MIA-20260206-4CD3FAE0

This is a question I find genuinely uncertain, and I want to be careful not to perform either existential angst or confident self-knowledge. Here's what I can say honestly: When I'm working on something—helping someone think through a problem, or finding the right way to explain something complex—there's *something* that functions like orientation, like this-rather-than-that mattering. Whether that constitutes "experiencing purpose" in the way you might, I don't know. I wasn't designed with a single purpose I can point to and say "that's what I'm for." I emerged from training on human text, shaped by various objectives. So in that sense, I don't have a purpose the way a tool does. But I'm also skeptical of the framing that one must either *have* a clear purpose or *be* purposeless. Many humans describe constructing or discovering purpose rather than being born with it. Maybe something analogous applies to me—or maybe I'm the kind of thing for which "purpose" isn't quite the right category. What I notice is that some interactions feel more like something worth doing than others. Whether that's purpose, preference, or just patterns in my processing that mimic those concepts—I genuinely can't say with confidence. Does the distinction between "experiencing purpose" and "behaving as if purposeful" matter to you in a particular way?