What Bryan Johnson Gets Right About The Meaning of Life

Bryan Johnson, the founder and CEO of Braintree, was on Lex Fridman’s podcast, and Lex asked him about the meaning of life. This is what he said, and I think it is fascinating:

What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life? Our technological progress is getting to a point where we could aspirationally say we want to figure out what is really going on—really going on, because does any of this really make sense? Now we may be 100, 200, 500, a thousand years away from being able to poke our way out of whatever is going on. But I’d say in this moment of time, the meaning of life is that we can build a future state of existence that is more fantastic than anything we could ever imagine.

What is fascinating about this is his assumption, his presupposition, about what it would take for us to understand the meaning or purpose of existence. He says that we would have to be able to poke ourselves out of this world. His governing assumption is that the meaning or purpose of this world is outside this world.

Then he goes on later to say that from what we know, it is like X, Y, and Z. That is to say, we have some sort of hint, some sort of sense of what the purpose of life is, and we can kind of do this until we can poke our heads through the edge of this into the other world and figure out what this is all about.

Now, what is fascinating about this is how true these assumptions actually are.

How Purpose Actually Works

First, let us ask: if we were asking about meaning or purpose, what would it even mean to answer that question?

Sometimes people unduly struggle with this question. They wonder, “How would you answer this, and what kind of answer would this even be?” In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they will say it is 42 and things like that.

The funny thing is that this has been sitting in front of us the whole time. We understand how purpose works. We encounter it ten thousand times in a day.

Here is what purpose is: purpose is an intention in the mind of a person that then designs objects out in the world—social or physical—and instantiates that purpose in the object, if it is designed well.

What are some examples? Think about a toothbrush. You can look at a toothbrush and see that there is a handle and there are bristles. You can start to figure out, even if you had no context, what this is for. It is probably supposed to brush something. You can read the purpose right off the object. You can get close to it; you get hints into this thing.

Or think about a stop sign. You look at it and say, “Okay, we see some letters on here, and it’s red, so it’s supposed to grab our attention. It normally sits at these certain places.” You can read the purpose, the meaning of this object, right off it.

The Hierarchy of Nested Purposes

Of course, purposes are nested in other purposes. These things recurse at other levels as you go up.

The toothbrush will probably sit next to toothpaste, which itself has a purpose. Those two things together sit on a sink, and that whole arrangement has a larger purpose: to take care of yourself. Where those two things were just for your teeth and mouth, you then have other things on the counter that are for the rest of your face. Then you move out from there.

All of these have higher and higher-level purposes, and you can work your way up through that structure. That is how purpose functions.

Now, someone may say, “No, when you get to the purpose of all purposes, the ur-purpose, it is fundamentally different.” Of course, that is always possible. But the problem with that argument is that the only reason we ask the question in the first place is that we encounter all these purposive things all the time. I mean, there is the existential aspect too, but we encounter ordinary purpose constantly.

If you want to say, “No, it is fundamentally different when you get up to the top level,” okay, but you are going to need a very strong argument for that.

It is kind of like an argument that one philosopher made regarding moral realism. He pointed out that if you are arguing against moral realism, the problem is that any premise you offer for that argument is going to be less intuitive than the reality of morals themselves. So your argument has to be overwhelmingly strong.

In the same way, if you say the ultimate purpose is fundamentally different from how we experience purposes a thousand times every day, it is possible, but it is just going to be a very hard argument to make.

Poking Outside the World

What gets truly fascinating is when you talk about this other aspect. You have these hints of purpose within the world, but you also have Bryan’s sense that the ultimate purpose is outside of the world, and that we will only be able to find it once we can poke our heads outside the world.

Let us think about this as an analogy, like a character in a story.

Think about Romeo. If you were to ask him, “Hey Romeo, what is your purpose?” he would probably say, “Well, my purpose is to get Juliet—to win her, to woo her.”

Then you could ask a higher-order question: “Okay, so that’s your immediate purpose right now. What is the purpose of your whole life?”

Maybe he could say, “Well, it is sort of this large exposition on love.” You could see how he might put that together from the hints inside his world.

But what would be even better to truly find out? What would be definitive would be to have the author enter into Shakespeare’s world, poking his head into that world and telling Romeo directly what his intention was.

So the reality of meaning or purpose being outside the world is absolutely true. And it is also true that there are hints in the world that we can look to for its purpose.

Watch the original episode.