3. Bottomline: If Not Evidence and Reason, Then What?
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“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller, American architect and systems theorist
"Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational."
― Herbert A. Simon, American political scientist
We are lucky to be living in an era when we know so much about our world, discovered through a process that relies upon evidence and reason alone.
In fact, this may be the first time in our history that we can even talk about creating a coherent and comprehensive framework for navigating life's big questions of meaning, purpose and hope, based purely on a foundation of science and engineering, or more broadly, evidence and reason.
We are now at a point where those of us who have adopted evidence and reason as their primary guides in life, and have suffered from a loss of meaning as a result, can begin to recover it. And, with that, our sense of well-being, belonging, and happiness.
Before this, we didn't even have the required background knowledge for doing something like this, and as a result, had no choice but to take leaps of faith or just trust our intuitions and opinions.
It goes without saying that a framework based on a foundation of evidence and reason can be far more trustworthy than one based on faith or dogma. Moreover, just like any body of scientific knowledge, such a framework can be openly challenged and even improved by anyone who comes up with something that can be proven to be better.
Also, having the universal common language of science and math at its core ensures that people with vastly different religious, cultural, or ideological backgrounds can widely share and study the framework. It can even serve as a unifying force for all people around the world.
Beyond that, such a framework can provide new and deep insights into reality that, for many, can even reignite a sense of awe and gratitude for being a part of something so awesome. Such feelings are normally associated with faith-based lines of thinking, but it is possible to recover them even when walking on this path.
Over the next few chapters, I intend to describe such a framework that can accomplish all of the above and then some.
But before we go there, let us go over some disclaimers and potential sources of confusion.
(Note: You will see me using the words “evidence and reason”, “rationality”, “science and engineering”, or just “facts and logic” somewhat interchangeably in this book. I am doing this mostly to break the monotony. We will talk about the relevant nuances that make them slightly different when needed.)
I want to emphasize that I am not against any religion or philosophy. This book is not trying to stir up a controversy on that topic like so many other books that talk about science or rationality.
I am a curious person with a STEM background. I have simply followed my curiosity honestly and diligently and, to my own pleasant surprise, discovered some very interesting results and ideas in the existing scientific literature that provide all the basis needed for answering the deeper questions of life. I have had to add just a few extensions of my own and connect everything together into a coherent whole to form a complete framework.
Moreover, as I already mentioned in the chapter on Motivation, going through this exercise has been personally useful to me. It has brought a certain level of serenity and clarity to my life. I have also been able to recover my sense of awe and gratitude about life that we usually associate with faith.
And most importantly, I have a strong and defensible basis for saying all of this. I don't just know the "whats", but also the "whys" and "hows" of what I am saying, to the best extent possible.
As I went about researching the material for this book, and the vague outlines of a framework started crystalizing in my mind, many seemingly disconnected concepts that were all tangled up in my head got straightened out and a new sense of understanding emerged out of the clutter.
Many of the details got even clearer as I started writing things down, structuring them in a way that made sense to me, adding diagrams to explain them visually and so on.
They say that you only understand something well when you try to explain it to others. I have found this to be absolutely true. I have learned so much more about this topic, and even about myself, while writing this book.
Also note that, just like any other ideas in science, none of the ideas presented here should be taken as cast in stone or unquestionable.
This is why I prefer to think of the ideas in this book as a collection of scientific facts and results, not as a philosophy or doctrine. Everything in it can be challenged, tested, proven wrong, improved or replaced.
Still, I can imagine some of you rolling your eyes at the, admittedly, tall claims I am making.
There is a persistent dogma, even among scientists and engineers themselves, that things like meaning, purpose and hope are beyond the scope of their fields.
As a result, embarking on such an endeavor might come across as either incredibly naive or unbelievably arrogant.
Not without good reasons either. History is full of people who have tried to do similar things that resulted in disasters. Even recent history is full of “tech-bros” getting carried away with too much hubris and arrogance, getting into areas they had no depth or breadth in. So, it would be perfectly reasonable to ask: Am I just repeating their mistakes?
I am painfully aware of such objections. I accept the fact that this project is rather audacious and your skepticism may be justified. I am a skeptic too, just like most scientists and engineers are, so I can absolutely empathize with such suspicions.
So let me try to address some of these suspicions and objections in advance.
