1.2 Origin Story
This is the origin story of how I first came up with The Big Answer. It’s not meant to explain the model or its concepts, as these were refined and fleshed out over the years after I had these original epiphanies. This is a personal account of the initial breakthrough and the subsequent days and months spent developing the main concepts.
To start with, I was never overly interested in philosophy. I am more science-minded and didn’t like how philosophy just seemed like an endless process of subjective conjecture without ever providing concrete answers to anything.
But one day, in 2010, I watched a TED talk by Sam Harris, called “Can science answer moral questions”. I found this notion that there were objective truths about human suffering and thriving to be a fresh take on the subjective non-answers I’d previously come across. Looking into it, I found he is a neuroscientist, and I began thinking about how we could potentially, one day, figure out the exact neural wiring that makes decisions about whether something is good or bad, moral or immoral, and I wondered what kinds of things that mechanism would be looking for.
Shortly after watching this video, I left with my oldest son to pick up my middle son from preschool at Douglas Park in Vancouver, BC. I believe it was a Tuesday. It was cloudy, grey and cool. The only other people at the park were a mom and her baby on the swings. My oldest son and I arrived early, and we were in the large, empty, shallow, concrete wading pool kicking a soccer ball back and forth (the two-foot-high walls helped contain the ball).
As we were booting the ball back and forth, I continued reflecting on Sam’s video, pondering how our brains judged various actions as moral or immoral. I reasoned it must be something fairly straightforward, likely with reasonably few parameters. I tried to think of a simple commonality among all things “moral” and “good”. It was no surprise when, after spending a couple of minutes pondering the question, I couldn’t come up with anything. After all, we’d had thousands of years of the best minds working on the problem, and we still had no answer.
However, before I gave up completely, I remembered that, as a kid, I used to keep myself busy at restaurants with the activity placemats they handed out. One of the games was always a maze. I remembered that it was often easier to start at the finish and work backwards, as it seemed a lot of the traps were designed to appeal to someone starting from, well, the start. So I flipped the problem on its head and started to think about what all immoral or “bad” things had in common.
It took only a minute or so of trying a few candidates that obviously didn’t work before the idea popped into my head that everything we considered immoral lead to some kind of deterioration or destruction - of someone’s mind, body, freedom, autonomy, their subjective experience, their ability to support themselves, etc., or of a relationship, family, business, society, economy, ecosystem, etc.
To be honest, I doubted at first that it could be something so simple and obvious that someone like me would be the first to think of it, so I assumed there must be some flaw with that reasoning that was already known. This was back before I had a smartphone, however, so I had no way to look it up then and there. So I continued testing it in my mind, thinking of every moral dilemma and every ethical conundrum I could and seeing if the “bad” or “wrong” answer did, in fact, lead to deterioration or destruction of something.
In doing so, I made a few quick discoveries.
One, not all deterioration or destruction is bad. However, just like the statement “not everything with fur is a dog” doesn’t negate the statement “all dogs have fur”, the statement “not all deterioration or destruction is bad” doesn’t negate “everything bad leads to deterioration or destruction”. If bodies didn’t decay, then once all the nutrients were locked up in them, life would cease to exist. The sun’s deterioration powers all life on Earth. A breakup, or the overthrow of a government, etc., is necessary to replace it with something better.
This model only applies to living things and systems of living things. It also applies on the largest scales and time frames. The sun and dead bodies aren't living things or systems of living things, so this model doesn’t apply to them. A breakup or overthrowing a government might be bad in the short term, but the hope/goal is that it will be better in the long term. In all cases, deterioration/destruction is never “good”; it can only be “necessary”. Further, it would always be preferable if a better outcome could be achieved without an interim period of deterioration or the need for destruction.
Two, something can be seen as bad not only when it directly leads to deterioration or destruction, but also when it simply pushes something in that direction, making it more likely (eg mildly teasing a partner, or raising taxes slightly too much), or it could increase the statistical likelihood of deterioration or destruction, such as not wearing a seatbelt.
Three, I realized that something could be “good” and yet we might subjectively think it’s “bad”. For instance, being disciplined by a parent can be perceived as negative by a child, but we often appreciate it when we become successful adults. We react to pain as if it is bad, but it’s good that we think pain is bad, as this makes us avoid things that hurt, which is good. It was these examples that made me realize this solution was something objective that we could be subjectively wrong about.
Four, I realized it worked even for people with opposing viewpoints. Some examples I remember thinking of at the time were how pro-life people focused on the destruction of a life, while pro-choice people focused on the deterioration of bodily autonomy and women’s rights. Or how pro-gun people focused on the deterioration of their rights and freedoms, while those against gun ownership focused on the destruction of life. While both sides vehemently disagree and have polar opposite viewpoints on a single topic, the positions of both sides can be accounted for with this singular explanation.
The final epiphany I had on that day was when I started thinking of things that were “bad”, that were explained by deterioration or destruction, and yet were not moral issues. Getting a hole in your favourite pants when you trip, or a natural disaster causing devastation, or your mind and body deteriorating with age, etc., have nothing to do with morality, and yet they represent deterioration and destruction, and are “bad”. This made me realize that I hadn’t just found the criteria for something being morally “bad”, but “bad” in general, in all areas of life.
