OK, this is going to be a little petty, and I guess it’ll split along the lines of theist/atheist mostly, but consider this.
I have a flight leaving at 4, so I have to leave for the airport in 20 minutes or so. I log in to an online game to piddle away the time, and I end up finding someone who needs help accomplishing an important task. I give them that help, and log out just in time to leave. I realize an online game may not be important, but extract the situation to the real world if you will.
Now, was there purpose to me logging in for 20 minutes? Was my purpose to help that person? Does it fulfill any sort of balance in my life? Or was it just wasting 20 minutes before going to the airport?
(obviously I won’t be here to clarify this any further, but I’ll try to grab some computer time once I get to my destination).
This is more of an IMHO, so I’ll give you my personal, physicalist, atheist opinion.
No.
No.
No.
Yes.
Everything that happens, just happens. Sometimes there’s a coincidence, and depending on one’s outlook and what one is looking for (fate, kismet, karma, the hand of God, luck, etc.) one may interpret that coincidence as significant. Without looking for such significance, then these phenomena are nothing more than coincidences.
I’d say yes, slightly, to every question. Helping people makes you feel good, and feeling good makes you have a better day, plus you probably had fun playing the game, and made the person you helped feel good.
Call me a believer in Karma (as a concept, not as some mystical magic powder)
I agree with Jjimm. Absent any spiritual essence, the universe is nothing more than a probability distribution. Both a rescue and a murder are merely the collisions of electromagnetic fields in a suspension of gravity. Morality (spiritual purpose) is a gestalt, and is metaphysical.
A purpose is an unnecessarily multiplication of entities. Which is not to say that there is no purpose, but the burden of proof is on those who wish to show that there is.
I agree with Liberal to an extent: there is no inherent value or purpose to anything in the Universe. We, as sentient beings, assign value to things and derive purpose from that.
Pretty much what I was going to say. No there’s no actual purpose to anything. Science cannot measure it; it has no empirical standard because it’s strictly a concept that has no basis in the machinery of the universe.
However we as humans can not live that way so we inject purpose into everything we do and things that happen or we’d give into despair. So did the things you do have a purpose? It has exactly as much purpose as you perceived it to have.
We’re very good a pattern recognition (actually, I think it’s fair to say that we are astonishingly good at it); but we also seem so prone to recognizing patterns we can imagine some that don’t exist. The recent SD Classic on the Canals of Mars is a good example of this phenomenon.
A lot of what we believe to be purposeful series of events or outcomes is possibly explained not so much by what we observe, but how we process that information. Murphey’s Law, “good things come in threes”, apparently cosmic coincidences, may feel “true” to us because we tend to assign significance to seemingly-related observations, essentially filtering our observations such that we emphasize some, and ignore others, based on an alertness to the possible presence of a pattern. We may be “programmed” to see purpose in events, because drawing connections between disparate data is a kind of cognitive habit that serves us very well, in most circumstances, and hence probably confers a selective advantage. The instances where this tendency leads us astray are perhaps sufficiently mitigated (or, at least, were) by the benefits gained when it does not.
So the general (and rather atheist) viewpoint from this thread is that the universe (defined as what exists) is in a state of chaos, and any event, good or bad, is a random intersection of “electromagnetic fields in a suspension of gravity.” I disagree with this interpretation.
I think I agree with this. I have at least one purpose - that is to fulfill the needs and wishes of others. But this statement requires that “I exist” on a level above atomic particles and electrochemical reactions.
The American version of “karma” is rather incredibly warped. While it gets the general concept right, karma technically is applied to reincarnation into the afterlife, and is handed out much differently. Wiccans have a similar rule, the threefold law, which variably states something like, “the energy you use returns to you threefold, be it negative or positive”. I don’t agree with this as a metaphysical property, as in helping someone means someone will help you three times, but I believe in it as a source of self - my helping the random person in the game returned to me three times the positive energy I spent, in making my day better and making me feel like a better person. By contrast, if I had done something nasty, regret would (supposedly) take its toll.
I still follow the line, “Do as you will, an it harm none”, and my will is to go a bit beyond that and help people whenever possible.
I guess Jeffrey Dahmer’s purpose, then, was to kill men and eat their genitals, since that’s what he was motivated to do. Does motivation define purpose, in any metaphysical sense?
By what mechanism do you suggest this ‘purpose fulfillment’ is driven? When you say “I have at least one purpose - that is to fulfill the needs and wishes of others”, is that a personal definition, or do you think the definition is imposed from elsewhere?
It is, in my opinion, entirely subjective. Some other person’s purpose might be to pillage as much from his earthly existence as he can, no matter what the consequences to himself or others. If there is an objective purpose, then we’d best hope that it is edification.
The history of Teleology is one of a downward curve in recent centuries: phenomena which people considered to be clear evidence of “purpose” have time and again been shown to have a perfectly feasible explanation without it.
Now, that is not to say that there is no such thing as purpose, anymore than there is no such thing as “mind” or “truth” or “morality”. But human constructs such as “purpose” clearly do not require external existence. Whether their existence is necessary is a subjective decision output by humans.
Persoannly, the idea that my actions have purpose is a “useful” input in the feedback loop governing my subjective decision. I cannot say that my existence has any purpose objectively: I simply live to squeeze from my neurons every last drop of awesome wonder at the fact that an organism capable of experiencing the universe subjectively evolved at all.