Well, while imagining it I was brought to a shuddering halt when I realised that I would be putting a lot of immature beings in a paradise which they wouldn't know how to cope with. It would be pitiful to watch, I think. Maybe I wouldn't press the button until every person was mature enough to proceed.
It reminds me of the parable of the genie and the lamp.

I have found it's difficult to explain to someone where to look and what to look for. I think it can raise some interesting issues about how perception affects empirical knowledge. Once a person has seen one of the faces, they always see it clearly whenever they look at the photo. It's as though it is really obvious and they can't easily imagine not seeing it. While someone who has not seen it can struggle and struggle and just not see it.

On the sceptics forum, they just kept sayings it's paredoila and wouldn't consider anything else.

Let me try and tell you where a face is. If you roughly divide the bottom and the left side of the photo into ten squares like a grid reference, Zero at the bottom left corner. There is a light brown tabby cat looking out towards you, but looking past you slightly to your right, in the second square across the bottom and first up, in fact it's chin is almost touching the bottom of the photo. It appears to be wearing a white bib under its chin.

Anyway, I am thinking that we are programmed to consider something like a face as an important thing in our environment and have highly acute perception of facial recognition. This suggests that we have a strong anthropocentric bias. The implication being that any ideology we find pragmatically useful, perhaps, is given a bias of importance and correctness above its station.

P.s. There is a cheeky green goblin in the dead centre looking to your right with a dark coloured tricorn hat on. A prize to who can see him first.

Interesting, but I keep finding I can't get to an answer without having to come to a naive assumption or three. For example, "the best possible lives imaginable" leads to an infinite regress of more and more exalted states. States for which the brain would become obsolete, where do I draw the line? An interesting thought though.

Phew that's a relief, the person I was thinking of would never have said that!

Anyway, I don't believe that you can't see any fairies, you just haven't looked hard enough. You're to skeptical, because your world view denies their presence.

Not you again! I hope.

I have taken a photo of fairies.


This is a high resolution image, http://www.anbdesign.co.uk/wood.jpg

I once started a thread with this photo on the internationalskeptics forum(James Randi forum). It was fascinating the lengths they went to to discredit what was before their eyes.

So I can see at least 22 good faces including some three dimensional looking beings in this photo and for someone who is new to it they probably can't see any of them.

How many can you see? Or do you deny they are there?

Thanks, nice version, some good improvisation and the last two minutes are sweet. But the Winterland version is my favourite, tight and heavy. I've got it on vinyl, so no worries.

What about the seven eighths of the iceberg below the surface to speak by analogy?

Jimi did some nice heavy instrumental back in the day, this is one of my favourites.

Jimi Hendrix, Tax free, live at Winterland.
https://youtu.be/tqjR8P5Jt48

I can't watch this in the UK due to copyright, hope you can where you are.

This version is no where near so heavy, more meltdown though and nice guitar torture.
https://youtu.be/yzi9Av0Mg80

Good driving music.

Yes, I've heard about the problems with migrants in Australia. Curiously the boat people who were housed on Naoru are now going to be accepted into the US.

I was a reluctant remainer, this is due to my planning to live in France in a decade or so. Although I largely agree with your assessment. I would say though that economic considerations were not on the mind of those who voted to leave, or I suspect on the mind of the remainers. I am a polling officer in Suffolk and around here the consus from the people who came into the poling station was that they are happy to take an economic hit for the political benefits of leaving the EU.

So are you talking about my fathers desire to ejaculate inside my mother? As that would be the purpose of the agent (my father) who chose to bring me in to existence.

Im not sure that there was a lot of purpose there, more like desire, attraction etc. This goes back to my point about cellular life though. The purpose in your fathers action was biologically determined and driven by his cellular life.

Or do you refer to all life when you say "US" as in "god was the agent who brought us in to existence".

Yes, I did, I but I did state that it might be a process and not God, or an intelligent alien.

Oh no, now I see it was the latter. But I have seen many people reject this notion in favor that there is no agency that brought us in, it was just a fluke of nature. single celled organism evolved after lightning struck certain chemicals in the atmosphere and we are now just an absurd, random nothing with no rhyme or reason. How do incorporate purpose then? It would seem to go back to what willowofdarkness said: "To think in terms of living for a purpose is to consider life meaningless. As if life was nothing, with meaning only to be found in escaping it to some notion of purpose."

