What is the proper way to live?

How can I live the best possible life?

Am I making the best choices in life?

These are the most grappling question humanity has struggled with, consuming the minds of great thinkers and philosophers throughout centuries.

These questions are very fundamental to our existence. They spell out one of our greatest needs, the need to know our purpose and meaning of our existence.

Their significance can be understood if we take our free will which is our faculty to choose between innumerable courses of action in any given situation and then obliterate any guidance or framework upon which these choices have to be based upon.

The result is, utter and hopeless confusion.

It is my hope to address and eliminate some of these confusions through this article.

What Does It Mean To Be Alive?

In order to address this question from first principles, it is my opinion that we will profit greatly from understanding what we mean by living, or life in general. After all, how can we learn about how to live, without really grasping what life is?

There have been many attempts and various ways to define life and the quest is still on, but perhaps, the most reasonable definition I have come across is following :

Life is the ability to experience and respond.

Ability to experience and respond are both necessary and sufficient condition for life.

Even seemingly inanimate entities like plants and bacteria presumably experience rudimentary sensations, and they certainly respond to different stimuli.

Incidentally, we have another word for the ability to experience : Consciousness.

I know it is a matter of debate whether entities like plants or bacteria are conscious, because there is no way to know what it feels like to be them. However, the fact that it does feel like something, points in the direction that they are conscious.

We often think of consciousness as a binary quality. Either you have it or you don’t. Bacteria and plant don’t seem to have it, therefore it is easy to dismiss primitive creatures like them as not being conscious. This, in my view, is very myopic and narrow take on the subject of consciousness.

I reckon consciousness is best considered as a spectrum, one starting at zero or state of no consciousness such as those exhibited by rocks and mountains and going all the way up to infinity or God level consciousness.

And each creature, lie somewhere on this spectrum. Seen like this, it is easy to see why plants and even single celled organisms might possess some degree of consciousness, however small that may be, with humans, possessing the highest consciousness of all species on planet earth.

Anyhow, if consciousness is such a crucial part of what it means to be alive, then its worth examining the concept in a little more detail.

Consciousness & Meaning

Let’s begin our inquiry by asking this rather simple question :

What do we mean by meaning?

The word meaning in philosophical sense implies significance or value of something.

Can objects that lack the ability to experience or consciousness assign meaning to anything?

The answer is an obvious no.

Good, bad, right or wrong, beneficial or harmful doesn’t mean anything to rocks or mountains.

From an objective standpoint, things are just atoms and molecules arranged in certain configuration in space. But do we, as conscious creatures, perceive them as such ? Obviously not. We assign meaning to things in relation to how they shape our experience.

It stands to reason then, that ability to experience which entails ability to perceive is antecedent to assigning meaning to things.

Therefore, if good or bad, right or wrong is going to mean anything, it is only going to do so from an experiential standpoint.

In other words, our capacity for experience or consciousness has to be a determining factor of what it means to live a good life.

As humans, there is a range or rather a spectrum of experiences we are capable of, and they can be broadly classified as good and bad, contingent to whether we want more of it, or less of it.

This invites us to explore one very interesting idea : Why does some experience seem good and others bad? Why does happiness feel good? Why does grief feel bad?

From an objective standpoint, an experience is an experience. Good or bad, negative or positive, are meanings we attach to it. And we assign those meaning because of our wiring. We are wired to interpret certain experiences as good and hence desirable and certain others as bad or undesirable.

Let me explain what I mean by wiring by analogy of a chess playing machine.

If we were to create an algorithm/machine that plays good chess, part of the algorithm will be about rewarding it when it makes an intelligent move and punishing it when it makes a wrong move.

But why would the machine prefer reward over punishment?

The machine doesn’t care about what in our language we are referring to as reward or punishment. We must therefore build a meta algorithm, one that makes it care about reward and punishment. We must declare to its structure that it cares about getting more of what we call reward, and avoid what we call punishment. In other words, the desire to experience rewards and avoid punishment has to be wired into it.

In a very similar fashion, we are too, wired to desire certain kinds of experience and avoid certain other kinds. This wiring may have its causality in manner in which we evolved, but nevertheless, it is an undeniable fact that it is present. And it is this wiring that makes us perceive, from a subjective standpoint, certain experiences as good and others as bad.

It is worth mentioning here that in our broad classification of experiences as good/desirable or bad/undesirable, we might be committing black and white fallacy. Once again, there is range of possible experiences and there is always a degree to which we perceive something as bad or good. This is to say, some experience may be more desirable to us than others.

Incidentally, we can very well classify experiences based on their nature and kind or even intensity without actually mentioning anything about them being good or bad. This is analogous to choosing to classify objects based on their colour or size or weight, depending on which is relevant for the situation.

