12. Call to Action: From Knowing the Path to Walking the Path
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"There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."
― Morpheus, in "The Matrix"
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
― Richard P. Feynman, in one of his lectures
Whenever you come across any new philosophy of life, no matter how convincing and appealing it is, the most important question you must ask is: What can I do with it? What can I do daily, weekly, or on a regular basis? How can I put this philosophy into practice and see real improvements in my life as a result? If no such prescription is available, then what is the whole point of the exercise?
It goes without saying that there is a big difference between theory and practice. In fact, in our discussion on Present-Bounded Rationality, we identified this as one of the biggest limitations of rationalism or any other philosophy that limits itself to abstract ideas.
Moreover, since this book is entitled "An Engineer's Search for Meaning", I feel like it is absolutely my duty to come up with tools that can be used to put all of this theory into practice. This is what engineers are supposed to do.
What we have done so far is that we have settled on the Present-Bounded Rationality (PBR) Methodology, developed the MSE Framework based on it, used the framework to identify 8 tendencies the universe appears to exhibit (which we have named "6CED" Tendencies) and how they can be used to find meaning, purpose and hope in life.
What we need to do next is to develop some practices based on these concepts. These practices need to be simple for most people to follow on a regular basis, so they can actually see the benefits of the ideas presented in the book for themselves.
Let us look at each of the 6CED Tendencies and how they manifest themselves in Meaning-Seeking Entities such as ourselves:
Coherence or Comprehensibility: This tendency is reflected in all our ongoing struggles to make sense of our lives, our place in the world, the economy, our relationships and so on. It helps us to improve our agency or "grip" on our lives.
Complexity: What this tendency typically translates into is being able to manage higher levels of complexity in our lives or activities. It could mean taking on more complex tasks or building more complex things or managing more complex teams of people or tools or even raising the level of complexity of our own thinking.
Continuity of existence or identity: Everyone wants to live long and healthy lives, have relationships that last, work for or create long-living institutions or organizations, and so on. This could be something as simple as taking care of your health and well-being, along with that of your family and friends, your community, all the way up to ensuring the sustainability of the entire biosphere. All of these are Meaning-Seeking Systems, and they all depend upon each other to achieve their aims of continuation of existence.
Curiosity: This involves trying to be curious and open-minded, willing to experience new phenomena, new places, new people, and new tasks and continuously keep learning. This is the natural behavior of our any system that performs Active Inference. It is only when we get stuck in a routine or become dogmatic about some belief or scared that we force ourselves to deviate from that.
Creativity: This one involves focusing on being creative in our activities or thinking. And, in particular, creating things that embody at least some of the other 6CED Tendencies.
Consciousness: This implies trying to expand and enrich our conscious experience, and through that expand and enrich our consciousness itself. Practicing mindfulness, to whatever extent you can, is one of the best ways to accomplish this. One can also try to expand and enrich the range of conscious experiences one has, like listening to richer types of music or appreciating better qualities of art or reading better books and so on.
Evolution: Evolution is an ongoing process for all Living Entities. We all have an innate biological as well as sociological desire to participate in evolution at the biological or social level, whether we realize this or not. This includes everything from raising (or helping to raise) children to participating in the iterative improvement of all our activities or every organized group or community we belong to to evolving our own thinking and skills.
Diversity: This involves recognizing the value of and facilitating the enrichment of diversity in all aspects of our lives. This could manifest itself in everything from trying new foods or meeting new people or playing with new ideas all the way to diversifying your investment portfolio! It also means detecting when diversity is being destroyed and slowing or preventing that from happening.
Of course, as we have already said, there is some overlap and synergy in all of these, so some of the activities that you might engage in might meet more than one of these criteria.
In addition to the above list, we have also identified Mindfulness as a natural practice that all Meaning-Seeking Entities need to perform in order to align themselves better with the basic process of Active Inference.
With all of this in mind, let us see how we can go about developing some practices.
It is well known that any practice works best when we identify concrete situations where and when it can be acted upon. That way, whenever you find yourself in that situation, it reminds you to follow that practice. Over time, it becomes a habit and then the benefits really start to compound.
So let me start by asking some questions about some regular situations that we all face:
What's the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?
