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| title | date | techne | episteme |
|---|---|---|---|
| On Purpose | 2011-03-11 | :done | :discredited |
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 only1 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.
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]
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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. ↩︎