Book Cover

An Engineer's Search for Meaning

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

You can read this book (for free) in 3 ways:

  1. Read it online or
  2. Download PDF or
  3. Download eBook (ePub)

Here is a quick overview of the book in podcast form:

This book is a part of a larger effort known as LifeVisor.AI.

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, fact-based approach that relies on evidence and reason rather than faith or opinion.

Of course, we all know that various people have tried this approach in the past and the results have not been great. So it is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical and ask what's different this time.

Whenever something that has failed many times before suddenly starts to work, it usually involves one of 2 things:

  • New knowledge or techniques
  • New attitude or way of looking at the problem leading to new insights
And I believe that we have made great strides in both of these areas just in the last few decades, enabling us to make another 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 problem 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.

The target audience for this book consists of:

  • Individuals seeking a new, modern, fact-based approach to finding meaning, purpose and hope in life because other approaches aren't working for them.
  • Scientists, engineers or anyone with a STEM background with an interest in the intersection of science and meaning.
  • Honest truth seekers of all types. Those who are itching to get out of the Matrix / Plato's cave, because they realize that that is the only journey worth being on, even if it is a tough one.

The book uses a definition of "meaning in life" that is well established in scientific literature, rather than relying on religious or poetic ideas. The concensus among psychologists is that meaning in life consists of 3 components:

  • Having a sense of coherence or comprehensibility in life
  • Having a sense of purpose in life
  • Having a sense that one's life matters or has existential significance
The book shows how one can attain meaning in their lives in all the 3 ways using the MSE Framework.

I am not claiming that religion or idologies 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 demonstrate 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, 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 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. Doing so also allows you to challenge and potentially improve the answer if you want to.

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. These limitations result from the fact that reality is extremely complex and contains a lot of nebulosity and unknowns, and thus we haven't been successful in capturing it fully using science. (And even when we ignore those factors, we still have do contend with things like Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.)

But it turns out 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 problems in the real world. In fact, a lot of the practice of engineering isn't even fully captured by science, such as heuristics, satisficing, tacit or embodied knowledge and so on.

I believe this makes engineering far more capable of not just manipulating reality, but also understanding it.

This is crucial when talking about creating models of reality that are actually useful in practice, in particular when dealing with 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, which I named 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 started suffering from excessive hubris and I concluded that I was ready to write a whole book! That too, about "life, the universe and everything", no less!

I suppose this could be another instance of the by now commonplace Dunning-Kruger effect (people with limited competence overestimating their abilities and ending up doing something rather dumb as a result)!

For more of such lame attempts at self-deprecating humor, not to mention enlightening nuggets of wisdom that will turn you into the center of attention at parties, you may want to read my book. Don't overdo it though, or you may get yourself thrown out said parties just when things start to get interesting! 😃

Anyway, the full story of how this book came about is included in the book itself. Happy reading!

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