How about just before you hit the pillow at night?
What is the most common activity you do whenever you have a free moment during your day?
My guess is, for most people, most days, the answer is: "Check my social media feed!"
Is it any wonder, then, that most people think that life has become crazy / sad / angry / sucky in general? This is because most of our social media feeds are full of such negative content. When you feed your mind junk, it's no wonder it gets sick over time!
It has been well acknowledged that we need better alternatives to these bad habits.
What would be a better alternative? How about something simple that can be done anywhere, anytime, in small chunks just like checking a social media feed?
Fortunately for you, that's very much possible. It is possible to define practices that can each be performed in a few minutes in any of the above situations, and that can help make your life more meaningful, purposeful and hopeful over time.
Let me first name these practices along with the most likely time that one might do them and then we will look at each of them in more detail:
"Mindful Moments": Whenever you have a free moment at any point in your day,
"Purposeful Mornings": Before you start your day in the morning,
"Hopeful Evenings": The last thing you do at night, and
"Meaningful Life": Whenever you are in the mood for taking a deeper perspective, such as on weekends or birthdays or while making New Year's resolutions or some other significant event in your life.
Let us now go over each of these practices in detail. Each one takes only a few minutes to complete. Moreover, each of them can be useful immediately and can impact your life positively over the long run.
As we have already seen in the chapter on Life, Mindfulness is a natural method for complex Living Entities to align themselves completely with Active Inference.
So it should not surprise us that our ancestors, who thought hard about their lives and minds and experimented with them discovered the practice of Mindfulness long before we knew anything about Active Inference.
That's the wonderful thing about truth - it can be arrived at from many different angles.
The ancient practice basically involves focusing your full attention on the present moment, simply observing and labeling things happening around you, as well as inside your body and your mind, clearly and calmly, without making any judgment about them.
Practicing mindfulness in everyday activities has been proven to improve focus, productivity and peace of mind. Simply observing and labeling things occurring in the present moment, instead of trying to judge them as being desirable or "good" or not is like removing cobwebs that cloud your perception. Also, the present moment is where you have the highest level of "agency" or effectiveness on your actions as compared to any moment in the future or indeed, the past.
Thus, being mindful allows you to perceive everything more clearly, think more clearly about it, and act more effectively on it.
All of this makes your life more attuned to reality, which is the same as being more aligned with it. And that, as we have already shown, leads to more meaning, purpose and hope over time.
With that quick introduction, now it is time for us to look at the specific steps involved in the Mindful Moments practice:
Start by settling down comfortably wherever you are, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly.
Gently allow your mind to pay attention to what is happening around you, right here, right now.
Take a look around yourself and make a note of something that catches your attention. It could be anything you see or hear or smell or touch (e.g. "pen", "chair", "carpet" etc.).
Pay careful attention to that object. Notice some of its properties, such as its color or shape or texture or the way it is changing etc. Trying to do so helps to focus your mind on the object.
If your mind wanders, that's ok. Gently and playfully bring your focus back to the object. Allow it to fill your attention as much as you can, at least for a few seconds.
Avoid making any judgments about the object, such as whether it is desirable or not. Whatever it is, let it be, and try to simply experience it the best way you can.
Gently close your eyes and turn your focus inwards, towards your own body.
You will start to notice various physical sensations occurring in your body, such as your breath coming in and going, maybe an itch somewhere on your skin, or tenseness in your muscles etc.
Once again, choose whatever catches your attention and pay as careful attention to it as you can, at least for a few seconds.
And again, if your mind wanders, just gently and playfully bring it back to the sensation. Allow it to fill your attention as much as you can.
Once again, avoid making judgments. Let it be as it is, simply try to experience and label it.
The last step is to pay attention to what is going on inside your mind.
Notice any thought or emotion passing through your mind. Simply observe and label the thought or emotion as it is, without making any judgment about it.
Continue to do this for a short time, as thoughts come and go into your mind. Try to look at your own mind playfully, as if it is a child. We don't judge the things children do, we simply watch and appreciate the things they do. Do the same with your mind.
This is probably the hardest part of the practice, but even a minute amount of regular progress towards it will compound over time.