No kidding! Certainly, this endeavor is rather audacious, if I may say so myself. So, allow me to offer the following arguments in my defense:
Having mentioned audacity, I guess it is time for me to talk about humility.
Other people who have undertaken this endeavor in the past have indeed failed miserably.
People in various parts of the world have tried to create entire architectures, economic systems and ideologies based on taking rationalism to the extreme. These attempts have resulted in everything from lifeless neighborhoods to failed economies to even unthinkable violence.
In my opinion, all of these failures were a result of hubris. Over-reliance on abstract reasoning without sufficient input from empirical evidence or an underestimation of the complexity of reality—whether in philosophy, economics, science, or moral reasoning—led them to extremes. They kept forging ahead even when weaknesses in their thinking started becoming evident.
One can say that they left rationality behind while pushing ahead with rationalism. Taking things to an extreme even in the face of evidence of failures is not rational.
We can certainly learn from these mistakes of the past and avoid their pitfalls. This is why we always say "evidence and reason" instead of just reason. And we talk about humility and willingness to change based on evidence.
These ideas are major pillars of the framework I am proposing. You will see them pop up time and again in the book.
Having gotten that out of the way, let us get back to some of the main justifications for following this approach.
In the old days, it was customary for people to go to religious leaders when they were facing important life decisions such as what career path to choose or whom to marry or how to get rid of some ailment they may have been suffering from, and so on.
This was all we could do when we didn’t have any better way of answering those questions. But over time, we have discovered far more reliable methods, based on science and engineering.
Here is a list of such questions and the modern methods we routinely use to answer them:
Modern methods: Creating a personal occupational and psychological profile, matching it to career profiles, looking at employment statistics and jobs databases, browsing career social networks etc.
Modern methods: Medicine, diet plans, exercise regimes, therapy etc.
Modern methods: Psychological profiling, meetup or dating services, social media, relationship advice etc.
Modern methods: Maps, demographic data, employment and living cost data, weather, and other statistics etc.
Modern methods: Financial planning, investing, budgeting, insurance, accounting, entrepreneurship etc.
As you can see, all of these modern methods are primarily based on evidence and reason, not faith or dogma.
Wouldn’t the next logical step be to use the same methodology to answer life’s deepest questions also? In fact, don’t some of the questions from the list above partly rest on answering those deeper questions?
What’s the holdup then, besides some dogma that somehow, these deeper questions are beyond the reach of reason?
Even if you could make only partial progress using this approach, wouldn’t that be preferable to relying on something for which there seems to be no basis at all?
Which brings us to my next defense.
The "meaning void" and "meaning crisis" that I mentioned in the last chapter are real.
Studies after studies have shown an alarming increase in depression and anxiety, polarization and intolerance, nihilism and conspiracy theories that have their roots in people not being able to find authentic and deep sources of meaning in their lives.
In addition, as a result of the amazing strides we have made recently in science and technology, our ways of life and thinking have been seriously upended.
In many cases, the frames of reference, realities of life and ways of thinking that were in vogue when various world religions or philosophies were developed would look alien to us today. We have drastically changed many aspects of our lives: the way we make a living, educate ourselves, connect with each other, feed ourselves, entertain ourselves, and so on.
This makes it urgent that we review the ideas of meaning and purpose that have been around for centuries and have formed the basis for a lot of our culture and institutions.
Moreover, some of the new technologies like AI, robotics and genetic engineering are raising entirely new questions about what it means to be human or what life itself means. It won’t be too long before we are forced to make serious decisions about how to deal with them.
We badly need a rigorous framework that is based on the current body of knowledge and can address these challenges effectively.
The cost of not doing so can be very high, which brings me to the next point.
We supposedly live in the “Postmodern Era”, which arose as a reaction to the excesses of the “Modern Era” that preceded it.
The Modern era was based on grand, centralized, all-encompassing theories and ideologies, many of which were based on science and rationality, but taken a bit too far. During that era, the pendulum swung too far, and as a result, it was only natural for it to reverse course and swing too far in the opposite direction.
This is what gave rise to the Postmodern era, which rejected everything that the Modern era stood for. Grand, centralized narratives of Modernism went out the door and Postmodernism set us free to find our own way.
A common refrain of our times is, "You don’t need someone to tell you how to find meaning in your life, you can make it up yourself". Anything you feel is meaningful, by definition, is. Period.