It was at this point that I realized I might really be onto something, and I began to feel that “eureka” moment take hold. I was still fighting it, because I thought I couldn’t possibly be the first one to have thought of it, and I felt like there was a good chance I’d go home, look it up, and find that this line of reasoning had already been thought of long ago and had been long-since debunked... But still, part of me kept thinking “what if”.
What if I were, in fact, the first person to think of this? The more I thought about and tried to test it, the more powerful it seemed to be. I started to let the excitement of a breakthrough rise up. There was no moment when I felt enlightened, no cherry blossoms blew off the trees and swirled around me in a vortex, a hole didn’t open up in the clouds and shine a god ray down on me… In fact, it was remarkably unremarkable. It was still a gloomy, grey, cool day.
I couldn’t share my thoughts with my then-six-year-old son, as he wouldn’t understand what I was talking about or give meaningful feedback. The lady on the swings with her baby probably wasn’t interested in a stranger suddenly yammering at her about solving morality. I called my then-wife, hoping to tell her, but she said she was trying to get my youngest to sleep and couldn’t talk, so since it wasn’t technically urgent, I said I’d just talk to her later. So it was incredibly anticlimactic. I just kept kicking the ball with my son, and eventually, my middle son came out from preschool, and we went home.
When I had the chance, I started learning about other approaches to explaining morality, meaning, purpose, etc., and I found I could quickly spot many loopholes, exceptions, or failures of those approaches and explanations. I remembered that is what turned me off philosophy initially.
Looking up “arguments against” and then typing in a particular philosophy showed me that I wasn’t the first to think of these shortfalls in the various approaches. However, this encouraged me because it showed me I was fairly good at spotting holes in philosophical models in general, and yet I couldn’t think of any significant holes in my own model. I also couldn’t find anyone who had come up with the same idea of deterioration and destruction, which simultaneously baffled me and encouraged me, as this meant it hadn’t yet been debunked!
The next step was to try to figure out what the opposite of deterioration and destruction was, and see if this universally applied to everything we thought of as moral and “good”. This took significantly more time! I couldn’t immediately think of a simple, clean opposite of deterioration and destruction. I found this quite frustrating!
Eventually, I took the approach of asking “what, exactly, is deteriorating or being destroyed?”. That’s when I came up with the idea that it was something’s features, characteristics, properties, behaviours, etc. I eventually settled on the word “principles” as a catch-all for these. It was later that I realized principles were even more foundational, since something didn’t just “have” principles in the way something had properties, features, characteristics and behaviours, but rather that something “is” its principles.
This led me to order and complexity, which led to stability. I also thought of “distinctiveness” within a few days.
However, I could tell these weren’t enough. I kept trying to think of examples where I knew one thing was “better” than another, and then trying to use these qualities to explain this, which didn’t always work. It then took about a year and a half of continually going back and thinking about the problem to finally come up with the final few qualities of dynamics, resourcefulness and efficiency.
It was shortly after identifying these final qualities that I realized they were necessary for existence, which then made me realize they were what evolution was selecting for.
It then took about another 5 years to figure out most of the rest of this model (realizing that it explained “truth”, meaning, purpose, and so on, coming up with the new definitions of chaos and order, and the concept of “disorder filters”, etc). A number of key breakthroughs were only made recently. For example, the “supporting qualities” I only just thought of in 2025.
Why did I call it “The Big Answer”? When I realized how many different areas this one model explained, I couldn’t think of any title for it that was less than five words long and which didn’t exclude one of the major areas of application. As it dawned on me that it answered many of the “biggest questions” we’ve been asking throughout history, I thought “Wow, this is really, like, the big answer for all these big questions”.
At first, I started referring to the model as “The Big Answer” both for lack of something better, and as a funny, overly grandiose nickname/placeholder until I could think of something else. At first, I felt it was too audacious to actually use; that it would put people off and make them approach it with hostility and a desire to disprove it rather than learn and understand it.
Over time, I grew to like the name more. I feel like it truly is at least “a” big answer if not “the” big answer (though “A Big Answer” doesn’t quite work as a title). Also, as I have become more confident in the overall approach, I feel I am actually eager for people to try to disprove it and find its flaws. Trying to do this myself is what has led to the biggest breakthroughs and discoveries. I am confident that people challenging it from different angles will only serve to improve and refine the model over time, as well as highlight its robustness. I hope the title works as a lure for those who only want to learn about it to disprove it, as I believe that by doing so, they will only end up adopting it and/or improving it.
The biggest challenge that took the most time over the years has been trying to figure out how to explain this model. I don’t think this process will ever be truly “finished”, but I hope I have reached a level of proficiency where I can start sharing it! The biggest advancement was just this past spring when I developed my current format, which combines Overviews, Shallow Dives, and Deep Dives. This approach provides some necessary structure while also allowing the freedom to explore, and it gives me the freedom to write in a way that works best for my brain.
Where does this story go next? I am eager to find out! While this model applies to pretty much every area of life, I am personally most interested in working to incorporate the model into artificial general intelligence and solving the alignment problem.
