Ten years ago, after finishing my bachelors when I was in an existential crisis, I had come up with this purpose for my life:
My purpose of life, since we do not know our purpose, is to find that purpose of life. i.e. Work on finding out the Truth, meaning of life and universe.
One way I figured I could contribute to this is through the field of machine learning and AI - I did not understand it much especially since I had studied mechanical engineering, but I felt it in me that these could be legit avenues. I figured if we ever invent a "self-learning machine", and provide it the same senses, cognition and motion as humans, it would learn and grow way faster than humans could. And then when it knows more than humans, we could just ask it the purpose of life.
My life did not go as planned for whatever reasons. I could not get onto that academic path of contributing to such science & tech directly [yet?]. Blame it on opportunities, circumstances, resources, personal flaws, procrastination, lack of information, bullshit US visa system, whatever. Life happened. I have been quite depressed about that for long.
Recently, I have been revisiting the simulation hypothesis (like The Matrix), and it has been causing a bit of an existential crisis again. Imagine humans in an effort to understand the universe spend thousands of years with science, tech, art etc, and finally understand it only to discover that they have perfectly understood only a simulation, and there is another real universe outside it with an unknown number of layers of simulations outside it! Our simulation may not have the same behavior as the real universe. The real universe may not even be observable. That information may just not be available to us. What then! Well, that throws out my original purpose which had pacified my existential crisis.
I have also been reading / watching a little about how there possibly are limits to what we can know. Something like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
So I guess if purpose-1 would be fundamentally impossible, then what's there to life at all? Other than just having fun, do your time and get out when it's time? Hence, I now have a secondary purpose in addition to the original primary purpose (at least tentatively until it gets ingrained):-
Enjoy living, as if you're in a video game with just 1 life. There's no meaning to life, just do what you like.
This is the message of the movie Soul. It's the same message as Kurtzgesagt's video on Optimistic Nihilism. It's probably the same message as when people say "Don't forget to have fun!". It's probably the same message as what my mom writes in her email signature - "Be Happy". It's the same message as The Happiness Equation's rule - "Be happy first, then pursue wants".
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Musings to follow this:
Implications of that purpose. Hedonism? Maximizing fun? Short-term vs Long-term gain? Calculative vs impulsive? Calibration of that? Morality?
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