This is a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately, this has led to many people falling for all kinds of superficial or even dangerous ideas. The usual culprits here are extreme selfishness on one side or fads, totally made-up or shallow causes, conspiracy theories, opportunistic “influencers” touting various flaky schemes, and so on on the other side.
People who have been set adrift as a result of the Postmodern ideology can easily fall into such "Meaning Traps". Some of these traps even provide some sense of meaning, purpose and community, but people eventually get disappointed or at least confused. Worse, they get stuck in such traps, sometimes just digging themselves deeper into them.
Many people who tire of such Meaning Traps simply accept defeat, set their doubts aside and turn back to religious or philosophical or poetic ideas that they had left behind.
What I am trying to do is to offer a way to move forward instead of going back. A framework for meaning that is based on the deep, wide and proven body of knowledge known as science and engineering can help us free ourselves from such traps while avoiding the shortcomings of other approaches.
Reductionism is the idea that we can understand and explain reality fully by analyzing and describing all complex phenomena in terms of phenomena at a simpler or more fundamental level. Science, to a large extent, is based on this idea.
And it has been proven again and again that this approach doesn't always work in reality, particularly when we are talking about very complex phenomena.
For example, we currently can not explain consciousness in terms of neuronal activity, or the wetness of water in terms of molecular chemistry, or predict the shape of clouds from the movement of molecules of water or the day to day movement of markets from the fundamentals of individual companies.
A big reason for our inability to do so is that these phenomena are extremely complex, and trying to explain them in terms of small components quickly becomes computationally intractable. Also, some of these phenomena are emergent i.e. not only are they complex and intractable but they appear to display higher-order behaviors that don't even have a counterpart at the lower level, such as wetness or consciousness.
But it's not like we have any other way of explaining or predicting them either!
The point here is that we aren't claiming that we can explain everything fully using the methods of evidence and reason. What we are claiming is that these methods have a great track record of explaining many phenomena really well, are improving all the time, and nothing else even comes close.
People often say that faith or poetry "explain" a lot of these unexplained phenomena. But what they really mean is that faith or poetry are gesturing at or partly characterizing some of these things that we haven't found good explanations for. It is true that they may be pointing out some shortcomings in what science and engineering can do, but that doesn't mean they have anything better to offer in terms of explanatory or predictive power or accuracy. If you investigate these claims seriously, you invariably find erroneous assumptions, invalid evidence and ill-defined processes at play.
I see no point in relying on something even less proven than evidence and reason.
There is an implicit assumption in the criticisms of reason that it can never explain "everything". But we don't need to explain everything here. We have a much narrower goal of finding meaning, purpose and hope in life. And, as we shall see, we can absolutely do that!
This is similar to how we are able to land on asteroids or etch nano-scale circuits in semiconductors or edit DNA even when we don't know "everything".
This brings us to probably the most important question of all.
If some real phenomena cannot be explained by evidence and reason, then what would you suggest we use?
If you believe that some phenomena are forever beyond the reach of reason, but you still believe them to be real, then, knowingly or unknowingly, you are admitting that you believe in some magical or supernatural power.
This is because there is no other way. We have only two choices for creating explanations or solutions: evidence and reason on one side, and faith, poetry or magic on the other.
Yes, it is true that some phenomena are too complex or too nebulous or even completely unknown or unexplainable at present, and some of them may even be unknowable. But just because we feel that there are some limitations to the rational approach does not mean we should suddenly resort to taking leaps of faith.
The rational approach not only allows us to discover and accept its limitations, it also allows us to keep learning more and keep updating our answers accordingly. This sort of evolution is built into this approach.
The alternative approaches don't allow for any of that.
It is evidence and reason that has allowed us to progress from "what are these twinkling lights in the sky" to land on a distant asteroid moving at incredible speed. Or "angry gods create plagues" to "here's a vaccine that can completely eradicate the plague".
Isn’t it a lot better to base our thinking on a body of knowledge and methods that has such a fantastic track record than relying on some baseless stories that just feel good to us? Isn’t it better to see what we can do with what we are sure of, and keep improving it as we learn more, than simply dreaming something up and insisting that it is the truth?
Ok, if even that argument didn't convince you, maybe I can try some other arguments that are commonly used when undertaking other audacious projects.
