The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life

Don't the higher powers promote articles to Main?

I'd suggest this be promoted.

After reading how to measure anything, I suspect of people when they say something could not be measured or defined, in principle. And one of the most useful things is how vague notions could be tabooed or replaced.

There's a stick lying on the ground in the woods. It previously was unknown by any agent, so it was purposeless.

I pick it up and start using it to steady myself as I hike. Now, it's a walking stick. Its purpose to me is to help me walk. I didn't create it. But I started using it, thereby creating a new entity--though the stick itself is physically unchanged.

In the computer example, the vulnerability gains purpose the moment that an intruder becomes aware of it. Previously, it merely had potential purpose.

What you're calling the act of "creation" can be as simple as the creation of an "intent to use" connection in the mind of an agent.

It seems that at least in some cases when I ask "Does this thing have a purpose?" the kind of answer I'm looking for includes "someone deliberately created it" ...

... for a purpose? Was, but is no more, valuable for someone? Was a byproduct of something valuable? Honestly, this comment confuses me. If there's some insight to be had from it, as many people seem to think, I'd be happy if someone explained it to me, because apparently I'm too simple to get it.

If "Does life have a purpose?" is like this, whether or not other people value my life wouldn't to be relevant to answering it.

What would satisfy the question if life was created for a purpose but has later become obsolete for its creator?

It seems that at least in some cases when I ask "Does this thing have a purpose?" the kind of answer I'm looking for includes "someone deliberately created it" but excludes "it's valuable for someone".

Can you give a more concrete example of what you're looking for in those cases?

Maybe I misunderstood your point, but I feel "somebody deliberately created it"* is at least as weird a usage for "purpose" as the mistake pointed out in the op. Anything delibrately created or not can serve a purpose, original or not, on the condition there's an agent deciding so. Something created for a purpose can also become obsolete over time.

*yeah this isn't exactly what you said, but still...

The following do not seem to be reasonable answers:

They seem like reasonable purposes to me.

It seems that at least in some cases when I ask "Does this thing have a purpose?" the kind of answer I'm looking for includes "someone deliberately created it" but excludes "it's valuable for someone".

To me, the purposes of a thing are all purposes that purposeful agent have for the thing. What purpose does X have for Y? Among those questions, you can always ask "What purpose does the creator of Y have for Y?"

If "Does life have a purpose?" is like this, whether or not other people value my life wouldn't to be relevant to answering it.

It's irrelevant because you have a purpose for your life (presumably), so any additional purposes for your life are superfluous to the question - we've already concluded that your life has a purpose by noting your purpose for it.

Well, it's extremely unlikely for a piece of code (or things like that) to be there by accident and still be useful to its user. (This is more or less why [HPMOR spoiler] Uneel fcrphyngrq gung zntvp jnf vagryyvtragyl qrfvtarq ol Ngynagrnaf.) This doesn't seem to generalize. (Think of “the purpose of X” as “the reason not to get rid of X”. In realistic situations, a given piece of code either has been placed there deliberately by someone or there's no good reason to keep it. This doesn't obviously apply to most other things, including life.)

The Linguistic Consistency Fallacy: claiming, implicitly or otherwise, that a word must be used in the same way in all instances.

I'm definitely talking about the concept of purpose here, not the word.

in my experience they tend to say something like "Not for anyone in particular, just sort of "ultimate" purpose"... That said, the fact that everywhere else we use the word "purpose" it is three-place is certainly a useful observation. It might make us think that perhaps the three-place usage is the original, well-supported version, and the other one is a degenerate one that we are only using because we're confused. But the nature of that mistake is quite different. ... If you think I'm splitting hairs here,

I don't think you're splitting hairs; this is not a word game, and perhaps I should say in the post that I don't think just saying "Purpose to whom?" is the way to address this problem in someone else. In my experience, saying something like this works better:

"The purpose of life is a big question, and I think it helps to look at easier examples of purpose to understand why you might be looking for a purpose of life. First of all, you may be lacking satisfaction in your life for some reason, and framing this to yourself in philosophical terms like "Life has no purpose, because ." If that's true, it's quite likely that you'd feel differently if your emotional needs as a social primate were being met, and in that sense the solution is not an "answer" but rather some actions that will result in these needs being met.

