The Whole Book in One Diagram

“Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.”

― Albert Einstein, Quoted in "Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future" by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

― Marcel Proust, French writer

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Since I am an engineer, I like to draw diagrams to help me think, as well as to present my thinking to others. Here is a diagram that captures how I have gone about deriving meaning, purpose and hope based on evidence and reason alone, starting from First Principles.

Let us start from the top of the diagram.

First, we define our methodology, which we call Present-Bounded Rationality (PBR). It is based entirely on evidence and reason, avoiding taking any leaps of faith or accepting any sort of dogma, no matter how respectable their source may be. (The meaning of each of the terms in PBR will be explained as we progress through the book.)

And yes, the PBR methodology acknowledges that we don't know everything and there is still a lot of nebulosity even in the things we do know. Not only that, but the methodology also acknowledges and accounts for the fact that there are well-known limits to rationality.

The beauty of the framework presented in this book is that we can still come up with solid definitions of meaning, purpose and hope based on this methodology.

I am calling this framework itself the Meaning-Seeking Entities (MSE) Framework. (These terms will also be fully defined in the book.)

The framework starts with a discussion of our Ultimate Reality (or the Great Unknown, if you prefer), followed by Physical Reality on one side, and Consciousness on the other, the two major foundations of the framework. We further show the phenomenon of Life emerging out of Physical Reality.

We also note that, at present, we do not know for sure the relationship between Consciousness and Physical Reality or Life. We do not even know if Consciousness is more fundamental or Physical Reality. But we do not depend upon knowing these things, and do not need to privilege one or the other to build our framework.

Note that we take all necessary care to avoid the typical pitfalls associated with other frameworks that attempt to define things like meaning, purpose and hope, such as needing to take leaps of faith or poetic licenses or appealing to authority. We honestly acknowledge our limits and yet make progress towards our goals.

Based on all of the above, we show that we have incontrovertible evidence that the universe appears to exhibit certain ubiquitous and ever-present "tendencies", which we call the "6CED" Tendencies. We define these tendencies and also define what we mean by Meaning-Seeking Entities (MSE) that naturally emerge from these tendencies.

We further define what we mean by meaning, purpose and hope, and where our desire for them emerges from.

Finally, all of this structure allows us to come up with rigorous definitions of meaning, purpose and hope, based on evidence and reason alone.

And, once again, being an engineer myself, I can't leave you with just some abstract definitions. I have gone ahead and defined some practices that anyone can follow on a regular basis to benefit from these ideas in their own lives.

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