Thoughts about Life

Thoughts and Language Through Dimensions

Thoughts carry more information than words do. Even when people speak the same language, each of the seven billion people in the world thinks differently, and something is always lost when a thought is turned into words. In that sense, thoughts are points in a high-dimensional space, and words are points in a lower-dimensional one.

The space where thoughts exist can be identified with the brain, so I will call it brain-space. The space where words exist is language. Every person has a brain-space of their own. So when we communicate, what we are really doing is projecting what is in one brain-space into another.

But to project it directly, we would first have to define brain-space clearly. And that is where the problem begins. Human thought takes place inside brain-space, which means we cannot fully define our own brain-space from within it. A two-dimensional ant on a flat plane cannot imagine a three-dimensional structure. In much the same way, we cannot neatly define the space our own thinking lives in.

To get around this, human beings created a low-dimensional space based on social agreement. That space is language. We project thoughts from brain-space into language-space, and the other person takes that point in language-space and projects it back into their own brain-space. Some loss of information is inevitable, but this is the best method we have found.

Note: Even within the same language, words like "cola" and "happiness" exist at different dimensional levels. "Cola" is relatively high-dimensional, because what people picture is fairly similar. "Happiness" is lower-dimensional, because countless different experiences are compressed into a single word, and each person imagines something different. Strictly speaking, it would be more accurate to describe this not as one single space, but as a network of subspaces. Still, "space" is simpler and more intuitive, so I will stick with that.

What is Happiness?

Rational people design their lives and make their choices in ways that maximize their own life metric. Happiness is simply another way of referring to that life metric.

So to ask what happiness is means trying to express the life metric that exists in brain-space in language that is even lower-dimensional than the word happiness itself. There is a paradox here. The more concrete the expression becomes, the more personal it becomes. The more universal it becomes, the more abstract it becomes, and the more information is lost.

The Illusion of a Correct Life - Thinking Outside the Box

After spending twenty years in Korean society, I fell into the illusion that there was such a thing as a life close to the "correct answer." For example:

Get into a good university, join a major company, marry in your early thirties, have children in your mid-thirties
Or, in the specific context of POSTECH: start doing research after your fourth semester, choose a decent lab, go to graduate school, and then get hired by a major company on the strength of that record

But not only is there no life that is "close to the correct answer" - there is no correct answer to life at all. We know this, and yet we go on living inside the illusion that such an answer exists.

So where does the mistake occur? Is it really true that there is no correct answer to life?

To say there is a correct answer means that there is some fixed action plan that maximizes the life metric. That idea rests on two assumptions:

The life metric itself is fixed in advance
There is a correct action plan for maximizing it

The second assumption is not easy to dismiss. It is a social conclusion drawn from tens of millions of people who have lived with similar life metrics.

The real error lies in the first assumption: that the life metric is already fixed.

If I were to redefine "life metric," or happiness, I would call it the direction a given brain-space is pointing toward. Each of us has a brain-space of our own, and each of us therefore has a life metric of our own. In language, the word happiness may be the same for everyone. But in brain-space, it becomes something unique to each person.

If we do not clearly distinguish language-space from brain-space, it is easy to fall into this illusion. The word is the same in language-space, and in many cases the directions themselves are similar too. For most people, happiness tends to be greater with more money than less, and greater with family than without.

But if we never step outside the illusion that life has a correct answer, then we cannot truly enjoy living. The moment we become adults, the number of choices available to us comes close to infinity. And yet, if we stay inside this illusion, we end up grieving a reality in which we have no choice but to conform, while ninety-nine percent of the options remain hidden from sight.

In reality, we really can:

Drop out of college and start a company
Become a YouTuber who travels the world
Open a shop on the other side of the planet

To make myself clear, I am not arguing that we should live in opposition to society. I am arguing that we should think for ourselves.

There is no Big Brother in real life. At least, I do not believe there is. Social conventions, and these supposedly correct lives, are still arranged in ways meant to aim at the happiness of the people inside them. So even if you think for yourself, there is still a good chance you will arrive at a similar conclusion.

But whether or not you arrived there through your own thinking makes a great difference in how satisfied you feel with your life. There is a profound difference between a life I did not choose and a life I was never given the chance to choose. Life is precious, and we only live it once. So we should step outside the social frame and think on our own.

What Kind of Life Do You Want?

Once you begin thinking outside the frame, you have to design your own life. The universe contains infinitely many scenarios, while life is finite. So unless you are Doctor Strange, choosing the global optimum - the theoretically best possible choice - is impossible. All we can do is make the best choice available at each moment, something like an MDP.

The more experience you have, the better. But when the moment of choice arrives, you cannot suddenly add more experience. So there are two additional variables we can use.

1. Others' Advice

Even though every brain-space is different, objective experience, and the insights of people moving in a similar direction, are likely to be meaningful to me as well. But if we keep in mind that every brain-space is unique, then subjective information has to be taken in with some distance.

(This is why there are contradictions when listening to various entrepreneurs' lectures.)

2. 'How Cool Is It?'

This may sound a little funny, but it is the conclusion I came to after thinking about it for a long time.

If I could confirm the correlation between my choices and my happiness through other people's experiences, that would be ideal. I could simply choose the option with the greatest increase in happiness.

But happiness is not intuitive enough, and when two options are at a similar level, comparison becomes almost impossible. So what I need is something intuitive, but still with enough dimensional richness that the loss of information from the life metric in my brain-space remains in balance.

I think that thing is coolness.

"Coolness" is more concrete than happiness, so I can judge it intuitively, and yet more abstract than any single lived experience, so it can still contain many different forms a life can take. It is a deeply subjective and intuitive metric.

If you ask, "Whose life would be happier, Mark Zuckerberg's or Obama's?" I have to stop and think. If you ask, "Who is cooler?" I can answer without much difficulty.