Yes it might well be a purposeless process which brought us into existence. But logically we can have no idea if this could be the case. Empirically based scientific enquiry cannot even address the question about our origin. Nothing we can rationally come up with can help us out on this score, because in either case(with, or without agency), what we encounter on the ground would be identical(i.e. the world we find ourselves in) and the alternative might be absolutely imposssible. We are blind.
If there is no purpose, then we can't obviously incorporate one. Unless we accept that we might be mistaken and incorporate one anyway, which many people, do anyway. Personally I leave the question open, while maintaining a heathy contemplation and intuition on what the purpose is if there is one.

There is another angle though and that is that we decide to trust nature and that nature is not somehow deceiving us. If we trust nature in this way, we can consider that all the information about our origin is somehow expressed, coded in nature, naturally. So an intuitive reading of nature might give us the answer. I do this to the capacity that I can and I have determined that there is agency present and active in nature before our eyes, so there might be grander forms of agency beyond our current level of perception. So on balance if one is looking to nature for guidance, I do consider that there is a such a purpose.

Also I already addressed the point made by Willow.

Right, but this isn't OUR agency. It is the agency of something of which we have no control over and are not a part of (the unconscious brain). We are separate from it even though we share the same house.

But my point is that one is at liberty to programme/condition ones unconscious mind to the extent that one is able to act as a strategic agent. Also your point about our unconscious mind having predetermined what we are going to do etc, is only an observation of how our momentary responses work. Agency over longer time periods works out regardless. For example in my own life, I contemplated for many years what my ideal career path was, I consciously chose what that path would be and have now acted on that choice. As such I am in entirely different circumstances, doing something different to what I would have been doing if I had remained in the demographic etc that I was born into.

I would call that autonomy, not agency. Agency implies careful deliberation, decision making, conscious choices etc.

It is rudimentary agency I know, but it is deliberated and decisions are made, although there isn't conscious choice. The organelles within the cells are complex computational devices which develop, test and refine responses to environmental conditions.

Yes, I do think that it was immigration which decided the vote in the end. As an issue it was probably more important than the economics, or politics of the situation. Only the other day there was a prominent politician criticising Angela Murkel(in reference to brexit) for outspokenly offering refuge for refugees a year ago, which led to a surge of up to a million arriving in Germany. For the UK it is the freedom of movement within the EU which was to much for many, not only people from all the new member states, but also potentially refugees and economic migrants who once present in Europe would move over here at a later stage. The scenes at Calais, which I have experienced myself were very provoking. I had personally experienced people in large numbers on the roads on the approach to the Channel tunnel and while parked at a hypermarket, a scary looking African man emerging from a hedge approaching us who was I expect looking to hide in our van.

Yes, it is my perception that outside the UK there is little mention of and it is largely not known about the downsides of the EU. In terms of economics I think it is better understood and I agree, it is a rocky road at the moment. But as I said there is a political dimension, which was the concern of those who voted to leave. During the debate leading up to the vote the debate was dominated by economic considerations, but towards the end there was a marked shift in focus towards the political implications which swung the vote.

You guys appear to be working on the assumption that the EU (as a political organisation) is functional and useful, also that it is a benefit for the UK to be a member. There are many who disagree with this view and many arguments to the contrary.

The EU does achieve the purpose for which it was set up(so far so good, however in the current climate I can see this changing) namely to bring the countries of Europe together with a joint purpose as an antidote to perpetual conflict.

But in terms of politics it is disfunctional and dictatorial. No member can instigate change (except perhaps Germany, or France), all members are subject to a relentless implementation of a certain politic which is decided behind closed doors by a faceless beurocracy. Alongside this, which does not seem to be acknowledged here, is that there is a continuous project of further integration going on, both economic and political, "an ever greater union". However The UK has always been fundamentally against the political union, while in favour of greater (to a degree) economic integration. This split was inevitable due to these political circumstances, it is the EU bureaucrats who have been in denial of this reality. The UK, both as a government and as a people were never in favour of, or going to accept such political integration.

There could be purpose both ways. If it was created by agency then it would be akin to what willowofdarkness says "To think in terms of living for a purpose is to consider life meaningless. As if life was nothing, with meaning only to be found in escaping it to some notion of purpose."

I understand what Willow is saying here, however I think that it is more a comment about having a respect and a sense of reverence for the living of life in the here and now, as opposed to ignoring the present in favour of some imagined future moment. I don't think it is actually a commenting on purpose itself.

It is true that one can live a fulfilling life without any awareness of a purpose. But this does not mean that there is no purpose in our existence. But as I said, I don't think we can know the purpose in the absence of a knowledge of the purposes entertained by the agency which brought us into existence to begin with. For example God, or an advanced alien. Although, I think we can conclude that whatever that purpose was/is, our presence is required for it to be carried out. So we can perhaps come up with a few initial thoughts about what that purpose maybe in terms of a general perspective.