So where does this lead us? If our ability to experience is at the centre of what we call life and we have capacity for a range of possible experiences, along with inbuilt wiring to desire certain experience, and indifference or aversion for certain other kinds, then it follows that we will be naturally more inclined to bring about good experiences and will tend to avoid what we perceive as bad experiences.

Moreover, if good life is going to mean anything, it has to mean only insofar as we think of it as good from an experiential standpoint. In other word, a life full of bad experiences cannot be perceived as good by the subject.

So, it answers at least, in parts, our original question of How we ought to live. We ought to live in such a way that maximises our chance of bringing about those experiences we perceive as good and avoiding those we perceive as bad.

Is/Ought Gap

I am getting a bit ahead of myself here, as I haven’t addressed the is/ought gap, also known as Hume’s law. I have made prescription about how we ought to live after making a descriptive account of our nature as experiential creatures.

So what if we can experience things? So what if we perceive certain experience as good and others as bad? It doesn’t naturally follow that we ought to follow those experiences perceived as good.

In order to support my claim, I am going to argue, the word ‘ought’ doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. Before we can use ‘ought’ we must state a desire or a need. Consider the following premise.

Premise 1 : Eggs are good source of protein (is statement)

Premise 2 : Our body needs protein to function properly (is statement)

Conclusion : We ought to consume eggs (ought statement)

We can easily see how these two premises don’t add up i.e. we can’t get is from an ought. However, what if we add a third premise.

Premise 1 : Eggs are good source of protein (is statement)

Premise 2 : Our body requires protein to function properly (is statement)

Premise 3 : We want our bodies to function properly. (want statement)

Conclusion : We ought to consume eggs (ought statement)

Now the conclusion naturally follows, or at least intuitively seem to follow.

We ought to consume eggs, if we want our body to function properly.

In my opinion, ought, should or must statements are always conditional to a want statement. Ought doesn’t mean anything in a vacuum. I would invite you to look deeply into any ought statement you have ever encountered, my guess is you will find there was always a conditional want statement that was hidden or implicit in it.

We ought not kill innocent people if we want to follow God.

We ought to eat healthy, if we want to be fit and well.

We should donate to charity, if we want to make the world a better place.

We should make the world a better place, if we want our future generation to live better.

It means our desires or wants are antecedent to any ought we may have.

Our One True Desire

What do we really want?

Here is the nucleus of my thesis : Everything we want can always be traced back to one or more of experience we are wired to want. This means, we don’t desire anything for its own sake, we desire it only insofar as it can help us bring about a positive experience or avoid a negative one. Fundamentally, we are only wired to desire experiences, and we desire objects or states of reality only insofar as they help us achieve those experiences.

This is a bold claim, and let me back it up with evidence. Think of anything you desire. Let’s say a nice car. Now think of why you desire it? Perhaps, it will help you have a more pleasant experience while commuting to your office. Or maybe, so that you can flaunt it to your social circle, thereby gaining their recognition or validation, which in turn is going elicit an experience of better self-perception.

Conversely, let’s say I take away your ability to experience. Would you still want the nice car? Of course not. Your ability to experience is antecedent to you wanting anything in life. And experiences, in themselves, are the ends that you desire. In other words, it is only experience that you desire for its own sake. Everything else are desirable as means to get there.

Now this may cause you to think that I am advocating hedonism.

To their credit, hedonistic philosophers got it right insofar as they recognised pleasure as the only worthy pursuit. However, they didn’t do justice in defining what pleasure really is. What they termed as pleasure was often misunderstood as that which felt good on the surface, like having a sumptuous buffet of delicious meal or a great sensory experience. In their definition of pleasure they didn’t include more permanent states of consciousness such as peace and tranquility or the satisfaction that comes from serving others etc. Their definition of pleasure involved but a very narrow subset of what is perceived as good through our apparatus of consciousness.

Incidentally, I don’t prefer to use the term ‘pleasure’ for experiences we deem as good. Pleasure seems to have a connotation that it is fleeting, short term and contingent to external environment, and certainly we do desire these kinds of experiences but they are not the only kinds of experiences we desire.

We desire meaning, fulfilment, a state of peace or tranquility, significance, love etc. which can’t be aptly classified as pleasure.

Now this brings us to our final part of discussion :

How can we best create the experiences we want and avoid the ones we don’t want?

Let’s begin to answer this question by first inquiring about what factors are responsible for creating the experience within us.

How Experiences Manifest

Now obviously, our experience is manifested in our brains, therefore, it goes without saying that brain plays, perhaps, the defining role in filtering, processing and interpreting the sensory as well as non-sensory inputs that we get exposed to. Our experience, in turns, is essentially our subjective perception manufactured by our brains of various inputs or data we get exposed to.

