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C00002 00002	becaus[w82,jmc]		The ultimate "because"
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becaus[w82,jmc]		The ultimate "because"

	When a person is asked why he did something, he may answer
"... because I want W1".  When asked why he wants W1, he answers
"... because I want W2".  As we all experience in childhood
philosophical discussions, there seems to be an infinite regress.
How can we stop the regress?

	I claim the ultimate answer occurs at a rather early stage
of the regress, indeed at an earlier stage than most people admit.
The stopper is "Because that's the way I'm constructed".  If asked
why one is constructed in particular way, one can only appeal to
how one was brought up and ultimately to evolution.  Asking "why" to
that brings up the presently fruitless discussions as to whether the
universe as a whole was constructed for "some purpose".

	In speaking of a computer program or robot, the same considerations
apply.  The program may have explicit goals represented as symbolic
expressions in its memories, but the chain of causality goes rather
quickly to the structure of the program itself and (in one direction
of following causality) to the hardware and in another direction to
the programmer.  Any formalism that ascribes goals, whether to
computer programs, robots or people, must terminate its chain in
some such way.