It has been a while. I have no good excuse, other than to say I’ve been busy. If you really want to know more, you should contact me. You’d think that some people have already contacted me to ask this very question. The fact is, I do receive quite a few messages through this website each day. Unfortunately, the number of them that are legitimate communications are quite limited. So far, by my estimation, only one person has contacted me who was an actual person. You can check the comments to see who that one person was.
While in school, a discussion was once raised regarding a strange situation. In this hypothetical situation, you have an organisation who’s purpose is to create robots that mine planets for various ores and materials. These robots then use the materials they’ve mined to create more robots who’s purpose is the same as the original robots. Through generations of this process, the design of the robots evolves and becomes highly efficient in serving their purpose. The organisation is quite successful, as they corner the market in mining and robot production. The question that is raised in this hypothetical example is, to what end is the organisation aimed?
It seems like there is no reasonable answer. To create robots who’s only real purpose is to create more robots is to ultimately aim at turning the entire universe into robots. Once the goal is accomplished, then what? And having more robots doesn’t seem to provide any other significance in the universe than their existence as such. They just are. Whether they are deemed good or not seems only to make sense if considering them from an instrumental viewpoint. That is, do they do their job well. If the robots are efficient at mining materials and making more robots, then they are good. If they fail to accomplish this task, then they are bad. Ideas of good and evil don’t seem to enter into it. At least not within the groundwork of the organisation itself.
As you likely already guessed, this hypothetical example is a commentary on human beings. We are those robots, and our existence seems pretty pointless. Our aims are directed at the efficient generation (and maintenance) of more human beings. The basic unit of social structure, the family, is considered good if it serves this purpose well. A family that does not generate children is frequently not even considered a family at all, and if it is at least considered a family, it is somehow a lesser one. Also consider the frequent claim made by many that “children are the future,” suggesting that our focus and energy ought to be aimed at the development and preservation of the future generations. However, as in the case of the robots, I ask: to what end?
During the course of my own life, I have often asked myself what I want to do or what I want to be. What career choice is the best career for me. I find myself unable to answer this question for the reasons above. I cannot think of any particular career or job who’s purpose seems concerned with something I might consider progressive or enlightening. All careers, as far as I can tell, are aimed directly or indirectly with the original goal of producing or maintaining human beings. Sometimes, the careers are so indirectly related to this goal that their pointlessness is hidden in layers of obfuscation. However, if you follow the trail long enough, eventually you are able to find that it is concerned simply with this one goal.
It is for all these reasons that I preference Existentialist philosophy. I find solace in the idea that I am personally responsible for the creation of meaning and purpose in the world. Not that there is any inherent meaning or purpose out there. Or if there is, there is no way for me to determine what those inherent meanings or purposes are. Thus, I am tasked with generating it myself. In fact, if I were to select an aim for humanity, it seems that this might be it. It might be our purpose to find our purpose. It might be our aim to decide what things ought to be valuable. Ultimately, this amounts to an acknowledgement (at least in principle) of the existence of freedom (or free will). Without freedom, without the possibility of deviation from a deterministic chain of events, there does not seem to be a point to anything.
So what has brought this all out of me presently? I return now to all those messages I receive daily through this blog. It seems to me that the bulk of these messages are generated automatically by programs on the Internet. These programs, I would have to guess, are created by individuals who are trying to aim at some purpose which requires them to spread propaganda of some sort, perhaps trying to harvest Email accounts, or even perhaps to simply misinform. The strangest thing for me is that they persist despite my deleting those messages. That is, the messages are sent to me, and I have configured this blog to not post anything unless I approve it. Clearly, I have not approved any of these messages. So why do these parties persist?
If the source of these messages were human, some sort of conscious entity with something resembling freedom, they might realize that I actually will not approve these messages being posted to my blog. That because I have configured my blog to require approval to post comments, none of their comments will ever be posted. A human is likely to recognize this and decide (perhaps in the name of efficiency and progress) to cease their pointless activity and move on. But they do not. More messages are received each day. Thus, I must conclude that they are not human. The source of these messages must be some sort of automated system, like a bot, that is programmed to simply try and try and try again, endlessly. Like the robots from the hypothetical situation I described, they will simply continue to attempt to harvest my blog for their own nefarious purposes.