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125 lines
6 KiB
Markdown
125 lines
6 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: On Purpose
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date: 2011-03-11
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techne: :done
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episteme: :broken
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---
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Two reflections on purpose and two open questions.
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# Purpose cannot be created.
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I'll just let [Alonzo Fyfe][Fyfe Purpose] speak for me.
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> However, the common atheist response to the question of meaning and purpose in
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> life is almost as absurd.
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>
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> This is the idea that each of us gets to choose our own meaning or purpose in
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> life, and whatever we choose has real value.
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>
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> If we are talking about a person, and I have the ability to choose where that
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> person was born, who its parents were, what it likes and dislikes, and what
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> happened to him five years ago, this should be taken as a reliable sign that I
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> am dealing with a *fictional* character. I do not have the liberty to make those
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> types of decisions if we are talking about a real person. Instead, there is a
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> fact of the matter.
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>
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> The same is true of assigning a purpose or meaning to life. If a person has
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> the liberty to simply 'choose' a purpose or a meaning, then this should be
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> taken as proof that he is creating a fictitious entity. This 'purpose' or
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> 'meaning' is no more real than the character she invented for some story or
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> book.
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>
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> To live one's life as if this fictional purpose or meaning is real is to live
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> a lie.
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# Desire is not about content.
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Do desires exist? Has desire fulfillment value?
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According to [Desirism][], desire fulfillment itself has no value, but the
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existence of desires creates value within the agent that has them. In other
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words, if Bob wants to eat cheese, then eating cheese has value for Bob, but
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only because this attitude exists in Bob's mind. The important assertion of
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desirism is that desire fulfillment itself has no value, so it cannot be said
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that it is good for Bob to want to eat cheese, nor that it is good *in general*
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to eat cheese.
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(This has the implication that if there were only agents without desires, then
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no value at all would exist. It is only for an accident of evolution that we
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happen to have desires.)
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Overall, this is not an esoteric claim. It follows quiet neatly from standard
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scientific models. But is it true?
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Think about [wireheading][Wireheading]. Why should I bother to fulfill a complex
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set of desires if I'm also able to self-modify? I could simply replace all my
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desires with a single trivial one, say "I desire 1+1 to equal 2". What would be
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the difference in this case?
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How do you identify desires? How do you *know* if a desire fulfilled?
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One possibility might be that desire is about a state the world should be in.
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Say, I might desire that every human has access to health care. But that seems
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weak. For example, economics is full of "as if" models built just around this
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assumption. A nice one is [Rational Addiction]. Regardless of their predictive
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power, they tend to be very different from the way people actually think.
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Or maybe we are talking about "reasons for action". Essentially, every moment
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there are thousands of things we could do, but ultimately something compels us
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to do a specific thing. This thing we might call a desire. But this again is
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weak. For one, that would mean that desires are either in principle
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unfulfillable (because they are only present when we act, but not when results
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occur) or they are fulfilled through each action immediately. This again seems
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false.
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What we are really after is the sensation of fulfilling desires, not the actual
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desire. Or in other words, utility is about mind-states, not world-states. This
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becomes clear to anyone paying close attention to their mind upon the moment of
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desire fulfillment. It is only[^1] this short moment of aggravation and
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cessation-of-aggravation that matters, not the content of the desire.
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A content-of-desire model of purpose therefore fails.
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[^1]: While trying to map this during vipassana, I noticed an additional stage
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right before the aggravation. Sometimes for a short moment a glimpse of
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"heaven" pops up, but the promise is never actually fulfilled. I haven't yet
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mustered the necessary concentration to check if it always occurs.
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# Why does this state of cessation exist at all?
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It seems so unnecessary. Agents with preferences would work just fine without
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it. I can drop my free will, so to speak, yet still act and choose just fine. I
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do lose my ability to make complex conscious decisions, but why the difference?
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And why, if I don't drop it, do I have cessation-of-aggravation even for trivial
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things?
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# How does one act if there is no purpose?
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Maybe there really isn't any meaning to life. My brain is just broken, hoping to
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find any. But then what? There seem to be only two responses to this question.
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Either, "there's ultimate meaning, duh", but they all are very silly attempts of
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what this meaning might be. Or, "get rid of the need to know". I utterly detest
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this option. It is, maybe, the only thing I actually consider evil. If the only
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alternative to suffering is "not looking for answers", then I prefer the
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suffering. I'd rather not have this kind of "enlightenment", thank you very
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much.
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But this doesn't seem right. I have a strong intuitive sense that there is
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meaning and I'm just too stupid to figure it out. Maybe my intuition is
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misleading me. Yet, I don't seem to be the only one. A sense of *fulfilling
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fate* seems to be not too unusual.
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> Long ago, a Pentecostal pastor told me that I could keep on doubting, waiting
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> till I had resolved all questions before I would be able to enter into worship
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> with a clean conscience, but then that would probably mean I would never
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> worship, because there would never be a way to settle all questions about God.
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> I must simply decide (now) whether I was going to worship God. I see he was
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> right. He would not have put it this way, but what I see in his sage advice
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> was the realization that the two issues (of deciding what to think of "God" as
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> an intellectual problem versus deciding whether to walk with God) belong to
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> different language games, and that to solve one is not to solve the other.
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> Thus, why wait to solve both before you can make headway on either one?
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>
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> -- [Robert M. Price][Price Purpose]
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