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hyporational comments on The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life - Less Wrong Discussion
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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
"What's the point of that curious tool in your shed?"
"Oh, it's for clearing weeds."
The purpose of the tool is to clear weeds. This is pretty underdetermined: if I used it to pick my teeth then there would be a sense in which the purpose of the tool was to act as a toothpick, and a sense in which I was using it for a purporse unintended by its creator, say.
Importantly, this isn't supposed to be a magically objective property of the object, no Aristotelian forms here! It's just a feature of how people use or intend to use the object.
Sorry if I worded my question confusingly.
I think the op already addresses this and is not simply projecting minds. The important part is that an agent can be assumed and queried. I was hoping for an example where an agent cannot be assumed as in "the ultimate purpose".
Your example would make no sense at all if an agent could not be queried.
Oh, I see. Sorry, I misinterpreted you as being sceptical about the normal usage of "purpose". And nope, I can't give a taboo'd account of it: indeed, I think it's quite right that it's a confused concept - it's just that it's a confused concept not a confused use of a normal concept.
Actually, "the ultimate purpose" seems double-confused, lacking both the object and the optimization process :)
If the object is "life", I can't tell if it is supposed to mean life-in-general, or my life, or all our lives.