An Engineer's Search for Meaning

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!

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 an aside, this is the essence of what an engineer does.)

This book is intended 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 poetry are irrelevant to finding meaning. I acknowledge that all of these approaches have a proven track record of helping scores of people lead meaningful lives.

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, 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 to 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 building 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.

So glad you asked! Here's a quick slide deck that introduces the book:

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Yes! Here's a quick podcast about the book generated using NotebookLM: