I. Introduction
AT THIS MOMENT, YOU ARE. YOUR GOLDEN WILL COMES OFF OF YOU IN ALL DIRECTIONS EXCEPT FOR ONE. IT SPREADS AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT INTO THE FUTURE.
It is hard to communicate in words the intensity that ideas reverberate in our heads. Do we speak figuratively, commonly, or technically? How do we make sure that both the implicit and explicit meaning transmits from blazing mind, to dry paper, back to blazing mind?
In this opening, I am trying to persuade you that it is worth listening to me. Not because of any particular credential, but because I manage to truly make you believe that I get it, and that I can breathe sparks into your mind.
Here, and perhaps in other parts of the book, I may use poetic language to try to communicate the gravity and intensity of the idea as it rests in my mind. It is not that I necessarily consider that my experiences will transmit quite correctly to you, but if simply stating how to live was enough, people wouldn’t search for meaning to motivate them to live better.
These are concepts that are running inside my mind, and seeking to share how they feel inside my mind requires trying to share the types of sensations and analogies that occur in the process.
My belief about what makes life good connects with my beliefs about where the ‘purpose’ of life comes from. I am careful here to say the ‘purpose’ of life because the word ‘meaning’ implies semantic content. Living is something you do, with a purpose. It is not a word, a sentence, or a book.
My answer to the question of what the purpose of life is begins with myself. I can say what gives my life purpose, and I can seek the chain of reasoning that explains where I get an absolute sense of purpose from, how I tie it to living, and seek to find a way that I can share the answer that roars inside of me with others so that they can have an answer as well.
This answer, however, is an internal fire that cannot easily spread - the soul is no mere dry tinder, and no one can prepare our inner selves for answers except us.
I speak in terms of fire, because I think of the source of my meaning like that - an eternal fire at the heart of my will. Like other eternal fires, both natural and manmade, it can certainly be given fuel to ignite and grow, but it never goes out even when denied of all external fuel. When I refer to this fire, I mean very specifically this source that cannot be taken away from me, even when I am not handed any way to achieve my broader goals.
This is all a work in progress. I am a man in his early thirties at the initial time of this writing. I have experienced many things, but barely anything compared to what lies ahead of me. I have a trifling understanding of virtue, and even less of an understanding (perhaps easier to resolve, though with more intense study rather than intense living) of the nature of statistical and informational entropy.
I do have a reasonable grasp on how to live skillfully, at this stage in my life and this point in history. Thus, I will primarily focus on this.
Even though my scope of understanding is limited to my own perspective, I hope that writing it out and sharing will feed back to me to increase my own understanding in the process of helping others.
II. Purpose
YOU SEE YOUR WILL AND IT IS GOOD.
The purpose of life is to do what life does.
When I say that the meaning of life is to do what life does, I can refer only to Erwin Schrodinger's "What is Life". What life does is it takes the universe, carves itself into that stuff of the universe, and leaves behind more universe that resembles living will. We take the breath of stars in all their myriad, chaotic forms and build with them buildings that touch the sky, art that makes us feel, monuments that reshape the landscape.
The key to my thoughts here are found in Erwin Schrodinger's "What is Life", Chapter 6. I have excerpted quite a bit more below1 - you should read the full thing. But let me try to capture the single, core piece.
“Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( == fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.”
We metabolize our environment, maintaining our homeostatic entropy level. Furthermore - and this is a step beyond raw biology, stepping into cybernetics - we reshape our environment as our technology and tools become part of us. We express our living will in the material and information landscape2 of the world.
That living will is created by each of us. It is the everpresent and neverending process of reshaping the universe to make it more human, to make humans more than human, and to create pseudo-divine3 meaning from nothing.
I diverge and say “meaning” here, as differentiated from “purpose” above, in that we put values and interpretations on things in the world around us, beyond our mere purpose in living. That is something that differentiates us from most or all other living systems.
While the radical frontiers of life are pushed by material boundaries, this is not merely expressed in physical things, but also in leaving legacies - which are relationships to other living, thinking beings. When we leave our will behind, somehow, we have added information comprising something of who we are into the body and mind of humanity.
You are, you have, you express a living will that is its own purpose.
I call this bringing of the universe under the human will a human "tendency", because I don't believe that it is some absolute metaphysical truth, or even an a priori aspect of human cognition. I merely think it describes the vast majority of us (and life in general).
But as living systems, when do we know that we have had a good life?