That's basically it. (At least these steps should give you a good start on this practice. Of course, the best way to learn any practice is to work with a guide, so eventually, you may want to find such a guide.)
This practice is extremely useful and should put you well on the path to your ultimate goal of finding meaning, purpose and hope in your life. But it's not sufficient for our purposes.
We need to add something more to the mix.
Let us consider the following issues:
As we have already discussed, when Meaning-Seeking Entities perform Active Inference, in addition to mindfulness, they also have to evaluate and prioritize their goals and desires (i.e. counterfactual scenarios their internal generative models they come up with), based on their alignment with the 6CED Tendencies. So we need to develop practices that help us deal with that, too.
While we are talking about longer-term things like goals here, the important point to remember is that we still want to focus on things we can perceive and act on in the present. This is what our Present-Bounded Rationality requires. So we need things we can use in the present that might still be valuable to help us reach our longer-term goals.
Moreover, mindfulness is quite hard for most of us, at least initially. This is because we have been conditioned to focus our minds on either the future or the past rather than the present. Moreover, we have gotten used to judging everything that happens, as being good or desirable or not. It takes a while to get used to not falling into these habitual patterns.
As a result of these issues, we need to recognize and (non-judgmentally) accept that most of us need some additional support to align ourselves with the tendencies of the universe.
The next three practices work together to address these issues.
This is where we take advantage of practices that belong to another ancient philosophy we have talked about, Stoicism.
Stoicism prescribes regular practices such as morning and evening reflection, and longer-term practices involving taking a big-picture look at our life. When performing these practices, the philosophy asks us to use a set of "virtues" it prescribes as guidelines.
In our case, we will change the list of virtues slightly to say that we will use the 6CED Tendencies as our "values" or "virtues". (There is even some overlap between the virtues as defined by Stoicism and the 6CED Tendencies, but we will stick to the tendencies here since we have developed a robust framework to support them instead of just taking someone's word for it.)
As noted earlier, these values allow us to keep our focus on the present moment, yet have a higher level confidence that they will lead us to our goals. This is because we are using the ubiquitous, ever-present and inherent tendencies of the universe as our guidelines.
With all of that in mind, we can now define 3 practices: a morning practice, an evening practice and a longer-term practice. Let us go over them next.
This practice is basically identical to the Stoic practice of Morning Reflection, with the addition of the 6CED Tendencies alignment as the guiding principle.
Here are the steps to follow:
Every morning, before you start your day, sit quietly for just a few moments and go over your day in your mind.
Identify your goals or objectives for the day, imagine the challenges you may encounter while pursuing them, and visualize the actions you might take to handle them. In order to do so, visualize yourself actually taking those actions and overcoming the challenges that may come up. Doing so may lead to insights that require modifying the goals and actions.
Identify up to 3 goals or actions for the day. These may be personal goals, work or school goals, or family or community goals. Ideally, note down these goals or actions in a journal.
Stoicism asks its practitioners to ensure that their activities are "virtuous". In our case, we are defining "virtuous" as "being in alignment with the 6CED Tendencies of the universe". Thus, this practice requires that, when we identify our activities for the day, we try to ensure that they are aligned with the 6CED Tendencies of the universe.
The best way to do this is to look at each activity in your list and check which of the 6CED Tendencies it is aligned with. Since there is some overlap in the tendencies, you may need to check off more than one tendency. The more the merrier!
In the beginning, this may turn out to be hard to do because many of your goals will not be aligned with the 6CED Tendencies. But simply being aware of these guidelines will, over time, lead to better alignment, and, along with it, the sense of having meaning, purpose and hope in life. And here again, every little step can produce tangible benefits.
This practice will help you feel that your activities during the day are purposeful.
This practice is basically identical to the Stoic practice of Evening Reflection or Journaling, with the addition of the 6CED Tendencies alignment as guiding principles.
The steps are analogous to the ones in the previous practice, except we are talking about the events that have already occurred and the actions you have already taken during the day .
Here are the steps to follow:
Every evening, before you call it a day, sit quietly for just a few moments and go over your day in your mind.
Go over the goals or objectives for the day that you had identified in the morning. Make a list of what actually happened as a result, as well as other important events that occurred during the day.