In other words, sensory (sound, touch, sight etc. ) and non-sensory ( thoughts, emotions, imagination) inputs pass through the filter of various brain faculties such as memory, intuition, beliefs, presuppositions and inherent and acquired biases to give rise to the phenomenon of experience.

It stands to reason then that there are essentially two control variables which can be influenced or calibrated to induce or evoke the experience we desire. These are :

Sensory or non-sensory inputs

Combined role of all our brain’s faculty

It is very important to note here that there are many regions of the brain, playing a significant role in creating our experience, that we don’t have direct control over. They are largely automatic and do their jobs without our conscious intervention or control. For example, we don’t control how we perceive colours. Red is perceived as red and blue is blue. We can’t by choice perceive red as blue. We can’t by choice, experience hunger as the feeling of being satiated. We can’t choose to appraise squealing sound as music. This implies that we are not in full control of our experience. This further admits to the fact that we cannot conjure up experiences we desire by pure choice.

However, there are other brain functions which also play a significant role in the genesis of our experience which we have at least some degree of influence over. These include but are not limited to our capacity for cognition, intuition and beliefs. Our appraisal of various inputs are often dependent on our presuppositions, prior beliefs and cognitive biases, all of which can be influenced or even changed, through deliberate effort.

The sensory and non sensory inputs also have a similar dichotomy, meaning they too depend on factors, some of which are in our control and some are outside our voluntary control.

We can’t, for example, choose to live in a great mansion, by merely desiring it. There is various preconditions that need to be met before we can do so, and many of them aren’t in our direct control. We can, however, choose to run, stand, sit, sleep, watch a movie and a range of other things, exposing ourselves to a myriad of different inputs through voluntary control.

In nutshell, although we are not in complete control of our experience, we do have at least some ability to sway the probability in our favour.

So how can we best accomplish this?

First of all, we can’t possibly hope to comprehend the full range of experiences possible for our being. We don’t even have linguistic tools to name and identify all the possible experiences. Experiences can be imagined being analogous to a colour-wheel, with nearly infinite numbers of possible variations. Therefore, trying to name individual experiences you desire and labor to achieve it would be a fool’s errand. Furthermore, it is a well accepted knowledge that you can’t chase experiences directly. Experience happen as an outcome to the factors mentioned above.

Since we can’t directly pursue experiences, I am going to argue our best bet is to indirectly pursue them through something known as value.

Value as our best bet

A value is a proxy which can be directly pursued to sway the probability of positive experiences in your favour.

Each value is often the last link in the chain, which when realised or pursued, directly furnishes or unlocks many desired experiences.

An example of a value is Health. It can be directly pursued and as we move up the continuum in our health, many desirable experiences become possible and various negative ones lose grip or even disappear en masse.

Before we dive deeper into the concept of value, I would like to digress a bit and discuss why I believe that pursuit of value is the best bet to unlock positive experiences.

One alternative to pursuit of values, is pursuit of virtues or moral principles.

Several philosophers, including Stoics, Aristotle and Socrates, have regarded virtues namely prudence, courage, temperance and justice as highest and perhaps the only good, and therefore, only things worthy of our pursuit. They meticulously reason how moral virtues ensure purity of our soul, and therefore, lead to tranquility and equanimity, in midst of vicissitudes of life.

Their reasoning is undeniably sound and worthy of our attention. However, in this very reasoning they have treated virtues as a value worth pursuing.

Virtue is a kind of value because their pursuit leads to experience of equanimity. Had it not been the case, I suspect, virtue would not be considered as worth pursuing. In other words, virtues are valuable insofar as they lead to the experience of equanimity or tranquility. And I believe, those philosophers have regarded the experience of equanimity as the best possible or perhaps the only good experience human can have, thereby making virtues as the only thing worth pursuing.

It is this last point, where I have my reservations. While I agree that being virtuous leads to equanimity, I do not suppose equanimity is the best possible experience humans are capable of. I certainly don’t think it is the only good experience possible.

Moreover, how is one supposed to be virtuous? Virtue don’t work in vacuum. Moral principles are analogous to natural laws which pose constraint in our behaviour, determining our legal and illegal moves. It doesn’t mean much when someone says “Follow Justice”, same as it doesn’t mean anything when someone says “Follow gravity”.

We obey the laws of gravity in trying to achieve what we set out to achieve, as we are expected to observe moral principles in our march towards our goals and desires.

