class people aren’t allowed at this table. They have to eat in the kitchen or the backyard. Why? Because the upper-class people have decreed that the lower-class people are simply incapable of eating at the big table. Sitting there requires one to follow certain protocols, certain language, and certain mannerisms. Things that the lower-class people simply don’t know how to do. Leave alone the fact that it is the lower-class people who do all the cooking and cleaning. They provide all the plumbing and air conditioning and even the entertainment. They even make the table and all the crockery, the silverware, and the glassware on it. Including the expensive champagne.

This is basically the situation we have with religion and poetry on the one hand (the upper classes) and science and engineering on the other (the lower classes). At the big “meaning and purpose table”, only religion and poetry are allowed. Science and engineering can only do all the cooking, cleaning, plumbing, air conditioning, entertaining, furniture, crockery, silverware, glassware and even the champagne-making.

This is literally true! Science and engineering run our entire world. They provide everything we need in our lives. We count on them every minute of the day. But, somehow, we have allowed ourselves to be sold the idea that things like meaning and purpose are beyond their reach.

And if you dig a little deeper into the reasoning behind this thinking, you will see that this is simply a result of how the words meaning and purpose have been defined. The words probably started out simple enough, but somewhere along the way, their meanings got changed. They took on theological or poetic connotations. And then those became their core meanings. A part of the reason for this was that science and engineering were in their infancy at that time. They didn’t have many answers. So one had no choice but to look to religion or poetry.

But, as a result, most people have come to believe that meaning and purpose can only come from a supernatural power or some ineffable source, and can only be described in religious or poetic terms. And then they go ahead and declare that science and engineering are incapable of getting there because science and engineering don’t have the language or the protocols or the mannerisms for talking like that. In science and engineering, we have a technical term for this: “Well, duh!”

Note that I am not against religious or poetic usages of the words meaning and purpose. Feel free to use them that way. All I want to do is to ensure that science and engineering are also allowed to eat at the same table. (Not to mention that they are already doing everything else related to the dinner!)

Sure, you may be the type that doesn’t get swayed by such political or emotional arguments. You may have some more serious and well-known objections. So let us address them next.

I) Doesn’t Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem prove that your science and engineering-based approach is doomed to failure?

No. I have already covered this objection in a Deep Dive into Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in the chapter on Methodology.

J) Doesn’t the Is-Ought Problem in philosophy prove that trying to define Purpose from first principles is doomed to failure?

No. I have already covered this objection in a Deep Dive into the Is-Ought Problem in the chapter on Purpose.

K) Destructive things self-organize too. If a virus or a cancer cell is also a product of the tendencies, does it share our “greater purpose”?

Let us call this the “smallpox objection”: if we are defining meaning and purpose as alignment with the tendencies that produced you, and a smallpox virus or a cancer cell is also a product of some of the tendencies, such as Energy Flow and Self-Organization, then is its life meaningful and does it share in our greater purpose too?

The short answer is no, and the reason is that the tendencies come as a set, and destructive things express only part of the set.

Recall that there are eight Meaning-grounding Tendencies, four physical and four biological. A cancer cell does self-organize, and it does dissipate energy, so it expresses a couple of the physical tendencies. But look at what it fails to do. It does not genuinely couple; on the contrary, it destroys the larger coupled system, the body, that it depends on for its own existence. In doing so, it destroys itself along with its host. It is, quite literally, self-defeating. The same goes for a virus that kills its host too efficiently, or a parasite that consumes its ecosystem, or any purely extractive enterprise. They ride one or two tendencies while violating the others, especially Coupling, and so they burn themselves out.

Contrast that with the things we intuitively recognize as most alive and most meaningful: a thriving organism, a flourishing community, a healthy ecosystem. These express all eight tendencies. Crucially, the Coupling tendency. They sustain the larger wholes they belong to rather than cannibalizing them. So the tendencies don’t just permit life; they find their fullest expression in the living, conscious, coupled beings that build up rather than tear down.

This is why “alignment with the tendencies” is not a blank check for anything that happens to self-organize. It is alignment with the whole set, and the whole set, followed honestly, points away from the cancerous and the parasitic and toward the coupled, the sustaining, and the generative. A cancer cell is not a fellow traveler on our greater purpose; it is a cautionary tale about what happens when a system pursues a subset of the tendencies at the expense of the rest.

Now let us look at some other efforts that may have some overlap with what I have proposed.

L) How is the MSE Framework different from Effective Accelerationism (e/acc)?

Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) seeks, in its own activists’ words, to align with the “thermodynamic will of the universe” by embracing and accelerating the natural tendency of the universe toward growth, complexity, and higher intelligence. There is clearly some surface similarity with the MSE Framework.

But that’s where it ends. The critical difference is that I explicitly account for the limits of rationality, which is why my methodology is Present-Bounded Rationality rather than pure rationality. By contrast, e/acc is willing to extrapolate its ideas very far and shows little humility, mindfulness, or insistence on staying grounded in reality. Even a good idea, taken too far, eventually turns bad: drinking water is essential, but too much causes kidney failure. Taking rational thinking past the limits of rationality is, ironically, irrational.

Our aims also differ: e/acc wants to provide the ideological fuel for accelerating technology; I want to help Meaning-Seeking Entities, such as ourselves, find meaning, purpose and hope. I am not against developing technology (I am an engineer myself), but I am against the almost religious zeal of accelerationism that makes even rational people act irrationally. And where e/acc pays only lip service to consciousness, the MSE Framework treats it as a central pillar to be enriched and expanded. As Yuval Noah Harari put it, “if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.”

