A Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of life and why is it important to answer this very question? Let’s look into why we should be concerned by finding a problem in assuming the opposite – something like proof by contradiction. Imagine a dumb machine that has an optimal model implicitly imbued for a specific task it performs. Realized to perfection, such a machine has distilled in it the past experiences that crystalized by working its task over and over again. This dumb machine is perfectly able to operate without a reinforcing feedback loop telling it how well it performs, as such a feedback loop has no place in the overfit model that the machine implements. In fact, such a feedback loop would contradict the machines perfection considering Ockham’s razor. We are not like such machines. Our human ancestors have evolved in a different direction. Originally starting off very close to such a perfectly dumb apparatus, the cruelty of our world shaped human body and mind in ways that allow for survival. From this evolutionary struggle emerged a humanized model that is not limited to a specific set of tasks, but one that can also generalize. A (meta-)function of the model builds abstractions of prior tasks and instantiates new skills from those abstractions continuously. This was necessary for survival and allowed humans to step on the surface of the moon, to experience the joy of music, but also to conduct never before seen atrocities. For a stable society to emerge in the cultural evolution, it became relevant to think about which skills to apply and which tasks to pursue on yet another meta level. Complexity took over the model.

The discontinuity should be disputed, but unlike dumb machines driven by entropy or animals reacting mainly on instinct, we humans seek for further meaning in order to operate. In the broad scope of human opportunities, societal pressure always tries to constrain what is acceptable “from the outside”. But “from the inside” on an individual level, the meaning of life is primarily subjective. It is personal in guiding our curiosity – and ideally behavior – beyond death as a general driving force. The meaning of life is our human goal generator. Yet, or because of that, we have a hard time reaching broad consensus on an answer to what the meaning of life could be. Culture, Zeitgeist, and a lack of existing knowledge drives us apart on a societal level. Add to the mix the impulses and beliefs of individual people and the result becomes a big mess. Due to the entanglement of the question with all kinds of evolving systems that influence each other and form feedback loops, an objective answer eludes itself since thousands of years even from the smartest minds. Likewise, it does not seem like one of Simon’s Ants is sitting at the core of the question. Rather, there seems to be a knot at the core of the question that is highly complex enabling divergence. The following is an attempt to uncover this complex core that makes it hard to come to an objective agreement on the meaning of life.

Of course, a source of possible confusion is the different views that can be employed to present an answer epistemologically. That is because the question gives too little information about what is asked. It is ill formed and requires systematic abstraction. Like Einstein allegedly said, “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use.”

An approach to alleviate the semantic confusion could be to phrase the initial question in a more clear light. A first step in this direction would be to pose a more narrow question that is a specialization, as a – at this point presumably – hierarchical foundation, before extending the narrow formulation iteratively to a more clear expression of the wider question. One could approach this task by selecting invariants in the already existing answer candidates. The selection of invariants would require a justification. Analyzing these invariants then would lead to a first more narrow variant of the question corresponding to the selected answer invariants. Answers to the narrow question could be found by fine-tuning parameters of the narrow question based on personal and socio-cultural preferences. These answer variations and their invariants could then be assumed to be a subset of all possible answers to broader, and most general forms of the question. One could then speculate that answers to the narrow question would support a hierarchical coherence in the set of all possible answers. At first this approach towards epistemological clarity seems possibly complicated but at a linear difficulty when scaling up.

Yet, upon closer reflection, it seems just as reasonable that different locally consistent but globally inconsistent sets of answers would emerge when generalizing the specialized question to all possible answer domains. Depending on which answer invariants were chosen to specialize the question initially, one could expect to find traces of this incoherence already all the way down. The possible incoherence at all levels of specificity is yet another hint at the complexity sitting at the core of the question itself. (Likewise, answering the narrow question by tuning parameters harbors complexity in itself if the parameters are dependent on each other.) To untie this knot, an abstraction of the question from all the different levels of specificity is required. This “meta” specialization should be able to illustrate all the components that have to be considered. The hierarchy and relation of specific, general, and most general instantiations of the meta-question and its answers would have to be constructed as a next step.

In summary, the goal is to uncover the complexity at the core of the question which seems to remain present independently of how it is asked (without trivializing). Likewise, the meta-question posed below illustrates a source of divergence in all possible answer candidates. Furthermore, it can be used to instantiate clear formulations of the question at different levels of specificity for which answers can be found more easily, thereby creating a structure in which inconsistent but locally viable answers to the meaning of life can be negotiated. Contradicting answers as would be given by a leader in the struggle of creating a company from nothing and a surfer on the beach watching the dawn before the campfire.

