But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.