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Someone on Quora asked, "What's the aim of life?"
Complaint: I had already answered a question, "Why do some people want life to have a purpose?", and Quora sloppily merged that question into this one. So I clarified in my answer that it was an answer to a different question, and then wrote the answer for this question here, and added a link to it...
I distinguish 3 kinds of answers:
There are lots of reasons. A person might want:
Most people go through phases where they focus on one of these, or a few. Some people dedicate their lives to one or more, such as to raising children, or to a project that will contribute to the world, or they immerse themselves in work to prove their worth, or to amass wealth.
Often these purposes are adopted out of hardship. Someone might want to be okay or worthy because they think they're not. If you study them closely, you can imagine each of them being a reaction to thinking one has a lack of it or isn't good enough until they achieve it. One might want one or more of them without thinking one has a lack, or a deficit, but for some of these, that's rare.
All of these are possible purposes for each of us. Rarely do we feel like we have a choice about our purpose. It's much more common to search for one's purpose, as if it's God-given, not designed and chosen.
Perhaps there's no choice when we're ignorant, or when we are in a moment of reaction. But if you look closely, we really do have a choice. This is very similar to how beliefs are also a choice, but mostly we gauge how strongly we believe, and then settle for that as if we have a sense of what's true, rather than exercising choice about them.
We can choose our way of being, and our purpose, as well as our beliefs.
Different people have different notions about what God wants. Some options. (Note- below, I'll try to use alternating genders for God when I use pronouns.)
Many, many more explanations are possible. Why would we create a new world?
The context here is life is a force, or a system.
One view of the world is that it's a swirling mass of chaos- stuff, energy, movement, change. Things randomly bumps into each other, occasionally creating patterns.
When patterns are stable, they persist. Think of all the sub-atomic particles, whizzing around. As it cools, protons, neutrons and electrons form stable patterns- atoms.
Atoms swirl around in hot gasses. As they cool, they form liquids, even solids- a molten planet with an atmosphere, a crust of rock, soon water, and more.
There's no purpose yet, it just happens.
And then some patterns form that are not just stable, they reproduce. Life begins. But there's still no real purpose- reproduction merely happens because of the way the patterns are shaped- as little machines that react to their environment by producing more of themselves.
Then some of these come together and survive better together- multi-celled animals. This is the evolutionary process.
Finally animals of enough complexity evolve that they start thinking. Pack animals dominate each other to create leaders. Monkeys and parrots use tools. Dolphins and whales and gorillas have bits of language.
It seems that all these complex animals strive. They search, usually for food- chickens with their ceaseless scratching at the soil, pigs forever rooting through the soil. Bees and hummingbirds, attracted to bright colors. Rodents and crows, distracted by anything shiny. Monkeys, probing anything that's new.
It seems the animals, complex combinations of patterns, are built in a way that naturally searches, explores.
And then humans brains are capable of language. We, too, search our environment, and we categorize and capture the patterns in our language. And not just the patterns of things, but also the patterns of our lives, of birth, development, adulthood and death, of our wants and relationships, our dramas. We even invent stories about creation and feel the need for purpose.
In this view, the purpose of life is the purpose that our patterns were given- to explore and know and capture it in language. We not only apply it to everything, but then we apply it to ourselves, to changing beings.
Imagine that bits of knowledge are rocks. We create piles of rocks. And then we see the pile and its shape and size and these new bits of knowledge become more piles of rocks. These are wholly our own creation.
Before humans existed, there were rocks and oceans and animals. There were caves, but there were no huts or farms or camp fires. Nor were there windmills or boats or cars, much less telephones and computers. We've created wholly new combinations of things, and then we create knowledge about them- knowledge that was never possible previously.
Our purpose seems to be to create and know and build on that. We're powerful enough now that we've drastically changed our environment. For the last few centuries, we've been able to drive other species to extinction. Now, we've been able to kill vast regions with pollution, or cover many miles of ocean with garbage. And with climate change, we've kill off a measurable fraction of Earth's animals, and it keeps growing worse.
Humanity is not qute able to choose, yet, to be a pattern that's self-sustaining. Nor are we able to choose, yet, to work together. Some of us can, and do, but many don't.
There's a project on our planet to help us communicate constructively about the design of our future. I suggest you get on its email list, or even support it.