Think of the challenges you encountered while pursuing the activities you had planned, and how you dealt with them. What lessons can you draw from that for the next time? Are there any opportunities for iterative improvement?
Also, ask whether your actions improved your alignment with the 6CED Tendencies. What were the challenges and how can you adjust your activities to bring them in better alignment?
Once again, the best way to do this is to note down each of these activities along with your reflection about each of them, and check off which of the 6CED Tendencies each of them was aligned with.
And again, this may turn out to be hard to do in the beginning. But simply being aware of these guidelines will, over time, lead to better alignment, and, along with it, the sense of having meaning, purpose and hope in life. And here again, every little step can produce tangible benefits.
Note that this practice is associated with "hope" since, as a result of the 6CED alignment, the ultimate outcome of this practice should be to make you feel grateful for the day and hopeful about the next.
The last practice is meant for taking a long-term perspective on one's life. This again is a very common idea recommended by many philosophies of life, and we will add our own twist based on the 6CED Tendencies.
The practice can be done at longer intervals, such as months or years. Typically one can do this on their birthday or while making New Year's resolutions or when there are major events in one's life.
The practice involves the following steps:
Review the morning and evening journals that you have been writing. Notice any recurring patterns and trends.
How is your list of activities evolving? How is their alignment with the 6CED Tendencies evolving? Do you feel that your life is contributing to the universe's relentless progress toward the expansion and enrichment of life and consciousness? What longer-term changes do you need to make?
Write these reflections down in your journal.
As we have seen, a meaningful life involves having a sense of coherence or comprehensibility about one's life, having a sense of existential significance, and having a sense of purpose. So evaluate your life up to this point along these lines.
One of the best ways to do this is to write down a story of your life up to this point, keeping in mind the 3 aspects of meaning.
Ultimately, reflect on whether the practices you have been doing have been helping to make your life meaningful, purposeful and hopeful over time and whether you need to make any adjustments.
Once again, since I am an engineer, I don't want to leave you with just the recipe for these practices. I want to help you actually practice them in a fun, engaging way.
So, as a companion to this book, I am developing a web app called MindFeed. This app provides you with stepwise instructions to do these practices.
In addition, to make it fun, the app gives you fun mementos to commemorate your practice. It also keeps a history of your practices and helps you review them later. You can use this journal during your Meaningful Life practice as well as download it for your own records.
Eventually, I plan to add some analysis tools to help you with all of your practices.
Note that, since this is a web app, you do not need to download or install anything to use it. Just clicking on the link below in your browser will let you use the app.
Here is a link: MindFeed Web App.
That was the call to action for everyone reading this book. But beyond that, I have a special message for the engineers among us.
As I stated in the honeybee conversation at the beginning of the book, there is something unique and critically important about engineering that doesn't get acknowledged often.
Every cell in your body has a cell wall. Various molecules present themselves to this wall and the wall has elaborate mechanisms to select the molecules it thinks are useful to the cell inside and let them in. (Also some undesirable molecules, such as viruses present themselves as beneficial molecules and manage to get through.)
Once inside, depending upon the type of molecule, it either gets transported to the part of the cell where it is needed or it tosses around in the chemical soup of the cell until it gets where it is useful.
The mechanisms the cells construct for transporting these molecules can be quite elaborate. They almost resemble "molecular highways" with "walkers" walking along them that almost look like Atlas carrying a huge load on its back. These highways are constructed as needed and then disassembled.
Once the molecules get to where they are useful, appropriate chemical reactions take place to allow them to do whatever they are needed to do. This includes things like releasing energy to perform various tasks or building other molecules or processing waste products and so on. More importantly, they perform the critical task of DNA transcription, translation, signal transduction and eventually replication, when the cell is about to divide.
If you were to shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule and walk around a cell as it was doing these things, you would think that it was a very complex and dynamic factory. In fact, possibly the most complex and dynamic factory you have ever seen.
Similar observations can be made even at the level of organs, individuals, and groups of individuals. They can be viewed as supply chains, defense mechanisms, selection mechanisms, transportation mechanisms, chemical processing plants and waste management.