I wouldn't call the libet experiment "speculation". It indicates our actions are driven by unconscious decisions and that we percieve them as conscious by mistake.

Yes, I see this, but in terms or agency this is irrelevant, we can be unconscious agents and still have agency. For example by consciously planning a strategy and practicing and learning it repeatedly, leading to it being undertaken unconsciously at a later time. Also agency doesn't require "free will", I suggest that all cellular and multi-cellular organisms have agency and most of them don't have "free will".

By agency I mean a self organising system which develops a complex strategic action as a response to the environment. A more sophisticated kind of agency can be seen in humans. For example, humans used intellection to develop computation and robotics. So at some point in the future AI will imerge and will have been created/generated solely by human agency.

It is hard to make sense of your post. But in a general fashion, physics does make use of this kind of "projection from a higher dimension" thinking. For any dynamical system - like some dancing sea of particles - you can step back to a higher level view that sees it as a now frozen mass of vectors or trajectories

Yes, I realise this, but unfortunately, from my perspective, all these other realms are simply reduced to a set of mathematical relations and reification of mathematical and physical casual realities in this world. Rather like in my analogy of the puppet, the quantum physicist puppet, reifies a "higher dimension", constituted of strings, wooden bodies and the plot of the puppet show in which they find themselves. Never once considering that in that higher dimension, there aren't ropes moving wooden bodies and there isn't a plot of a show, but rather an infinite possibility of actions and autonomous biological bodies etc.

This is the trick that quantum mechanics relies on in invoking an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. There is room enough in Hilbert space for every alternative history. And reality can then be a projection of that frozen realm. If you look through it, you see the average state, the least action sum, that becomes what is most likely to actually happen.

Thats all very well, but the blinkers of what we know in this world and the mathematical consistencies we find here, are still being worn. Or in other words we just project what we already know, because we don't know anything else.

But the ontological issue is whether the mathematical trick is just a mathematical trick or - as MWI might want it - the higher reality is the true reality, and the projection is merely some kind of localised illusion.

Or that the true ontology is something else not thought about.

My own view of course is that it is simply a mathematical trick. It is how modelling works. And to get carried away by it is mistaking the map for the territory.

I agree, but we can't know if our world is a localised reflection, localised peculiarity, or the best of all possible worlds. Again we are blinkered.

And here you seem to be trying to introduce some mind behind the scenes and directing the action. So you are really stacking up theism on top of the mathematical Platonism. I'd call that doubling down on everything I would disagree with as a natural philosopher and systems thinker here. :)

.Well that depends on what I mean by mind* and a mathematical Platonism is an oversimplification. I know now your approach and I'm with you in the phrase, natural philosopher and I like these systems ideas. I'm with you all the way with the triadic approach, that's how I think, but I happen to have another world and philosophy of the "ghosts in the machine", which I overlay and integrate within the naturalism.

*for me mind is equivalent to being the way being is used around here. Or the living entity which is hosted, emerges from, the body. But mind is itself viewed as a material(subtle). So this mind you suggest I am introducing behind the scenes is nothing more than another material, operating in the same, in essence, way that the material of science operates. So I refer to a hierarchy of more subtle or higher minds, which are all materials in turn, embracing a hierarchical regression (eternal, not infinite) of materials which each appear as minds in the sphere below in the chain. The ghost in the machine is irrelevant other than in the introduction of agency and purpose into the system( sorry if this is meaningless).

↪Punshhh

That's the issue. The mind is not so much an obstacle as an irrelevance. Quiet sanctuary is achived by many. Anyone can do it. All it takes is living the moment rather than theorising about what logic, description or concept amounts to your existence.

Quite, but it is your assumption that the "theorising about what logic, description or concept" is in some way an alternative to quiet sanctuary. It might be for some, including those who are being mislead, or exploited, but for genuine practicing mystics part of the practice is in developing the discipline to manage ones own internal life and experience. For example, a mystic will have all their philosophical, spiritual ideology as a kind of reference library in their memory. But this is kept seperate (including its content) from other action and being through disciplined practice. Likewise when it comes to their living in the external world and likewise for when they take sanctuary, or any other of a number of other practices. None of these regions of their being impinges on the other and the practiced mystic will easily draw from a number of these regions for a specific purpose, or action, while maintaining an inner freedom from their uncontrolled impinging on their internal space. There are systems and practices specifically developed to enable this kind of mental discipline.