M) How is the MSE Framework different from the Omega Point concept?

The Omega Point, associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is a theorized distant-future event in which the entire universe converges toward a final point of maximum organized complexity. It is often framed as a counterpoint to the “heat death” that the law of entropy taken to the extreme would imply, and the tendencies it invokes overlap with our Meaning-grounding Tendencies.

The key difference is that the MSE Framework does not justify any present behavior by appeal to some extremely distant future event we cannot reliably predict. (There isn’t even scientific consensus on the heat death; various theories about the end of the universe exist.) Our framework relies on what can be observed right here, right now, which is where our knowledge of reality and our ability to act are both at their maximum. Extrapolating far into the future, given complexity, combinatorial explosion, and nebulosity, looks almost like a leap of faith. And, as the book shows, we simply don’t need to make that leap in order to arrive at solid definitions of meaning, purpose and hope.

N) How does the MSE Framework relate to Spinoza’s idea of God?

There are definite similarities. Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher and rationalist, proposed that there is only one substance in the universe, which he called God, and that everything, you, me, rocks, trees, exists as a part of it. He argued that understanding our place in this interconnected web and aligning ourselves with it leads to a kind of intellectual and emotional liberation. He was also influenced by Stoicism, which is closely related to the ideas underlying our own methodology.

So what I have presented has some amount of overlap with Spinoza’s argument. Spinoza was a strong proponent of rationalism, whereas we deliberately moderate our reliance on rationality with our focus on the present moment and bounded rationality. Also, we know vastly more about reality today than was known in Spinoza’s time, and we have taken full advantage of that in providing very concrete and verifiable justifications for what we are claiming. As a result, we have no need to invoke the concept of God as Spinoza does to make the arguments.

O) How does the MSE Framework relate to the Hindu / Vedic philosophy of Brahman?

In Vedic philosophy, Brahman is the ultimate, unchanging, formless reality underlying the entire universe, the source and essence of everything, and the purpose of life is to recognize our unity with Brahman and live accordingly. The MSE Framework’s effort to recognize the universe’s (and our own) inherent Meaning-grounding Tendencies and live in alignment with them is similar in spirit to aligning with Brahman.

Where we differ is in the details. There is no discussion of anything like the Meaning-grounding Tendencies in Vedic philosophy, probably because very little of today’s scientific knowledge was available when those ideas were developed, and because their approach leans more on introspection and meditation than on experimentation. In fact, Vedic philosophy treats physical reality as an illusion, and it hasn’t gone to great depths to explain the patterns in it the way science and engineering have. Also, Vedic philosophy considers our consciousness to be identical with Brahman; we make no such claim, and instead propose that consciousness may be a new life form that emerges in complex lifeforms as a result of Active Inference.

P) How does the MSE Framework relate to Buddhism?

Mindfulness, the cultivation of present-moment awareness and non-judgment, is a central practice in Buddhism, and it is also integral to the methodology we used to build the MSE Framework, namely Present-Bounded Rationality. We invoke mindfulness again when discussing how to find meaning, purpose and hope, because of the need to deal with complexity, nebulosity, and unknowns. Also, Buddhism holds that suffering arises from not aligning oneself with reality, which echoes our claim that aligning with the Meaning-grounding Tendencies is the way to a meaningful life.

But Buddhism, like the Vedic tradition, hasn’t focused on explaining physical reality or crisply defining its tendencies, for the same historical reasons. It is possible that science and engineering are simply newly available paths to some of the same realizations. One major point of difference: Buddhism rejects the idea of a self or consciousness, whereas the MSE Framework postulates that consciousness may be a new “virtual” life form that we give birth to and nurture, and, far from rejecting it, we embrace it and talk about expanding and enriching it.

Q) Is it possible to attain spiritual enlightenment using the MSE Framework?

Spiritual Enlightenment, also known as Moksha or Nirvana, is considered to be the ultimate goal for a spiritual seeker in Hinduism and Buddhism, respectively. It is a state when one is supposed to have truly and deeply understood and embodied the meaning of existence.

The ultimate goal of someone following the MSE Framework is to truly and deeply understand and embody the Meaning-grounding Tendencies of the universe. It is the realization that we are all an integral part of universal processes that have been going on for ages and will continue for ages, and living in accordance with this idea.

So one could say that the MSE Framework has the potential to become one of the paths to attaining spiritual enlightenment or Moksha or Nirvana. However, I must admit that the framework is still new and needs to mature and many people have to try it out and only then will we know if this potential can actually be realized. I believe that there are multiple paths to spiritual enlightenment and one should choose the path that suits them best. For someone who wants to stick to evidence and reason alone, the MSE Framework may provide just the early beginnings of one such path.

R) What is Deepest Turtle?

[ Aha! Finally, a non-rude, even self-serving, question! ]

Deepest Turtle is my lifelong project to make sense of life in general, as rigorously and systematically as possible. This book is a part of that greater effort.

Please take a look at the website to get a better idea about the project: Deepest Turtle. You can also follow the project on the social media sites mentioned at the bottom of the page.

S) I still have questions. How do I send them to you? How do I contact you in general?

Follow the Deepest Turtle project using the social media links listed there. You can ask additional questions there. And, once again, note that there are no rude questions as long as they are honest.