David R. MacIver's Blog

Asking for purpose disrupts action

This post was originally published at notebook.drmaciver.com.

I was feeling unmotivated by my back collection of suggested writing topics so I decided to try flicking through Hasok Chang’s “Realism for Realistic People” for inspiration, and I found a useful distinction that I think helps untangle one piece of what I was pointing at in Why do you do things?.

He makes the distinction between the “inherent aim” and “external functions” of an activity, using the example of lighting a match. If asked why you are moving a match in a particular way across a surface, your answer is simply “to light the match”. You can explain things in more detail - why holding it at this particular angle helps, why you have to move fast rather than slow, etc. but it is all relative to to the specific goal of trying to get a match lit.

You can also ask “Why are you lighting a match?”, to which the answer might be “I’m trying to light a bunsen burner” or “I’m trying to figure out how matches work” or “I like the pretty flames”. These are the extenral functions of the activity of lighting a match.

This is as part of trying to point to what a well-defined activity is, and the inherent aim is part of what constitutes something being a particular activity. There is an action of “lighting a match” that you can do more or less well, independently of the external functions of the activity.

In “Games: Agency as Art”, C Thi Nguyen talks about games as an example of taking on disposable ends. A game is an adoption of the lusory attitude - a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. This lusory attitude is one of voluntarily taking on the activity of playing the game. With that activity, the inherent aim is to score the most points (or achieve some other victory condition). The external function of the game might be to have fun, to spend time with your friends, etc.

If you focus on those external functions of the game as primary it can disrupt your abiltiy to play the game, which in turn can disrupt the ability to achieve those external functions.

Nguyen points this out as an interesting and unusual feature of games, but actually I think maybe it’s not. I think it is often the case that focusing on the external functions of the activity is disruptive to the activity itself. Being able to focus on a singular goal and smoothly trying to achieve it allows you to enter an effective flow state around that goal, and only when it is completed do you find yourself returning to the question of why you were doing this in the first place. If you try to act with the full set of external functions of your activity in mind, most of the time you’ll fail to act fluidly.

This, to me, I think does a better job of capturing the right sorts of distinctions that I want to make about why we do things. You can talk about activities, and their aims, and how they fit together, and having the notion of an activity effectively creates boundaries in the chain of whys. Every end is terminal while you are immersed in an activity with it as its aim, and only on emerging from the activity (either at its natural completion or as the result of some disruption) do you ask how it fits into the broader patterns of your life.