In order to be virtuous, one need to labor towards some goals. A politician can be just, but only if first of all, he is a politician. A businessman can be wise, but only in his endeavours to run his business. For any virtue to be exercised or applied, one needs a context, and this context must be supplied by the moral agent. But why would an agent prefer a particular context over others? Why would one want to become a politician over a businessperson? Can virtue determine which vocation to pursue? Well, I don’t suppose they can. These decisions have to stem from values.

It is for the above reasons, I think the argument of following virtues, and only following virtues is, at best, an ill-conceived one.

Yet another alternative to pursuing virtues or values, is pursuing pleasure. This is what hedonist philosophers preached. Now this one is easy to debunk.

The nuances of following this approach has been pointed out earlier. For one, we can’t directly pursue pleasures. They always come as an upshot of doing something pleasurable. Second, we are highly susceptible to follow fleeting, short-term and often detrimental pleasures if we concede to this approach. In the long run, it might do us more harm than good.

Notwithstanding what is said above, any pursuit that furnishes pleasurable experiences without the risk of equal or greater negative experiences can once again be regarded as a value.

There certainly can be many more approaches intended to unlock positive experiences. Some people can argue that the best way to secure such experiences is to go to heaven, and therefore, they might conclude they ought to follow their respective scriptures. But it can be argued that even in this case, following religious doctrines, simply takes the position of one of their highest values.

The problem with all the above approaches is that they all regard one particular value as be-all end-all of life. I cannot conceive good life to be containing a single, all-important value above everything. I reckon a good life is more of a balancing act between different values, thereby furnishing different kinds and intensity of experiences.

Having explored a variety of approaches, I guess I have made a strong case for living life according to a “value-driven” framework.

Let’s examine now what we mean by values, and how can we arrive at the correct values for ourselves.

How to Choose Your Values

As mentioned earlier, values are our best bets, which when pursued, will unlock the experiences we desire. It’s a bet, meaning, like any other bet, it isn’t guaranteed to furnish those experiences.

This is to say, we can be wrong about our values.

Consider, for instance, one of my chief values is building wealth. Let’s say I strive for that and indeed succeed in building a great amount of wealth. However, once I reach the desired level, I may realise to my dismay, that I am not any better in terms of my experience than how I was when I had only modest amount of money. In this case, I have likely chosen a wrong or rather, an ineffectual value, to pursue, thereby wasting a significant amount of limited time I had.

Yet another way we are likely to be wrong about our values is if they are chosen for us by our parents, teachers, bosses, friends and colleagues.

The programming that we imbibe from society often mislead us into valuing things that later prove detrimental to our well being. If we let our social mirror dictate our values, we are at best, subject to chance that these values actually lead to flourishing experiences.

Choosing our values is, undoubtedly, the most important decisions we will take in our lifetime. And choosing correct vs incorrect value would spell the difference between a good and a bad life.

I therefore advocate, consciously choosing your values after careful self-examination and scrutiny.

I recommend following a scientific approach, where we make observations by trying different things, form hypothesis about what may be considered as a value, run experiments by actually living them or by doing thought experiments and revise the hypothesis if we discover any inconsistencies or theorise it if they successfully and continually furnish the experiences we desire.

I believe each individual is unique and therefore, his values are going to be the reflection of both uniqueness of his nature and the unique circumstances he has found himself in.

Now, we can’t possibly have all the great experiences, owing to the fact that our time on this planet is limited. Therefore, it is important to choose a few top ones, from possibly innumerable set of values. We must prioritise the kind of experiences we desire the most, and then accordingly choose the corresponding value which we believe will unlock it.

So how many different values should we have?

This is pretty arbitrary, but keeping it too few might keep us from experiencing various things which was well within our reach, and might even lead to negative repercussions of not pursuing them such as in case of putting too much value on work and neglecting our health, and if it is too many, then we might get torn between the demands and requirements of various different values, thereby being unable to make any significant progress in any one of them. Once again, our goal is to have a well-balanced, holistic life filled with various colours of experiences.

Furthermore, it is important to revise our values in light of new data. Remember, our values are our best theories about what will lead to the experiences we desire and if we discover, either that there is a more desirable experience we can pursue, or that our value is not the best vehicle leading to the desired experience, we will do a great disservice to ourselves if we stay reluctant to amend our values.

This concludes my thesis on how I believe one can lead a good life. I hope it adequately answers the question of what all of our decisions should flow from. I will definitely touch upon all these topics in greater detail in my future articles, but for now, I guess I have given enough to ponder upon and perhaps, resolve some of the most fundamental existential questions that we all face.

Lastly, I have to admit, that much of what I have said in this article, are my own opinion or beliefs, and even though I routinely engage in critical examination of my beliefs, they can very well be swayed from truth. So, I would urge you to be critical of what I say, and apply sound reasoning before imbibing them as knowledge.