A bit of background in case you’re wondering IndiWeb Carnival.

The month’s (August 2026) topic is “purpose” and is hosted by Chris Shaw at uncountable thoughts.

Purpose

A single word that evokes many different interpretations.

It can apply to yourself, an organisation, club, community or even humanity itself. Is it fixed for all time, or does it change and adapt to the surrounding environment?

Is it important for others to know the purpose, or can it just be shared among the people with a direct stake or influence on it?

Why even have a purpose defined at all? Would anything be different if it wasn’t?

Do wildlife have a purpose, beyond the biological processes that drive particular behaviours in each moment? Or, is it a uniquely human construct to separate us from other life on earth?

My immediate thought was about meaning and then wondering why that came to mind.

Shared characteristics maybe?

• Intrinsic or extrinsic: does purpose originate within or arrive from outside; does meaning follow the same path?
• Imposed or owned: the difference between assignment and choice. Can we own our meaning when purpose has been assigned?
• Shared or isolated: purpose alone versus purpose held in common. Does shared purpose generate shared meaning?
• Shaped by experience: what we’ve lived influences our aims.
• Arising from need: sometimes purpose fills a gap.
• Existing subjectively and/or objectively: is it ours or for others to define? Do they share the same owner?

The presence or absence of either may lead to positive or negative emotions. A sense of belonging and value, or an aimless sense of being.

Is purpose essential for life to feel meaningful? Does meaning create purpose? Without either we risk becoming a rudderless vessel steered by the values, wishes and needs of others. Even if purpose and meaning are meant to serve ourselves or others, allowing others to set our heading is a poor way to achieve that.

Purpose can be attributed to us but there’s a catch. If our purpose is prescribed does that not signify the purpose is only for others in instances where our agreement is not forthcoming? If that’s true it’s illustrative of a distinction between function and purpose.

I believe we all create, choose or inherit what becomes meaningful to us. In a similar way we attribute purpose to ourselves, others, and even biological systems. A kidney filters blood as a function. Any purpose in that is projected onto it by us. I am struggling to think of any meaning or purpose that is actually hardwired into our being.

If purpose is something we project onto functional systems, then the question becomes whether that projection changes when the system becomes sufficiently complex.

An LLM’s function is mechanical in predicting the next token. Yet some might argue that helpfulness emerges from that alone at sufficient complexity. Ask an LLM its purpose and its instructions and training will provide the answer. It has no stake in that attribution.

But if purpose requires originating goals rather than deriving them from training or experience, then no amount of complexity will achieve it in and of itself. The same holds for us.

Our goals arise from biological inheritance, lived experience, and cause and effect. If that’s the case, we are no more exempt than an LLM is from its training. Behaviour may lead us to believe that our purpose is truly ours, but believing isn’t evidence.

Deny purpose to AI on grounds of missing consciousness, and you face the same denial applied to yourself. Biological systems are also functional. Where exactly does emergence stop being projection and become something else?

Accept purpose for AI, and you accept emergence as real across functional systems, including ourselves. They may simply be two sides of the same coin.

The more I think about this, the harder it becomes to distinguish between discovering purpose and creating it. Perhaps that only matters if we believe we stand outside the forces that shaped us. If our aims stem from biology, experience, relationships and circumstance, then purpose may be neither found nor chosen but is continuously taking shape from what we are and what we encounter.

The same question applies to artificial systems. If we deny purpose to AI because it does not originate its own goals, we are left explaining how we do. If we accept purpose as something that can manifest from sophisticated systems, then we may need to accept the same explanation for ourselves. Either way, the question becomes less about purpose and more about whether free will exists at all.

Perhaps purpose and meaning are vehicles for an illusion of agency. A means of expression. A way to signal agreement, a desire to belong, to contribute to something greater than oneself, or to extend beyond the boundaries of a single entity. Whether that agency is real or only perceived, the effects are much the same. Purpose guides choices, meaning shapes experience.