Still, that does not address the . So because "What's the purpose of life" may be a hard question, let's look at easier examples of purpose and see how they work. Notice how they all have someone the purpose is to? And how that's missing in your "purpose of life" question? That means you could end up feeling one of two ways:

(1) Satisfied, because now you can just ask "What could be the purpose of my life to ", etc, and come up with answers, or

(2) unsatisfied because there is no agent to ask about such that the answer would satisfy you.

And I claim that whether you end up at (1) or (2) is a function of whether your social primate emotional needs are being met than any particular philosophical argument."

I'd really like to see someone taboo or at least write out what they mean with this 2-nary purpose. It surely got me confused before, and especially now after the op clarified my thoughts, it feels like a completely meaningless and incoherent utterance.

Can you give any other examples where purpose is used this way in common language with intended 2-nary meaning* except "the ultimate purpose"?

*edited, sorry for the confusing wording

I don't think so.

He's pointing out that the concept of purpose entails an agent with the purpose.

We don't explicitly stating context for words all the time. But for words like purpose, people haven't just dropped context, they don't even understand the context, and think that their projections have singular meaning, and argue with other bozos suffering under the same confusion about a different singular meaning.

Meanwhile, when two people who understand the full context of the concept have dropped context, they may miscommunicate at first, but have no problem clarifying their commnication - they just identify the full context in which they're speaking. "I mean Joe's purpose for his life." "Oh, I thought you were talking about my purpose for my life. Nevermind."

As for the guy talking about "Ultimate Purpose", the OP points out that the concept of purpose entails a agent with that purpose. If by your own statement "it's not anybody's purpose", then you're not really talking about a purpose at all, and are just confused. The OP can show them the way out of their confusion, but there's not guarantee they'll take the way. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.

Anecdotal counter-evidence:

I used to fret about the "ultimate purpose" and then I thought about what it would MEAN for their to be some grand purpose, and it seemed like a dreadful prospect once I'd actually sat down and considered the idea that God might be Disappointed in me. The thing I wanted from my "ultimate purpose" was a guiding force, a Sign From God telling me what to do, and it's obvious that this doesn't exist. Even if there is a God, and even if He is deeply, deeply Disappointed in me, I've never been told - it can't influence my decisions.

So now I embrace Discordianism, and the freedom to write my own purposes, and to just worry about disappointing myself and the people in my life. It's really quite relaxing.

What I think of the post as saying, rather than "purpose has only the meaning (to english speakers) of a ternary relation," is that "when one normally asks about something's purpose, one implicitly uses its structure as a ternary relation, and since you haven't established a ternary relation here you aren't going to get a satisfying answer that way."

I think I agree with you on at least one point, though, which is that "words" are really not the problem object; the sentence "what is the meaning of life?" is grammatically correct and not logically invalid and is somewhat a different use of the word purpose. The core object in these constructions I think is cognitive algorithms; in particular the "hear the word purpose, search for Z" algorithm breaks down when purpose changes meaning to no longer involve the same sorts of X,Y,Z.

FWIW I think "2-Place and 1-Place Words" is a bit dubious for similar reasons. Both this post and that make the crucial observation that we have this confusing concept that looks like it's a good concept "partially applied", but use this to diagnose the problem as incorrect usage of a concept, rather than viewing it as a perhaps historical account of how that confused concept came about.

What do you mean by an incorrect use of a concept? If you curry a function, you get a new function, in this case a new concept that happens to be confused because the original function needs all 3 places to make sense. It says so right here in this post. I'm inclined to believe the disagreement you posit simply doesn't exist.

Would the historical account be that it was a less of a hassle to drop the agent from used language, and over time some people dropped it from the underlying concept, and got confused?

I think using the word "purpose" to describe optimizations by non-human agents makes it too easy to anthropomorphize the relevant agents and should be avoided. I am not sure what a good non-technical substitute word might be. Maybe "point"?

I wonder if this is ever true for people who've never been theists. No wonder nothing else seems important anymore after importance has been anchored to godhood.

I have no trouble conjuring hypothetical extrapolated superintelligent friendly future versions of myself that have deity-like knowledge relevant to the first referent of purpose.

This gives me an acceptable substitute solution when I find an unknown object of unknown creation that may or may not have some purpose in the mind of some agents at some point(s) in time.

Is this a possible escape route?

Partial application, actually... Currying is the transform on the function to make Partial application easy. What we are doing here is partially applying relations...

Maximum nitpick

"want", "desire", "should", "can't", and similar all come to mind as running in to similar failures.

Done :)