What is left to do is to justify or explain a little bit the invariants and point of view taken in an attempt to untangle the structure of questions and answers as a basis for formulating the meta-question. Granted, the method chosen here is a subjective approach that can only be seen as a starting point for a more rigorous one. The chicken-and-egg problem where both question and answer seemingly construct themselves while being eluded from empirical scientific methods does not help and calls for some pragmatism. The danger of course lies in the assumption that the meta-question can be found based on the chosen question-answer invariants and their structure in a process that reasons the existence of an antecedent from a possibly faulty, missing, or not jet discovered consequents. Nevertheless, it is the approach chosen here – standing on the shoulders of giants and based on the belief that the core of the question is not a pure construction but something grounded in a bigger truth that can be discovered at least in traces at this point in time.

Could there be something to discover or is it just our brain tricking us into imagining a pattern where there is none? Once again there is just a hint of insight to build an argument on. The inevitable force of life seems to have brought us here with the capability to think about the question. It is the inevitability of the process that suggests – somewhat – that entropy alone acting on a physical substrate is not the “natural” state of the universe. Rather, what is missing in the picture is life acting against entropy. The meaning of life is a way to describe the trickster counterpart to entropy, a counterpart that is present in this universe as an essential part of it. But this is only two thirds of the picture. The existential crisis of life versus entropy is not only motivated in itself and by its inevitability alone. If it was only the existential crisis driving something to exist, that thing might just as well decide to give up and vanish. Rather, the cruel force sustaining the struggle is beauty and art and the qualia of feeling and all the good things. All which we can create and experience has to it something unexplainable wonderful. This is the reason why life wants to stay alive. At least that kind of complex life that one day might have a chance against entropy. The kind of life that might wonder about the meaning of life.

Now, what aspects should be considered when analyzing answer invariants to reformulate the question about the meaning of life at different levels of specificity and to extract the components of the meta-question from that process? Some topics are now stressed to cover what was considered for the model below (i.e., that thing that turns the meta-question into something tangible).

• The first classification of answers that come to mind could be attributed with identity. In order for something to have a meaning of life, it seems to require a notion of identity. Identity can center around the entity of a person or around a part of a person like the voice that makes you go to gym. It can be a family, a state, or a whole culture. Any system realy that has agency.
• Another class of answers deals with improvement. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs famously depicts what motivates a person. A similar drive for innovation is a part of many systems. More abstractly, this is the awareness of time and space and how to proceed self-guided through both. Self-guidance implies that the systems revolve around pockets of computational reducibility to trick entropy.
• Some answers to the meaning of life group around the process of entropy or abstractions thereof. In us we have a biological drive that we do not fully control. Some might even say it is the other way around and instead we are driven by our biology. Living things tend to enjoy the passing and happening of nature including the morbid feeling of its decay. There is beauty to it. We also create offspring in the best and worst conditions. We are being driven by whatever lies outside our bubble of computational reducibility to which we only partly belong.
• One way to group answers is through the lens of a dichotomy where one the one side are subjective human mental processes and on the other side are institutionalized social encodings. Some aspects in there might just as well justify their own bullet points but can also be found in the other ones already. There is a force driving both parts and the dichotomy itself towards equilibrium. Maybe this point more abstractly only illustrates that a balance of abstract knowledge and personal experience plays a part in answers to the meaning of life.
• A last aspect shared by many answers to the meaning of life is a notion of faith, which often related to spirituality, hope, and inner beauty. The unknown on the blank canvas. The muse we listen to. A sucking void that is pulling us not only through space and time but towards a mysterious voice calling us conceptually. The creative dreams we have about the past, the present, and the future.
• (There is also often a difference depending on whether answers are presented to instruct or explain, but this difference seems to be a secondary concern. Here is pursued a mix of both.)

Finally, what follows is the diagrammatic and textual model of the meta-question about the meaning of life. It comes in five pictures. The first picture shows three egoistic goddesses emerging from the computational substrate of the universe. They struggle for attention and fight each other in mysterious ways. When one gets too powerful the others band together to beat her back. There is a game-theoretic optimum that they can reach but that they are not aware of. The second picture shows their struggle. The third picture reformulates their struggle from a computational view. It adds the factor time and shows the initial condition of the three goddesses. It shows a potential attractor of the system, a point of maximum “complexity” or “energy” that the three goddesses can conquer giving their interdependencies. The meaning of life describes how to get the universe to this point starting from initial conditions. It implies that reaching this point requires untangling the weighted constraints in the second picture. The fourth picture puts the point of maximum complexity in the context of updates performed on initial conditions. It proposes that the initial conditions are an input signal to our existence and the output signal is the attractor the goddesses approach. Is shows one possible attractor that outputs something very different from statistical noise. An attractor able to surprises whoever tests the system by feeding in input signals. The fifth picture more clearly shows the complexity implied in the second picture and how it is distributed through space. It distributes the meaning of life to different hierarchical systems ranging beyond the spectrum from cells to planetary systems. Thereby, it shows only a few of the relevant systems and focuses on our society at this point in time. This last picture also breaks down the description into parts that an individual persons can relate to.

