Becoming a State Space Traveler

Imagine that life and the pursuit of happiness is really an optimization problem. Imagine that we spend our lives traversing a gigantic endless landscape full of mountains and valleys. The landscape represents the space of all different possible beliefs, values, and experiences that you can have at any moment: your state. And the height of the landscape represents how happy you are at that state. Imagine that the lower you are in the landscape, the happier you are.

That’s why most people take the path of least resistance. They spend their lives walking straight down hill or squatting at the bottom of a valley; because that’s the most comfortable place to be. But this presents a problem: when you’re at the bottom of a valley, you can only see places that are higher up than you, in this case, states where you would be less happy.

So it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that there is no point in exploring your landscape. It’s hard to imagine that there might be deeper valleys beyond the ridgeline of your own.

Here is a common example of how we get stuck in local minima: many people spend their lives in ‘the valley of money,’ where the local minimum is defined by having as much cash as possible. When you consider the ultimate goal of the money valley, you realize the futility of such optimization. Whether you have ten dollars or ten billion dollars, you are no closer to your ultimate goal of infinite money. Consider that most people who win the lottery end up no happier one year later. They’ve got the money, fame, and freedom, yet they can’t get themselves any closer to being truly happy. Why is this? Why can’t they escape the valley of money?

Our ancestors evolved to optimize for local minima such as sex, security, and resources. Once we have settled into local minima, we grow comfortable and see no reason to leave. And it doesn’t help that we are all automatically born into the local minima that our parents occupy. That is why the vast majority of the world believes in the same religion as their parents and holds the same cultural values. These local minima are vast and very difficult to escape. Most of us have no idea that a great landscape even exists beyond the walls of the local minimum into which we were born.

Leaving the comfort of your local minimum is unsettling. Even though taking that step requires confidence, you appear less confident to the outer world because you are not sure what you believe in. You lose your values and your convictions. You no longer know what is right and what is wrong. You can no longer make yourself feel superior by passing judgement on others. You lose your sense of identity and must expose your ego directly to the fact that you don’t actually know everything. Many people who have been through this share a common shocking experience: “I suddenly realized that I actually knew nothing.”

But for those of us trapped in a local minima, once we decide to climb out and ascend a high ridge of uncertainty and discomfort, we will see a whole beautiful world that was invisible to us from the valley, a vast landscape full of far deeper valleys than the one you came out of. And you will also see even higher mountain ranges in the distance that stretch up into the clouds. And you will know that to find out what is beyond them, you must climb their steep cliffs. When you occupy these high places of discomfort, you feel lost and exposed. It is windy and cold.  But from there it is much easier to descend back down and ultimately reach deeper valleys and get closer to finding your global minimum: true enduring happiness.

Simulated Annealing: A Mathematically Proven Way to Find True Happiness

So we’ve established what you have to gain by leaving your current local minimum. But you also can’t spend your whole life exploring randomly through the state space because one day you’ll drop dead. So given the constraints of the human life time, what is the best strategy for traveling the state spaces and achieving true happiness?

1. First of all, give yourself as much time as possible.

In other words: exercise regularly and don’t eat crap food. The longer you live, the more exploring you can do, and the more time you can spend enjoying the benefits of your exploration and changing the world. And maybe you will live forever.

2. Increase the size of your state space.

This means consider every possible idea, belief, and value no matter how crazy or wrong they seem at first. Think about how many great scientific discoveries came from mistakes in the lab, or how many great companied evolved from bad initial ideas. People with the largest state spaces change the world. They are the ultimate creative types and big dreamers whose singular visions define humanity’s achievements. These people are always open to the newest experiences and cherish the craziest ideas. They surround themselves with people from diverse backgrounds and don’t let their egos blind them to critical feedback.

3. Use simulated annealing to search your state space.

Simulated annealing is an algorithm that can find the global minimum of a state space. Which, in our case, means finding ultimate happiness. In fact, it has been proven that under certain conditions simulated annealing can always find the global minimum of any arbitrarily large state space. This is a very exciting idea but how does it apply to our lives?

To answer that we need to know how simulated annealing works. Imagine that there is a ping pong ball and you want to get it to the lowest point in a landscape. To perform simulated annealing, you would heat up the temperature of the landscape so that the ping pong ball starts bouncing around crazily and randomly between all the different places. After heating up the ping pong ball to very high temperatures, you slowly lower the temperature. As the temperature lowers, the ping pong ball bounces around less energetically and slowly starts to settle down in lower parts of the landscape.

It has been mathematically proven that if you heat up the landscape to an infinite temperature and lower that temperature slowly enough, the ping pong ball will always end up in the global minimum of the landscape. Even for an infinitely large landscape.

So how can we apply this mathematical proof to living our lives? Well if we heat the ping pong ball up to an infinite temperature, this means it randomly moves around the landscape at an infinite speed and is simultaneously at all locations and also no location. The ping pong ball doesn’t occupy any single state. For us, this means we must do the same and completely clear our minds of all beliefs and values. This is very hard since from birth we’re inundated with belief systems. However, meditation is a powerful practice for emptying our minds and releasing ourselves from preconceptions.

From this place of clarity, we are completely free to explore any part of the state space without bias and beliefs that were embedded in us as children. This is the part where you slowly cool down your state space and start considering new beliefs and values. However, given that our state space is very large, this must be a very careful and slow process. But if we live long enough and chose those values slowly and carefully enough, we will eventually reach ultimate happiness. It is a mathematical certainty.