The mystic tells a falsehood: that respect for being and noumenon is given by abandoning thought and saying the (conceptual!!!) "mystery" formed them. Rather than quieting of the mind, it is the mind yelling at the top of its lungs, demanding that respect for being and the noumenon requires this concept of mystety (which is what makes the mystic profound over everyone else).

This is an incorrect assessment, perhaps because you are observing mystics who have succumbed to forms of vanity. This is understandable as we are human and this is human nature. This is nothing that a healthy dose of humility won't dispel.

No doubt in living, the mystic achievies contentment, as do many others, but that's not the issue. It's understanding of contentment which the mystic gets wrong. It sees them demand contentment is a matter of realising that being is given by concept of "mystery."

Again you display a lack of understanding here. It is as I say understandable for there are people around who for whatever reason do make these mistakes, as in any walk of life. For the mystic the role of mystery is in the acceptance of the mystery in life. Or in other words to develop an awareness of what we don't know, or understand and the extent to which some aspects of our life are mysterious even in the face of logic and reason.

Essentially the processes in the life of a mystic are to develop an awareness of, a control of and an alteration in the orientation of the person within the world. The primary step taken before this can be done is to strip away metaphorically the person from the being and establish a communion with the noumenon (God in traditional language). Thus establishing a stable anchor for the self which could be put off course during the practice. Provided these processes are done well none of the mistakes, or dubious ideologies you allude to are of any concern.

However I do realise that due to there not being any academically established and regulated mystical school in the world at this time(with the exception of those that can be found within a few religious traditions), it is a "Wild West" out there and any budding mystic will have to establish their own foundations to their practice which is not easy especially when there is no one telling them what information is useful and what is a distraction.

Memes, ideas, ideologies that stick around, infiltrate.
Here's the church, flint construction as most are around these parts.

Are we talking about the stickiness of memes?

Going back to Christianity, they went to great lengths to set their identity and ideology in stone, literally quite often. As I write this I look up and see a church tower that was built in 1100AD, so it has sat in the middle of this village for nearly a thousand years.

↪Wayfarer Yet still, you are not saying what you mean by non-physically real.

I may have a take on what Wayfarer is considering, but my terminology might be unpalatable in philosophical terms.

The implication as I see it is that this "probability wave" is an emanation from a portion of reality beyond the recognised membrane of our spacetime manifold. This portion may well have holistic presence as you suggest, perhaps transcendent of space and time, or reflective of such a state.

Personally the way I see it(apologies for the weird language) is as a reality in which space and time as we understand them are constructs, projections, like the two dimensions on a sheet of drawing paper, these are projectedthrough a substrate(again a construct) let's say the pre-noumenon forming a self contained field or membrane, or drawing on the sheet of paper. This is our spacetime manifold, as a holistic whole it exhibits probabilistic points, correlating to the symmetrical patterning of symmetry breaking of the whole(this whole might have fractal tendencies). This could also be viewed as a field or membrane projected between two poles in a pre-electromagnetism.

So as I see it particle physicists are trying to discern the probabilistic points in the projection I refer to, unaware of the pre-noumenon, or the reality in which the projection was constructed. l say constructed because I consider that the projection is an artificial fabrication conceived in a real world in which multifarious forms or species of projection, even fabrication are discussed, generated, and then individually put into practice on ocassion in a fabricated world, our world.

By analogy we are puppets and we are examining the strings which animate us wondering how they come into existence, unaware of the real world in which there is an author, a puppet maker, a stage, a puppet master and an audience. Let's say Punch and Judy.

Is the passage from Beyond Good and Evil? It's author has a nice turn of phrase.

You misunderstand me, did I not say that mind is the obstacle? So why would you think that the mystic is putting our meaning into conceptual terms, when that is the obstacle itself. For unveiling the pristine being and neumenon is the focus, the mind is nothing more than a witness, or for the canny a tool employed in retrieving intuitive knowledge(information from the transcendent interplay between being and neumenon) again, no conceptual construction, in terms of thinking intellection, going on. This information being a food of contemplation to be digested later.

So the mystic has a quiet sanctuary where being is in communion with the noumenon and no mind is allowed in.

This is all grist to the mill for the mystic. It involves collapsing all the ideas of metaphysics and reification of the human experience. All that is left in terms of logic and reason is your being and the noumenon. This is why I say from time to time that the mind* is the obstacle, the obstacle while also being the only tool of being in this world.

