Purpose Essay Now on Plankton Valhalla

Wow. It's been over a year since I published my last essay on Plankton Valhalla. That was the second episode in a trilogy, and my work only got harder after that. I worked on the third piece on and off (mostly on) for the past 13 months, and I have finally published it today. It's titled Purpose From First Principles, and you can read it here.

The essay is already very long (twice as long as the previous one!), so I'll be brief here: this is, in part, my attempt at "fixing" POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does), a goal I stated already a year ago. POSIWID suffers from a fundamental marketing flaw: the message itself is good and important, but the way it's worded is paradoxical and baffling unless you happen to already understand the message.

It is also the foundation for a way of thinking about the world that clarifies and operationalizes an understanding of purpose, rather than pretending it doesn't exist, as 99% of modern science does. There is so much confusion about these topics that any progress on that front would be quite valuable. I hope I've spelled it all out thoroughly and patiently enough in this trilogy that it instantly feels obvious to anyone who reads it. I did try hard to achieve that, but please let me know if that's the case.

The essay was even longer at first, but I decided late in the editing process to separate out the last part, which gathers the conclusions of the whole trilogy and answers the questions in the first installment. This Trilogy Conclusions piece (effectively a short fourth episode) will reach Plankton Valhalla very soon (within a month, I promise!), and will also include new interpretations of core concepts like "meaning" and "information" in light of my Purpose framing. Stay tuned for that.

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