In other words, one can look at the entire range of activities involved in keeping Living Entities alive as unbelievably complex and dynamic engineering activities.
Yes, you can absolutely think of life as a mind-bogglingly complex and dynamic engineering project!
This project, as far as we know, began all by itself billions of years ago and has continued unbroken ever since. It has complexified, organized, evolved and diversified in uncountable ways.
Now, I know what you are thinking - "That sounds rather lame and dry! Everything is just engineering? What about poetry? Atr? Beauty? Feelings? The ineffable and the unintelligible and the transcendental?"
So let me ask this: Have you ever been moved by an engineering marvel? A rocket taking off? A beautiful suspension bridge? A beautiful building or even a city? The mechanism of a wristwatch or a piano or a supercar?
A flower? A honeybee? Koi fish swimming around in a pond? A garden?
What are all these things if not engineering marvels?
There is a misunderstanding that engineering is all dry, mechanical stuff. This is not true. Every engineering product involves human, and sometimes even spiritual elements. The simpler ones may look mechanical and lifeless, but the more complex they become, the more life-like they look.
In fact, I would propose that all these feelings of awe, beauty, and transcendence that we associate with art or poetry or music and so on are just our ways of grappling with extremely complex phenomena that aren't easy for our minds to grasp. But, if you shrink yourself down to the level of molecules, as we did while traveling around a living cell earlier, you would see that ultimately, it is all just molecules going about doing their things. And many times, they appear to have a well-defined function and purpose, like an engineered product.
I know, it takes time to come around to this realization. It took me a long time too.
We have a huge amount of cultural and emotional baggage associated with life which gets in the way of getting to this realization.
But if you simply ask, if it is not molecules and processes with well-defined functions and purposes, then what is it? If it is not physics, chemistry and biology, then what is it? If it is not scientific facts and engineering processes and products, then what is it? If it is not evidence and reason, then what is it?
If you think there is something more, what evidence do you have to support it besides a feeling or some culturally accepted beliefs?
One of the reasons that people believe that there is something more is because science has generally been associated with nihilism. Science is just a collection of "dead" facts.
But engineering is not like that. In the chapter on Methodology, we already saw how engineering isn't just "an application of science" but a lot more ancient practice, practiced by not just human beings, but also by the birds and the bees and every living cell and even the entire ecosystem.
Engineering is a process that creates or fixes something functional and serves a purpose. It is inherently more purposeful and meaningful. It adds "life" to science.
And if engineering is done mindfully in service of a purpose like expanding and enriching life and consciousness, then it can rise to the same exalted levels that we usually associate with things like art, poetry and music.
In fact, engineering can be considered to be the meaningful and purposeful essence of life, the universe and everything!
It is hard to understate the importance of this realization. All engineers should take great pride in this fact!
So the call to action for engineers is to not only take pride in this fact, but act as good stewards of this phenomenon. This, as we have stated, can be accomplished via Mindful Engineering that is aligned with the 6CED Tendencies of the universe. The ultimate aim, as always, is the expansion and enrichment of life and consciousness.
Of course, any such feeling of great pride in your profession or calling must be accompanied by humility, as dictated by our methodology of Present-Bounded Rationality. So let us get to that next.
In all of the above, we should never lose sight of the fact that the universe contains a lot of nebulosity and unknowns, and as a result, we need to be humble, exercise mindfulness and moderation, and be willing to learn and improve our actions accordingly.
At times, some of these activities or even the 6CED Tendencies might be in conflict with each other. This is again where mindfulness, moderation and humility come in, to help you decide how to prioritize and schedule actions accordingly.
Moreover, because you know the reasoning behind our methodology and how these tendencies and practices were arrived at, you can make far more informed decisions about your prioritization and scheduling process as compared to pretty much any other method of meaning-making, where you are typically required to simply take things on faith.
This is the ultimate benefit of this approach - that it can be explained from the ground up, and questioned or verified or improved by anyone. That's the beauty of relying on evidence and reason.
With that, we have completed everything we wanted to accomplish in this book! Congratulations! You deserve a tremendous amount of gratitude from me for having stuck with my quirky and amateur writing for this long.
Still, for good measure, we will quickly summarize everything we have discussed so far and then take some questions.
