What expertise do you think is required to develop a robust understanding of this matter? How could we adjudicate between competing views and determine which, if any, is justified?
How did you come up with the 3 primary motivations? They seem like they are missing some important stuff, but I’m more curious about your methodology. Was it just from reflection on the matter, or is it based on any real research? I see no citations.
but I’m more curious about your methodology. Was it just from reflection on the matter, or is it based on any real research?
The current draft doesn’t yet explain the methodology, and that’s a weakness on my part rather than an intentional omission. The proposal isn’t from an empirical study or statistical analysis. I approached it through a philosophical analysis of motivational conflict. My approach was asking whether these diverse motivations could be ultimately understood as expressions of more fundamental motivational domains. Through that process, I arrived at the three categories, and they seemed capable of accounting for motivational conflict without further reduction. That said, it’s still a philosophical proposal rather than a demonstrated conclusion, and one of the questions I’m working on is whether these three categories are genuinely exhaustive or whether the classifications need further revision.
I see no citations.
You’re right about the citation part, too, but this is just an early conceptual draft, so it lacks engagement with existing literature. That’s something I intend to work on as the theory develops to clarify where my proposal agrees with or departs from existing accounts.
It looks very much to me like some random person having an idea and imagining that their self recognized cleverness is exchangable with actual academic work. Respectfully, you would probably be better served looking at the academic word done in the area your thinking about, because I 100% guarantee that the real work done in the field is WAY more interesting than your reflections made separate from any empirical observations.
If you wish to be taken seriously, you need to do WAY more work. Either is fine. Do the WAY more work, and earn the right to be taken seriously when proposing an entire framework for discussing a subject (Hint, that’s a huge undertaking), or don’t do the huge amount of work, be a little humble, and actually engage with the work of people who did the WAY more work and learn stuff.
WAY more work it is then
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Cool. Most of the people writing interesting things on the subject have at least a decade of intensive study. Talk to me in a decade and I’ll be curious if your view has changed.
Indeed, don’t be discouraged. You may not have the answer to your conundrum yet but nor did you claim to.
Good post! Welcome to The Philosophy Forum.
The drivers of behavior are multivariate, and it is difficult (maybe impossible) to track and calculate how all the interacting motivations result in what we do. We can focus on individual drivers like sex, for example, and then explain behavior. But single driver approaches are incomplete and distort our understanding.
Your idea of negotiation among competing drivers seems like a sound approach to me. The negotiation process runs from pretty smooth and orderly outcomes to rough and disorderly conflict. I could cite several disorderly negotiations among my motivations which have run over a lifetime. The outcomes were mixed.
Another factor in determining outcomes which sometimes comes into play is the malfunction of the brain. Sometimes our perceptions and reactions screw up the operation of otherwise clear motivations. For instance, a person may be motivated by the need for belonging, but paranoia frustrates that desire. Or for a non-pathological example, the need for belonging can be frustrated by flawed and incomplete social knowledge about how to interact with others. Maybe he or she lacks the skills to read and emit the right social signals.
Old idea, new thread. Yes, you’re correct. Competing motives are what it’s all about. Luckily/unluckily for some there are no motivational contradictions while for others its a constant irritation. Do you think, for example, a mafia don has motivational contradictions? Since a boss-don has no idea what the quest for meaning is and has no sense of duty, he’s basically functioning from basic instincts (survival, sex, viands, etc.) and that too is not so cut-and-dried as it appears to be.
Human behavior is far more sensitive to situational factors.
Minor contextual changes can profoundly change one’s behavior in ways that one didn’t have a particular motivation or reason to prioritize.
I get what you are trying to argue here, and it’s quite a good example too, but survival duty and meaning are structural categories, not moral categories. So your Mafia boss and a saint might have the same motivational architecture while differing radically in what they regard as duties and what they find meaningful.
Do you think, for example, a mafia don has motivational contradictions? Since a boss-don has no idea what the quest for meaning is and has no sense of duty, he’s basically functioning from basic instincts (survival, sex, viands, etc.) and that too is not so cut-and-dried as it appears to be.