We live in a world where “moonshot” projects are highly celebrated.
Some people want to go to Mars, some want to build superhuman intelligence, some want to build technology that will allow us to live forever and so on.
If they can dream about that and get everyone excited and participate, why not something a lot more immediately useful, feasible and, dare I say, noble or even divine, like finding a more reliable and defensible source of meaning, purpose and hope in our lives?
It is almost a no-brainer in comparison to the degree of difficulty, risk and expense of those other moonshot projects. It is not even close!
I can promise you, there is no chance this endeavor will lead to any massive explosions or extinctions or zombie plagues! At worst, you will just learn something new and deep about reality while keeping your life and limb intact.
Ok, after having addressed the futurists among us, let me say a few words to the traditionalists among us.
This point is mentioned briefly in the Preface, but it deserves to be repeated here.
Centuries ago, people believed that epidemics or natural disasters were God’s punishment for something they had done wrong.
Then, over time, we discovered that these were natural phenomena with scientifically provable causes. Then, over time, we even figured out how to deal with them when they occurred, make some predictions about them, and sometimes even prevent them from occurring in the first place.
It was our reliance on the process of science and engineering that allowed us to come this far.
This same process has been repeated in so many other areas of life. In each case, people used to believe that certain phenomena were mysterious, governed by some supernatural force. But over time, piece by piece, we were able to come up with rigorous explanations for them, and then improve our lives using the newly acquired knowledge.
Today, no one objects to the scientific explanations of those phenomena. And I believe we can make the same thing happen here.
Finally, allow me to make a democratic argument.
As the title of the book suggests, this is an account of one man’s search for meaning. I am not at all claiming that what I am proposing here will necessarily work for everyone.
Different people will approach the issue from different angles. I’d much prefer a situation where mine becomes one of many such perspectives.
I am guessing that the perspective I am proposing will appeal to at least some people, particularly those with a STEM background who are unafraid to trust their own intellect and experience.
In fact, if it can help them, then I feel like I am really obliged to do so.
Moreover, I do have some evidence that this way of thinking works in at least once instance - because it is working for me!
I am not saying that my life has been completely transformed due to the ideas in this book - changing lives takes a long time, particularly if you aren’t facing any immediate crisis. But I have definitely noticed a change in me towards feeling more peaceful, more confident and more aware. I am also seeing new nuances and more insights in simple and familiar things I encounter every day.
Most importantly, I now have a framework and toolset for analyzing events and improving decisions in my life from a new, firm and rigorous basis.
All of this gives me confidence that my voice is worth adding to the conversation.
I hope that these arguments satisfy most critics, so without further ado, let us dive in.
This reminds me of the motto of Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space company. I think it is quite pertinent here:
“Gradatim Ferociter!” (Step by step, ferociously!)
― Motto of Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin
So let us put on a moonshot engineer’s hat and take a step-by-step but ferocious look at meaning, purpose and hope.
Needless to say, these words get thrown around a lot, but if we are going to analyze them rigorously, we need to establish what we are talking about from the very basics.
Words do not exist by themselves, they need a foundation and context, particularly when they are such important words and you are talking about looking at them from a new perspective.
Moreover, since these words ultimately deal with reality, and we want to do everything from First Principles, we need to start there. So we will start by defining our methodology for building the framework, then talk about the lowest layer in the framework, our Ultimate Reality, and then look at every layer above that until we get to our goal.
Let us start by giving the framework a name and then take a look at its parts.
Right off the bat, let us observe that “Meaning-Seeking Entities” sounds like a scientific or engineering term. This is very much intentional.
The term generalizes the idea of complex and conscious living entities such as ourselves, particularly when it comes to meaning-seeking. (We will define the term in more detail once we have built the scaffolding needed to do so.)
Generalizing the term allows us to potentially cover other meaning-seeking entities such as groups or communities of living organisms that act like conscious organisms of their own, or even artificial or alien lifeforms that may exhibit similar characteristics.
Thus, this is a framework that defines, from the ground up, layer by layer, what Meaning is, what Meaning-Seeking Entities are, how they become meaning-seeking and how they can find what they seek.
Each of the concepts below maps directly to a major part of the framework and there is a chapter dedicated to each of them.
The most fundamental aspect of defining a framework from First Principles is establishing what constitutes genuine knowledge according to the framework and what methodology is used to acquire it. Another word for this is Epistemology.
