Do we exist only to exist?

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That’s a pretty good estimation of it. Both the materialist and non-materialist perspectives boil down to circularity of meaning. (existing merely to exist) Let’s dive in to that circularity.

We can divide up agents into self-aware agents and non-self-aware. Non-self-aware agents do not have to contend with the concept of the self when coming up with objectives. Self-aware agents have to devote brain cycles to objectives that involve the self.

What is this self? Well, of course, it’s different for every self-aware creature. You can’t just call the self personality, the observed differences in behavior between individuals of a species. Creatures can have personality yet still not be self-aware. You can observe their differences, but they have no conception of their differences.

No, the self is private, it’s how the individual directly considers itself. It’s probably impossible to distinguish just through observation what behaviors arise from the self and what arise from ‘mere’ personality. But if you could see into the critter’s mind, then you could start to make distinctions between brain activity.

You have a self, and you also have a personality. These things intertwine and shade into each other, and meditation can allow you to separate out ‘kinds’ of thought. There can be a lot about your personality that other people can observe, but only plays a small part in how you think about yourself.

The self is the subject of the two great religions of the world, Buddhism and Christianity. The fundamentals of what they want you to do with the self are the same, surrender to some external reality. In Christianity this is Jesus and God, in Buddhism this is to achieve the end goal of enlightenment. Both end states, and the pathways for achieving them, are described amazingly similarly when you scrub the dogmas away.

Religion, abstracting over the two major forms, describes the self as false, as misleading, as imperfect. The reality the self is being surrendered to is eternal, timeless, perfect. If religion seeks to impose any ultimate direction, it’s in this direction of surrender. But once surrendered, then the locus for further decision-making then comes from the external reality, from Jesus, from the present moment.

Materialism, which seeks to remove the mystical from consideration, ends with similar conclusions in this direction, only stating them more affirmatively. The external reality is no external reality, this reality is all there is.

We can now abstract over both religion and materialism as positions on ultimate reality. Any position on ultimate reality, is a framework for deciding what and where decisions should come from.

The question at hand now is whether any position on ultimate reality can produce a position on the purpose for existence being somehow not circular. And the answer to that is sure, we can dream up trivial ways to define ultimate reality as something that demands a non-circular decision-making process.

Let’s take one of those examples. Life is about cheese. Your purpose in life is to eat cheese, eat better cheese, everything in your life is cheese. Why cheese? To articulate a rationale for “why cheese” you must invariably invoke circular logic. Why eat cheese? Because cheese is great. See the circularity?

This is ultimately why the two major religions both resolve the same way. Religion looks like it introduces a pointed purpose framework on the surface of it, but underneath it’s circular. The purposes fold in on themselves. Materialism does the same, in fewer steps. After enlightenment, the dishes.