Yes, if he has no sense of duty or meaning, how do you classify his loyalty to the organization or powerful concerns that he has for reputation? These seem like duty and meaning to me, even if their content is morally objectionable. So I hope you understand that duty is not morality; it’s psychologically binding obligations, and meaning is not virtue; it’s symbolic significance. So a mafia code can create duties, and a criminal empire that gives the don power or reputation can have symbolic significance to him.
Thanks, I find myself agreeing with your criticism of single-driver approaches too. Human behavior seems too varied to be satisfactorily explained by one universal motivation, whether that’s pleasure, survival sex, or any other motivation. I agree they capture an important aspect each, but eventually, they risk becoming so broad and losing explanatory value. What interests me most, though, is that motivations compete, like we often experience situations in which different motivations prescribe incompatible courses of action, yet only one behavior is ultimately realized. Don’t you think it raises an interesting philosophical question: if multiple motivations are simultaneously active, what explains why one prevails over the others? I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now.
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Minor contextual changes can profoundly change one’s behavior in ways that one didn’t have a particular motivation or reason to prioritize.
I don’t think we’re necessarily disagreeing here. Context can indeed influence one’s behavior, but the motives will still remain the same. For example, you might help a stranger in a busy street, but when the same stranger approaches you in a dark alley, you might run or prepare to defend yourself. So here, even though the behavior might have changed, the motives are still the same. In the first situation, duty or meaning may outweigh self-preservation because you perceive it as harmless, but in the second, the perceived threat increases the urgency of self-preservation, leading to a different behavioral outcome. So I’d say context influences how competing motivations interact rather than replacing them with entirely new ones.
I don’t know, I’ve never worked for the mafia. Perhaps I’ve seen too many movies.
I feel … meaning can’t be automated and duty can’t be either. On the matter of survival, we’re all the same, including the mafia don.
If we’re talking about the same thing, I’ve worked with this before.
These are not just seperate things or different things that make us do things or make decisions, but may be the defining factor for consciousness and intelligence.
When these occur in the brain, they root stem from primative or simple origins, that when combined, (each giving conflicting commands), give rise to more complex networks that eventually lead to consciousness and intelligence.
One may coin it counter consciousness for lack of a better term.
Both environment and internal factors play a role and may interact internally or internal with external under the same term.
Well, I agree, but the point is that they can become psychologically binding or symbolically significant for an individual, not that joining the mafia instantly creates either of them. Plus, by “duty” I mean obligations that an individual finds binding, whether they arise from family, military service, religion, or even a criminal organization. Likewise, by “meaning” I am referring to whatever an individual might find symbolically significant, be it status, reputation, honor, purpose, or something else.
Well, that’s an interesting way of looking at it, but what I’m wondering is: GWT argues that consciousness emerges generally from competing cognitive processes. Are you suggesting that it instead emerges specifically from competing motivational systems? How? Like, aren’t they operating within a broader conscious cognitive architecture instead?
I’m no neurologist, so I can’t say where exactly in the brain we would find them.
My feeling is just that there are many of these elementary parts, which become complex when they combine.
One may say consciousness is a continuous processe of “natural sellection,” on smaller scales, which eventually settle into a more ordered and structured whole and from such a network the same processes may start again to give rise to even higher cognition or awareness.
The argument of the OP is persuasive, and it aligns with a lot of thinking, going all the way back to Plato, who divided the soul in three: appetite, spirit, and reason (reason having the adjudicating function).
For Freud, the mind has to be understood as a field of conflict between various often unconscious drives and internal agencies.
More recently, in affective neuroscience Jaak Panksepp identified 7 emotional systems that correspond with drives: SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY (always capitalized for technical reasons), which compete by dynamic cross-inhibition.
I’ve just been reading a book that combines Freud and Panksepp, updating the former’s sex-based scheme with the 7 emotional systems.
Maybe the OP would benefit from an engagement with these theories.
Well, I am aware that the general idea of multiple competing motivations has a long philosophical and psychological history, but I am not nearly as familiar with some of the more recent work you mentioned, especially Panksepp. I appreciate the references; I’ll definitely be reading more in that direction. That said, my interest isn’t so much in whether competing motivations exist as if that’s a novel claim. What I am currently very interested in and actually trying to understand is how these competing motivations are ultimately translated into a single behavior in a reflective individual. That’s actually the question that motivated the OP in the first place.