III. A Good Life
YOU LOOK IN THE DIRECTION THAT YOUR WILL DOES NOT SPREAD TO, BUT HAS SPREAD FROM. IT IS NOT PERFECT. IT IS GOOD.
A good life, first and foremost, is one that has been lived with skill. Do these seem like empty, or tautological sayings? They are not.
A life that has been lived with skill accomplishes two things. First of all, when you ask yourself if you would change anything about your life, the answer should be "no". At any given point, that point should justify the path to that point. When it doesn't, then we should seek to be at the point that the path has been justified.
Let me briefly give an example. Let us say that you have reached a point in your life where, when you ask if your choices have justified the state you are in, you say no. Perhaps you harmed those around you, didn’t achieve your goals, went bankrupt, or some other calamity.
There is no unwinding time, no reversing the causal arrow. This is something I will hammer again and again, I think.
Your immediate purpose is to, as quickly as you can, get to the point your life justifies itself to you.
This can be through mindset (both the easiest, and the hardest), or it can be through actions. Let me stop you here, since this touches on the types of concepts that can lead people through paths to self harm, if they are in the wrong state when they read this.
I do not know who you are. I might like you, I might dislike you, I might love you, I might hate you. But you create, and assign, meaning. You are the only thing I know of in the universe that does this. Whether it is through the divine, through your own will, or through bootstrapping on my own words, know that your life has purpose, that you can assign meaning to things, and that your life can be filled with glory.
YOU LOOK IN THE DIRECTION THAT IS NOT A DIRECTION THAT YOUR WILL SPREADS TO. YOU SEE YOURSELF LOOKING BACK. YOU SEE YOURSELF SEEING IT IS GOOD. SEEING YOURSELF SEEING THIS IS GOOD.
That is looking back, however. As we make decisions and travel into the future, living well means to make the choices that maximize how much we feel satisfied looking back. If we consider that I might say my life was worth living because I accomplished things and expressed meaning, but that in some alternate path I accomplished more and expressed more meaning, and was perhaps more satisfied, there is no reason to quibble at the fact that the second option is preferable to the first, even though both lives have been lived well.
And when our lives cease, our only regret should be that we did not have a chance to live them more.
Thus, the meaning of life is to act according to your living will to make more things in the universe have human meaning, and to leave markings of your living will on matter, relationships, and information (in a naive sense - obviously all things can be represented informationally). And living well is doing such, in a way that your only regret is that you have not been able to live more.
IV. Living Well
YOU OPEN THIS BOOK. IN YOUR HAND IS A TOOL. YOU ARE THAT TOOL. YOU ARE A CHISEL. THESE WORDS SEEK TO MAKE YOUR CHISEL SHARPER, LET YOU SEE FURTHER, LET YOUR WILL BE CARVED|BROADCAST MORE SHARPLY, PERSIST LONGER.
CARVE YOUR GOLDEN WILL|LEGACY|IMMORTALITY SO DEEPLY IT CANNOT BE REMOVED
The above is a philosophical examination of what it means to me to live well, but it doesn't particularly share how to achieve it.
Luckily, this is something I also feel somewhat qualified to answer.
If I have convinced you that I either have understanding of some facets of what it is to live well, then join me as I seek to breath sparks from my will to yours, so that you may join me in my attempt to become an unstoppable sculptor|engine|flame of reality.
When you look out at the world, you should see yourself. Your will. Your legacy. Your immortality.
Quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius; quod est intra est sicut quod est extra.
As above, so below. As within, so without.
More specific quotes from Schrodinger’s What is Life chapter 6. It can be found in its entirety here.
What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances.
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It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic; so much so, that from the earliest times of human thought some special non-physical or supernatural force (vis viva, entelechy) was claimed to be operative in the organism, and in some quarters is still claimed. How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism.
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What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening - call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy - or, as you may say, produces positive entropy - and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy - which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
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How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy', attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level.
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Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( == fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
The math here is hard, and information/thermodynamical entropy don’t exactly link up easily, but that’s really what I’m thinking about inspired by Erwin Schrodinger. Again, though, I’m avoiding specific math claims until I can make them firmer.
I realize the term ‘divine’ will be sensitive. I am not making a religious claim for religious people, though my perspective on being able to assign meaning in the absence of a prime mover or other divine entity may itself be considered heretical. Realize that I am not saying in any way that human will supersedes the divine if you so believe in it, but I do not.
Interested to see what direction you take next.
I'm something of a heretic myself.
https://nomadcharlie.substack.com/p/how-to-explore-the-map-without-going