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An Engineer's Search for Meaning

A New Paradigm for Finding Meaning in Life, Grounded in Science and Engineering Principles

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Quick podcast about the book generated using NotebookLM:

Frequently Asked Questions

The main message of the book is that it is possible to find meaning, purpose, and hope in life by following a principled approach that relies on evidence and reason rather than faith or dogma.

Now, we all know that many have tried to accomplish this admittedly audacious task in the past, and the results haven't been great. So it is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical and ask what's different this time.

Three crucial factors make our current moment different:

  • New scientific insights or tools that were unavailable even a century ago
  • New paradigms or ways of thinking about complex, fuzzy, emergent phenomena
  • A more humble, more realistic attitude due to having learned from the the failures of the past
We have made great strides in all of these areas just in the last few decades, enabling us to make a far stronger attempt at tackling this problem. Allow me to show you how.

In the book, I develop a rigorous framework, based entirely on evidence and reason, to create a model of reality as well as definitions of what we mean by meaning, purpose and hope in life and how they can be achieved. I build this framework, that I am calling the Meaning-Seeking Entities (MSE) Framework, from First Principles, using a methodology I call Present-Bounded Rationality (PBR).

This methodology is based on the idea that while science and rationality are our best tools for understanding reality, they have some limitations which you simply can not ignore when dealing with something as complex as reality. This fact has been used by many in the past to suggest that science and rationality are completely useless for this type of effort. Surprisingly, their solution to this inadequacy is to go with far less rigorous and unproven approaches requiring leaps of faith or reliance on feel-good or magical ideas!

In the book, I describe an honest and humble way of dealing with the limitations of science and rationality and still attain our intended goal. (As aside, this is the esssence of what an engineer does.)

This book is intedend for:

  • Individuals seeking a modern, evidence-based approach to finding meaning, purpose and hope in life because other approaches aren't working for them.
  • Scientists, engineers, doctors, analysts or anyone with a STEM background interested in the deeper questions of life.
  • Curious, skeptical, honest truth seekers of all types.

I am not claiming that religion or tradition or even poetry are irrelevant to finding meaning. I acknowledge that all of these approaches have a proven track record of helping scores of people convince themselves that their lives are meaningful.

I am simply trying to develop a new way of getting there by following an approach that I believe is more aligned with the current state of our knowledge. Not surprisingly, despite this path being different from the older approaches, the final conclusions reached using this new approach have many things in common with the other approaches (though there are also some significant differences). Still, the a big benefit of this approach is that not only do you get good answers, but you can follow the entire logic of how those answers were arrived at. This approach also allows you to challenge and potentially improve the answers if necessary.

This is a great question (if I may say so myself!) The obvious reason is that I am an engineer myself. But it goes a lot deeper than that.

Normally when people think of things like evidence and reason, they immediately think of science. And then they run into the problem of limitations of science or rationality in general. In spite of the great strides we have made with science, there still are many questions that science hasn't managed to answer convincingly. These limitations result from the fact mathematical formulas, models and even simulations can't fully capture some of the complexity and nebulosity in reality, not to mention the fact that we still have many unknowns. (And even when we ignore those factors, we still have do contend with things like Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.)

What's interesting, though, is that engineering is far better suited to this task! Engineering doesn't limit itself to logic and abstractions as science does, it occupies itself with the far more difficult task of bulding real working artifacts and solving real world problems. In spite of the gaps in our scientific knowledge, we can still build bridges that last decades, make vaccines to destroy organisms too small for us to see ourselves, land a spacecraft on an asteroid etc. This is crucial when dealing with complex and nebulous concepts like meaning, purpose and hope in real life.

Of course, as you might guess, this argument gets a lot deeper and far more complex than what can be described in an FAQ. You would need to dive into the book to appreciate it fully.

About the Author

Vin Bhalerao
Vinayak (Vin) Bhalerao

I am a curious, open minded, unapologetically nerdy software engineer and writer.

I started my "writing" career by writing code for computers at large corporations, such as Microsoft and Expedia. Of course, at some point I had to grow out of that and start writing for people, so at first I wrote quick little pieces on Facebook. This caused much chagrin and confused bemusement among my friends and family, so, to protect them, I retreated to a personal blog, Deepest Turtle. You guessed it, the name is based on the idea that "it's turtles all the way down" and my general attitude towards such never-ending recursions is to see how far we can get anyway! When I got tired of writing for a nearly non-existent audience on my blog, I decided to migrate to Medium, where I was finally able to find some readers. After I had written about 50 blog posts, some of which managed to get thousands of views and reads, I felt that I was ready to aim big (may be too big!) and decided to write a whole book. That too, about "life, the universe and everything", no less!

But that's just the background. To read the full story of how this book came about, inclduding gory details about my midlife crisis and how I overcame it, you will need to read the book itself.

Happy reading and thank you very much.

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