This is also where we will address the most important objection to what we are undertaking: limits to rationality and how we plan to deal with them. Our solution to this problem is to define a modified version of rationality, which I have termed Present-Bounded Rationality. We will go over what it means and why it makes a lot more sense than pure rationality.
We will also address why I keep adding "engineering" whenever I say "science" and why it is critical.
The next step is defining our model of ultimate reality, which is basically all that exists.
Needless to say, the knowledge of ultimate reality itself is acquired using the methodology mentioned above.
Of course, we won't go into all aspects of ultimate reality - that will take volumes. We will look at only the parts that we need for our framework.
We take it for granted that we live in a physical reality, but we also need to acknowledge that it may not be the ultimate reality. We do not really know how physical reality emerges from ultimate reality, but its existence is evident to us because we can perceive it using our senses.
Moreover, we have known for a long time that at least some aspects of physical reality appear to exhibit discernible patterns i.e. we can discover features and laws that seem to govern their structure and function. Physics is essentially a collection of such patterns.
But we also know that some things in physical reality are too nebulous to be captured as patterns, and some things are still to be discovered.
Here again, we will go over the parts of physical reality that matter for our framework. We will also start identifying some concepts that we will need to ultimately build our definition of meaning.
Normally, one would include Chemistry and Biology as the two layers immediately above Physics, but we don’t need to make that distinction for this framework. For our purposes, clubbing them together into one layer called “Life” is sufficient.
Also, we will often use the term “Living Entities” rather than just “Life” because we want the term to represent all phenomena that display the characteristics of living organisms, starting from single cells to individual organisms (including AI or aliens) to organized groups or societies of such organisms, to even abstract concepts that may exhibit the same characteristics.
Also, normally we would consider Intelligence to be a layer above this, but again, for the purposes of this framework, we will include it along with Life. As you will see in the chapter on Life, it makes a lot of sense to treat intelligence as an inherent property of Life.
Consciousness means different things to different people. We identify the most important definitions of consciousness that we will need for our framework.
Consciousness is one of the deepest enigmas of existence. We do not understand it very well, yet somehow it feels self-evident to us.
Typically, scientists and philosophers get stuck at this problem or even just ignore it altogether.
But in typical engineering fashion, we will not let its enigmatic nature hinder us, as long as we can still achieve our ultimate goal. We will try to understand what we can, use what we can, and see if we can continue to make progress.
As an aside, this is a critical difference between the engineering approach and the scientific or philosophical approach to problems, and why I feel so much more confident in using this approach where the scientific or philosophical approaches have difficulties.
The topic of “meaning” has been so muddied that we need to start by defining what the word even means. We need to figure out how to define it scientifically, what its essential attributes are and then figure out how to fit it into the framework.
This is where we will also define what we mean by “Meaning-Seeking Entities”. This will be followed by how the MSE Framework can help Meaning-Seeking Entities find meaning in their lives.
After we have done all this hard work, tackling purpose and hope becomes rather easy.
Here again we start by defining the term “greater purpose”. And then we will figure out how to define it using the framework. We will also start talking about how to convert all this theory into practice.
It goes without saying that any framework that purports to explain Life, the Universe, and Everything should also be expected to provide a strong foundation for hope, otherwise it will lose its appeal to most people.
And, luckily for us, hope simply falls out of the MSE Framework. Moreover, it can be shown to be well founded, not merely wishful thinking, as it is in pretty much any other framework.
That will complete the discussion of all the layers in the MSE Framework. Lastly, it will be time to wrap it all up.
Since I am an engineer, I don't intend to leave you with just a theoretical framework. Ultimately, the rubber has to meet the road. So we will take a look at some practices I have defined that are based on the MSE Framework. You can use these practices to bring the framework to life, i.e., actually find meaning, purpose and hope in your lives.
Everyone is busy, and reading long books is not always possible. So, in this chapter, I will provide a summary of the framework and the practices.
Finally, it will be time to do some "rude" Q&A. Given that this is a rather difficult and audacious endeavor, and I have taken a slightly unconventional approach, I can absolutely imagine that people have many tough questions. Bring them on!
Ok, with that high-level introduction, we can finally start to dive into each of the parts of the framework mentioned above, starting with our Methodology.