* l realise that I am using "mind" in what might be an unconventional sense.

That's an interesting question. Metaphilosophy directed at Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Darwin as a group.

Yes, I can't help imagining a a group of monkeys, or primitive humans sitting on a ridge in the Rift Valley, dreaming up complex patterns of grunts and interpretations of grunts, becoming gradually more sophisticated until they are organising themselves into religious and political groupings. Each pattern of grunts becomes a competing ideology with the most effective and persistent outliving the others and corralling the groups. And that we are still continuing the tradition, while imagining we are superior to this in some way.

I think I am beginning to understand your question now. Another angle might be to question if we knew that after we die we will be reborn into hellish poverty or a war zone, should we not be fearful of this, as we are fearful of being caned?

My intuition is that bodily integrity plays a visceral role in such possibilities. If I know, or just fear that I will be reborn into a war zone, I am not all that concerned in this life, because my corporeality is removed, or seperate from that reality. In that reality, it might not actually be me, or not the me I am now.

So is this a survival of the fittest in ideology, or perhaps survival of the most ingenious?

I don't really know what you are saying, I never saw a distinct classification of purposes. Nor do I see what the illusion of agency has anything to do with it. SOrry.

"The illusion of agency" is an unwarranted assumption. Determinism hasn't been proved to be the case, it is merely speculation.
The distinct classification of purposes is due to a distinct classification of agencies. For it is agency which generates purpose. Without agency there cannot be purpose, it is meaningless. Unless you include within the bounds of purpose the physical processes of matter, carrying out their own purposes.

So, do you agree that purpose is generated by agency and that there is no purpose in the absence of agency?

That is just saying our purpose is to going on towards going on towards going on at the same time caring for our biosphere.

Yes, I know, but this is the best we can do in the absence of the knowledge of the purposes of the agency, or process resulting in the existence of the existence we find ourselves in. Remember my second category of purpose?

There are small/weak purposes like instinct and mowing the lawn and then there are grandiose purpose like why humans even exist at all. It is absurd and foolish to claim small/weak purposes as grandiose ones (which is what my OP pointed out). Yet you are all seeming to disregard this.

yes, this is what I was pointing out in my post when I categorised purpose into two kinds. This is the second category, as I wrote it;
"The purpose of agents responsible for the existence of the existence we find ourselves in."

But you are conflating the two categories which results in the confusion. As I said, in order to consider the purpose of the agency, or process resulting in the existence of the existence we find ourselves in, we can only coherently address it in reference to that agency, or process. But unfortunately we can't do this because we are in ignorance of what, or who it is. End of story.

This philosophical problem is why ideas like God and spirituality were thought of in the first place.

I wouldn't call being afraid to fall of a cliff "intellectual strategic action", more like instinct.

Yes, but instinct is a rudimentary form of purpose, it is strategic action stipulated by cells and groups of cells. There is also intellectual strategic action in organisms with large brains.

I also wouldn't call this a classification of purposes:

"that the answer is for humanity to secure its long term survival with a healthy social culture, which manages the planetary resources sustainably and cares for and maintains the biosphere."
-punshhh

That is just something that humans keep in check in order to sustain a healthy existence, it isn't a purpose to live.

An answer to the question, what is the meaning or purpose in my life? Is a person's life cannot have meaning or purpose independent of the species or race of which they are a member. So their purpose and meaning is equivalent to the purpose or meaning of the species or race as a whole. The purpose and meaning of the race as a whole is,
"that the answer is for humanity to secure its long term survival with a healthy social culture, which manages the planetary resources sustainably and cares for and maintains the biosphere."

how did you get from "they have liberty to pursue purposes" to "they have purpose'?

Well I don't know the rigourous logical steps involved in this, but surely if an organism is at liberty to pursue purposes, at some point it will pursue them, or at the very least might do so. If it does pursue one of these purposes, it can be described as having purpose in its action.

Just contradicted yourself, you say it might be then you say it is.

You will have to allow me a little room for my style of writing that is not academically precise. Read between the lines a little. I didn't contradict myself, but the way I wrote it was unclear and imprecise. Did you not understand this?

Anyway, where I said it "is clear, there is none", I should have explained that on the assumption that following death, there is a complete lack of existence, this would be the case.

