Reducing suffering doesn't seem to be a good criterion, because it has a trivial solution of reducing all life. The pain, the process of suffering itself is not bad, it is just a signal that what one wanted to do will not be possible to do. So suffering is just a messenger. A better heuristic for a purpose is to increase the future freedom of action https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...