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torekp comments on The Meaning of Life - Less Wrong
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When you choose your own goals, by what criteria should you decide they're worthy? Some criteria meant to satisfy some higher goal, right? If you had a highest goal (and I'm not sure humans are even really capable of it, but assuming we are), how could you have chosen it? By what criteria could you decide that it was a good or bad goal, given that evaluation of the worth of anything at all is only meaningful in respect to some goal or other?
Saying "this is an action I want to take" is equivalent to "I believe that taking this action will move me closer to a goal I hold". But choosing a goal is an action in this sense, so there's eventually a recursion problem with choosing your own goals, unless there's some highest goal you hold which isn't chosen by you.
So, if you have a highest goal, it isn't one you've chosen. If you don't have a highest goal, then except in the case where your highest level goals are all compatible (which seems to collapse to the first case, since you could simply view them all as a single amalgamated goal), your goals are inconsistent. Both the case in which you don't get to choose your own goal and the case in which your goals are mutually incompatible are pretty unpalatable, but I don't see a way of avoiding one of them being true.
I can't fault your reasoning. So I'll limit it, instead.
In a broader sense of "choice" it is still possible to choose a highest level goal. To wit, you can try pursuing it, and find that you continue to do so, perhaps even more strongly than initially. Alternatively, you can find that you lose all interest. Over the long term as you try different pursuits and settle into a stable set, you can be said to have chosen your goals - just not in the explicit matching-means-to-ends kind of way.
"But this just amounts to choosing satisfying pursuits! So the highest goal is really satisfaction." OK, if you want to talk that way - but note that "satisfaction" may amount to nothing more than this very fact of goal stability in the face of experimentation and learning. One might as well say that your highest goal is to choose pursuits that are worthy for you. Come to think of it, that's exactly what I would say.