When I wrote “I wonder whether all species or even just one actually have a (shared) purpose? As humans couldn’t we all just try to find our own?” I was trying to say that I don’t see a species or all species as obviously having a purpose. Basically stating that what you said in the following quote is not a given to me.

Species on the other hand they all share a same purpose, which is to thrive as a whole (grow in numbers, but not too much in order not to endanger the very space they need to live in). At least that’s how I see it.

And that I see species very similarly to the way you see life here:

To me, life has no purpose beside maybe being what it is.

If it comes up again it might be best to use the same definition for ‘life’ I personally like the one from Wikipedia: Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not.

A species is only one possible configuration of life that produces similar copies of itself. What would give a species its purpose of thriving as a whole? If you ask me it just does, just like simpler systems also try to find a balance.

I’ve just realized that I made an error assuming that an individual having a purpose and their species having a purpose would be mutually exclusive. Though I do find the possibility of a species wide purpose for one to fulfill slightly constraining though I suppose it can be pretty permissive.

And then there are individuals. They may or may not have whatever purpose they fancy within a somewhat restrictive 'species limitation’.

I think we pretty much agree here.

I would say we’re more or less free as individuals to be what we want to be.

Whether or not we have free will is something have not been able to decide for myself but it seems unlikely that it would require us to be able to control the reactions in our brains. Unless you really want to I would rather not open that whole new can of worms. Anyway I think there’s nothing stopping whatever we are from being what we seem to want.

On the other hand, I have no idea what the idea of the individual could evoke in a bee’s mind? Or ‘personal desire’?

The personal desire seems impossible to answer. I’m also not sure how a bee could find its own individual purpose and I find likely that it is incapable of comprehending it. But could a beekeeper or even the bee’s environment assign it an individual purpose (maybe less applicable to a bee than other species but I hope I’m making myself clear).

Imho, that is a very nice objective to pursue.

Thank you very much, it’s nice to hear that. :)

I’m very much enjoying this back and forth so far.

Edit: Fixed formatting lol