---
title: On Purpose
date: 2011-03-11
techne: :done
episteme: :broken
---

Two reflections on purpose and two open questions.

# Purpose cannot be created.

I'll just let [Alonzo Fyfe][Fyfe Purpose] speak for me.

> However, the common atheist response to the question of meaning and purpose in
> life is almost as absurd.
>
> This is the idea that each of us gets to choose our own meaning or purpose in
> life, and whatever we choose has real value.
>
> If we are talking about a person, and I have the ability to choose where that
> person was born, who its parents were, what it likes and dislikes, and what
> happened to him five years ago, this should be taken as a reliable sign that I
> am dealing with a *fictional* character. I do not have the liberty to make those
> types of decisions if we are talking about a real person. Instead, there is a
> fact of the matter.
>
> The same is true of assigning a purpose or meaning to life. If a person has
> the liberty to simply 'choose' a purpose or a meaning, then this should be
> taken as proof that he is creating a fictitious entity. This 'purpose' or
> 'meaning' is no more real than the character she invented for some story or
> book.
>
> To live one's life as if this fictional purpose or meaning is real is to live
> a lie.

# Desire is not about content.

Do desires exist? Has desire fulfillment value?

According to [Desirism][], desire fulfillment itself has no value, but the
existence of desires creates value within the agent that has them. In other
words, if Bob wants to eat cheese, then eating cheese has value for Bob, but
only because this attitude exists in Bob's mind. The important assertion of
desirism is that desire fulfillment itself has no value, so it cannot be said
that it is good for Bob to want to eat cheese, nor that it is good *in general*
to eat cheese.

(This has the implication that if there were only agents without desires, then
no value at all would exist. It is only for an accident of evolution that we
happen to have desires.)

Overall, this is not an esoteric claim. It follows quiet neatly from standard
scientific models. But is it true?

Think about [wireheading][Wireheading]. Why should I bother to fulfill a complex
set of desires if I'm also able to self-modify? I could simply replace all my
desires with a single trivial one, say "I desire 1+1 to equal 2". What would be
the difference in this case?

How do you identify desires? How do you *know* if a desire fulfilled?

One possibility might be that desire is about a state the world should be in.
Say, I might desire that every human has access to health care. But that seems
weak. For example, economics is full of "as if" models built just around this
assumption. A nice one is [Rational Addiction]. Regardless of their predictive
power, they tend to be very different from the way people actually think.

Or maybe we are talking about "reasons for action". Essentially, every moment
there are thousands of things we could do, but ultimately something compels us
to do a specific thing. This thing we might call a desire. But this again is
weak. For one, that would mean that desires are either in principle
unfulfillable (because they are only present when we act, but not when results
occur) or they are fulfilled through each action immediately. This again seems
false.

What we are really after is the sensation of fulfilling desires, not the actual
desire. Or in other words, utility is about mind-states, not world-states. This
becomes clear to anyone paying close attention to their mind upon the moment of
desire fulfillment. It is only[^1] this short moment of aggravation and
cessation-of-aggravation that matters, not the content of the desire.

A content-of-desire model of purpose therefore fails.

[^1]: While trying to map this during vipassana, I noticed an additional stage
    right before the aggravation. Sometimes for a short moment a glimpse of
    "heaven" pops up, but the promise is never actually fulfilled. I haven't yet
    mustered the necessary concentration to check if it always occurs.
    
# Why does this state of cessation exist at all?

It seems so unnecessary. Agents with preferences would work just fine without
it. I can drop my free will, so to speak, yet still act and choose just fine. I
do lose my ability to make complex conscious decisions, but why the difference?
And why, if I don't drop it, do I have cessation-of-aggravation even for trivial
things?

# How does one act if there is no purpose?

Maybe there really isn't any meaning to life. My brain is just broken, hoping to
find any. But then what? There seem to be only two responses to this question.
Either, "there's ultimate meaning, duh", but they all are very silly attempts of
what this meaning might be. Or, "get rid of the need to know". I utterly detest
this option. It is, maybe, the only thing I actually consider evil. If the only
alternative to suffering is "not looking for answers", then I prefer the
suffering. I'd rather not have this kind of "enlightenment", thank you very
much.

But this doesn't seem right. I have a strong intuitive sense that there is
meaning and I'm just too stupid to figure it out. Maybe my intuition is
misleading me. Yet, I don't seem to be the only one. A sense of *fulfilling
fate* seems to be not too unusual.

> Long ago, a Pentecostal pastor told me that I could keep on doubting, waiting
> till I had resolved all questions before I would be able to enter into worship
> with a clean conscience, but then that would probably mean I would never
> worship, because there would never be a way to settle all questions about God.
> I must simply decide (now) whether I was going to worship God. I see he was
> right. He would not have put it this way, but what I see in his sage advice
> was the realization that the two issues (of deciding what to think of "God" as
> an intellectual problem versus deciding whether to walk with God) belong to
> different language games, and that to solve one is not to solve the other.
> Thus, why wait to solve both before you can make headway on either one?
>
> -- [Robert M. Price][Price Purpose]