The three goddesses are a proposal of three things in this universe that should be increased based on what can be perceived as invariants in our current best answers to the meaning of life. The postulate is that increasing knowledge, life, and experience is something fundamental to strive for by all systems that exist. Before the universe ends, it wants to have realized a maximum of it. There is some self-evidence in there. Each of these goddesses has different properties out of which the picture shows only a few. Increasing knowledge means to find useful abstractions that are, e.g., useful, consistent, and efficiently computable. Increasing life means to find physical structures that, e.g., maintain themselves and evolve in a self guided manner. Increasing experience means to find a way for as many things as possible to experience and express as much and the most wide variety of sensations. This troika emerges from the computational substrate of the universe and pervades all existence. The postulate is that the goddesses are the primary substance on which the meaning of life can be argued. Their description is purposefully colorful to capture their unclear scope.

The weighted constraint graph shows the aspects of existence to be optimized and the relations between them. These relations constrain the possible configuration of attributes. E.g., if you kill a person to experience that sensation the overall “Energy” in the system is not optimized because you reduce a life, so the goddess experience is constrained by the goddess life. Complex behavior can emerge from updates of the graph. Both the current state of the graph as well as its structure are subject to updates. There might be different update paths that lead to the same end result. It is an open challenge to find a better and more detailed graph. However, it seems like a certain stability of the graph structure emerges at some level of abstraction from the computational substrate of the universe. Thereby, it seems there is a fundamental truth to be discovered beyond what is constructable within.

One could assume that the meaning of life is a formula that optimizes the aspects of existence to reach a maximum state according to some evaluation criteria. The term “complexity” is used here for this evaluation criteria. The state of maximum “complexity” is a stable equilibrium where, e.g., the most is known, lived, and experienced while being as “independent” of the initial conditions as possible. The reason for the latter condition is given in picture four. Such a meaning of life is computationally irreducible from our point of existence, and it might as well be from the outside, hence free will effectively might exist.

The causal updates in figure two surround our existence. They have the potential to produce an output signal that is complex and independent of initial input conditions. The output signal has the potential to be statistically relevant and truly surprising even for an outside spectator that is not constrained by what is computationally reducible within our frame of existence. Therefore, the creation of the output signal must be barely computationally reducible for this outside spectator. To create such a feature we must create a really hard problem inside this universe box. We must barely brake it. The computations in picture two must approach the maximum computational power in our pocket of the universe. This is how we could be able to achieve such a truly independent complex state that is stable for at least some period, the existence of which is yet another remarkable feature that can reasonably be related to the meaning of life. There might be a set of equally complex but distinct output signals. It does not matter whether there is an outside observer or if the observer emerges from the computations that barely break the computational power in our pocket in the universe, as there is a relation between the two concepts.

Operations are performed on the force carriers of the goddesses. The things that perform operations are individuals, groups, and society. This are the workers in this giant Turing like machine operating on the abstract substrate of the goddesses. There might be other systems out there that are susceptive to the carriers. All these systems calculate as an output signal some notion of complexity that is emitted back to the computational substrate. The output signal behaves to the input signals like indistinguishable from true randomness. It truly must be a fine spectacle to whomever watches the show, next to the other dishes where nothing happens or some trivial outcome is boringly achieved.

Now that we have a better idea of the meta-question, we know all the necessary components. From them we can try to instantiate an abstract most generally accepted question and find an answer to it. But how will we arrange the parts? For yourself and society evolving through time, the only way to pass the giant turing test is to influence the three goddesses. These are the parameters we can influence. In what way should we do it, that is the question. But we already know the answer. To send that signal, we need to tell a surprising story. We need to get crazy, i.e., independent of initial conditions, while not forgetting to please the goddesses, i.e., maximize their state. So finally, let me rephrase the question: instead of asking what is the meaning of life, ask how to surprise yourself, it might end up surprising the whole universe. You can then start to break the question down into more detailed ones. You can ask how to surprise your family or loved ones. You can ask how to surprise your boss or bank. How to surprise yourself by creating something? How to surprise yourself while taking a break?

Now to the answer: Earn a lot of money only to give it all up. Care for many when no one cared about you. Build something from scratch when everything can be bought. Grow a strong back when the world breaks your spine. Look for the bright side when you are depressed. Stop drinking when you have become an alcoholic. Take a break when you work too hard. Learn what you want to do when you were raised watching TV. Assume this is just a complex turning test with extreme consequences. While you refine your surprising answer, do not forget to push the goddesses towards the complex attractor, otherwise all is just statistical noise. Be confident in your role within the bigger systems like society where different role emerge that push the goddesses to different degrees and different update paths can lead to the same result.

Conclusio
The current approach to the meaning of life is a story on the scientific level of a holy text. There is no dedicated scientific field to systematically dissect the problem. Given the fundamental importance of the problem, this seems none other than crazy. So take all that has been said with a grain of salt, because until we definitely know the questions and answers to the meaning of life we should continue to search for them while not forgetting the beauty in doing so.