To let go of the feeling of needing to keep trying is half the battle. There are numerous techniques and affirmations which allow one to dispel these sentiments and thought patterns that you find yourself preoccupied with. I have found that to achieve spiritual contentment doesn't actually require you to do anything, rather to stop doing things, things which amount to a distraction. So you can put yourself into a frame of mind where all you need to do is relax, rest, allow peace, stillness and quietude into your life, or into spaces in your life. Perhaps a quiet room, or special place in your garden. For me, to sit quietly in a woodland and just listen to the wildlife, feel the breeze, relax into the stillness and feel a space in the silence, would allow the hypereal state of mind to permeate. There is a hypereal joyful state in silence, especially if one can become acostomed to letting one's mind still and enjoy a lack of thought and the peace in simplicity.

All that striving that Mystics go on about is a different enterprise to this personal spiritual contentment we are talking about. It is a formal tutoring of intense personal development, a hot housing, designed to accelerate the development of the person. It is I think increasingly irrelevant in the modern world and is more a remnant of how spirituality was viewed and accessed in the past. There are I think a small number of people around now for whom it is appropriate, but for the majority of people it is an inappropriate, counter productive process, which can lead to psychological issues and feelings of failure etc.. I think that in the modern world of intense mental stimulation, financial freedom and domestic comfort, we face an entirely different set of issues for which traditional practice is not well suited and there is a mass movement, known as The New Age, in which people have begun to develop more appropriate approaches and techniques to embrace a natural spirituality in the modern world. Unfortunately it is a bit chaotic with false prophets and one is required to sort the wheat from the chaff to a certain degree. A formal school, or rigorous analysis of this movement has not been done yet as far as I know(I know it has been attempted a few times by some groups), it will emerge at some point I expect.

Just finished, looking inland from Aldeburgh beach.

For me meditation was what I did to force the issue. This was during a time in my late twenties and early thirties when I was engaged in a process of forcing a questing process, with some friends and one in particular, sparring, challenging, stretching, body and mind, on a grail quest, the comic version would be MontyPython's Holy Grail.

On two occasions I meditated at length in India for 4 or 5 hours a day for weeks on end. The second time in the Buddhist cave temple at the achealogical site at Ellora near Puna, 3hrs at dawn and 2hrs at dusk each day.

Both occasions were fruitful, but the results were subtle and permeated my being gradually and largely imperceptibly. The way in which it was revealed to me was not in changes I noticed in myself, but rather the way that I noticed how I differed from my piers, who had not undergone the same practice. In ways like a clarity and stability in mental focus, perception, along with an abundance of what I will describe as grace( I expect you know what I mean). Along with a freedom from the psychological states and conditioning which they were inexorably subject to.

there is no objective measure even of what life is, let alone of what it is worth

Quite, we might naively think we have little worth, but this is not established, it can only be a conceit at best. A human life might have great importance, purpose and meaning, but we just don't know anything of this subtle complexity. Surely it is our duty to observe a reverence for what we have been gifted in the wonder of what it might represent beyond our narrow little window on its beauty and reality.

We might be in class 1 at kindergarten, perhaps we should stop throwing our rattle out of the pram now, it really is time we were nappy trained.

This is correct, nothing does resolve the situation. You are stuck here until you're not. You will run into harm, you will create your own harm, you will find survival within your culture, you will experience boredom unless you create some sort of entertainment situation.

Yes I agree with your assessment, but this does not take away our (limited I know) freedom for a bit of autonomy, freedom in action, freedom to create something as we please. Not to mention, a choice to help others.

I know it's not much to look forward to in the greater scheme of things. But it really doesn't matter what we think, this is our lot, right now, we have a choice to be constructive, creative and help move the race along, rather than in the direction of more suffering, or towards oblivion. Not to mention, the gift of a mind with the ability to dream, to imagine.

I have given purpose a lot of thought and have concluded that the answer is for humanity to secure its long term survival with a healthy social culture, which manages the planetary resources sustainably and cares for and maintains the biosphere. Is that not a worthy purpose?
— Punshhh

That purpose is the same as I stated in my OP, just to keep surviving and not die like all other animals. That is not a purpose, that is an instinct.

This is a conflation between instinct and intellectual strategic action. Also you have ignored my classification of purposes. It's almost as though you are not interested in discussing purpose.

Going back to instinct, all cellular life forms(to generalise) have agency, if they have agency they are at liberty to persue purposes, they have purpose. Even if that purpose is dictated by the processes of instinct. Higher animals like humans and primates etc, have the ability to develop individual and group strategies, so they have a wider scope of purposes within their capacity. But they are still within the first category of purposes.

So are you going now to appeal to the second category of purposes, those in reference to any agency, or process resulting in the existence of this whole world we find ourselves in? Because this seems to be what you are looking towards in the OP.