Motivation

This is a brief sketch of a theory of motivation.

Motivation drives action. It also causes the experiences of pleasure and pain. We experience pain when motivation increases, and pleasure when motivation decreases.

Motivation is generated by emotions. Each emotion drives action toward some biological imperative. Hunger, thirst and lust are examples of emotion. Some emotions are triggered by external stimuli. For example, if you are pricked with a pin then you will experience pain. The pain an emotional reaction to a stimulus. The pin activates sensory receptors in the skin (nociceptors), which send a signal to the brain, where it generates an emotional reaction. Some emotions are triggered by internal stimuli, such as low blood sugar or low body temperature. Some, like lust, are generated internally without a preceding stimulus, although lust can also be triggered or increased by a complex stimulus, such as seeing an attractive member of the opposite sex.

All emotions generate motivation, which then generates action. Emotions identify/define problems, and action solves problems. You might wonder why the recognition of a problem doesn’t immediately generate the action to solve it, rather than going through this intermediate mechanism of motivation. In some cases, an action is automatically generated by a stimulus, such as shivering when you are cold, or jerking your hand away from a hot stove. Such reactions can only produce simple behavior, however. To produce complex behavior, there must be a separation between the identification/definition of a problem, and the generation of a solution to it. Emotions are necessary for both learning and cognition.

The brain is a machine for generating behavior. Behavior consists mostly of muscular activation, but it can also involve glandular secretions, such as salivation. Consider an apparently simple problem of action, such as walking across a room and opening a door. To do that, your brain must generate millions of coordinated muscle twitches that depend on input from your senses. But the brain does more than just solve problems of action. It must also define those problems. To walk across a room and open a door, you must have the intention to do so. You must want to do it. The problem is both defined and solved by the brain. Emotions are central to that process. They generate the want.

The brain generates behavior by defining problems, and then solving those problems with actions. We can divide problems into the following general categories:

• Harm to the body (being poked with a pin, bitten by a crocodile, etc.).
• Resource needs (the need for food, water and air).
• Getting shelter and comfort.
• Avoiding threats and dangers.
• Increasing one’s agency (acquiring money, knowledge, property, etc.).
• Social desires (having beneficial relationships).
• Sexual desires (having sex, creating and maintaining sexual relationships).
• Taking care of one’s children.

Solving these problems is instrumental to reproduction, which is the biological purpose of life. But we have no reproduction drive, nor do people naturally view reproduction as a problem. Instead, human beings reproduce by solving many different, smaller problems. We have many different emotions that motivate us to solve many different problems.

For example, you might feel hungry, which makes getting food a problem. Hunger causes you to think about how to get food, form an intention of making yourself a sandwich, and then get up, walk across the room, go to the kitchen, and make yourself a sandwich. The motivation is necessary to generate both the intention and the action.

Why don’t we just have a “reproduction drive”? Because such a thing could not evolve. Evolution builds complexity incrementally, by trial and error. It does not consciously design organisms to reproduce. Reproduction is an abstract concept. It cannot be recognized based on a stimulus. Even if an organism had a drive to reproduce, it would be impossible for the organism to figure out which action would be instrumental to reproduction in a specific context. We do not begin life with an abstract concept of value or purpose, and derive lesser values from that core value. Instead, we are born with a number of different emotions that drive different behaviors.

Emotions evolved from simple stimulus-response circuits, but they have evolved into something much more complex in humans and other higher animals. Some of our emotions are directly linked to internal or external stimuli. Hunger, thirst, and physical pain are examples. We have more complex social and sexual emotions, which are linked to complex internal and external stimuli. We also have emotions that drive generic proactive behavior, such as fear and hope. Fear can be directly generated by a stimulus, such as seeing a spider, but it is usually generated from ideas, which may not be tied to any current stimulus. For example, you can be afraid of death, in the abstract, even if there is no immediate threat to your life. There are also emotions that drive us to seek knowledge, such as curiosity and boredom.

Evolution cobbled together this mechanism, which consists of many different emotions, or drives, that work in the same way: by generating motivation. Instead of proactively pursuing the abstract goal of reproduction, we are driven to pursue many different, smaller goals that are instrumental to reproduction (or were in the ancestral environment).

Even though we are capable of goal-directed behavior, our emotions are reactive. They react to stimuli or mental states or both. Evolution discovered a way to generate proactive behavior from internal reactions.

Motivation is the “currency” of action. At any moment, your motivation determines both the direction and intensity of your actions. It also directs thought, because thought is part of the problem-solving process. We can think of motivation as having units of Watts (joules per second), because it determines the rate at which your body does work. However, this is only a metaphor, because human action is highly complex and it can’t be reduced descriptively to physical work.

It is important that different emotions generate the same currency. That makes it possible to resolve trade-offs between them.

For example, hunger motivates a lion to chase a gazelle, in the hope of getting a meal. However, the chase also generates fatigue, which motivates the lion to stop running. The lion might also be afraid of getting hurt in the chase. Or the lion might be thirsty, and go to the waterhole instead. The lion’s actions depend on the relative strengths of different motivations.

The common currency of motivation also enables actions that solve multiple problems. And it allows for generic motivation that is not a reaction to a specific stimulus and does not motivate a specific behavior. This generic motivation can then be attached to an idea to generate proactive behavior. You have no instinctive desire to win chess games, but desire can be attached to the idea of winning a chess game, making it into a problem that you are motivated to solve.

We do not directly experience motivation itself. Instead, we experience changes in motivation as pain and pleasure. Pain is an increase in motivation, and pleasure is a decrease.

People often think of pain and pleasure as being caused by external objects and events. For example, they think of the pleasure of eating a hamburger as caused by the hamburger. They don’t think about hunger as a cause of the pleasure, although it obviously is. You must be hungry to feel pleasure from eating a hamburger. The greater the hunger, the greater the pleasure. The pleasure comes from the reduction of prior motivation.

Pleasure and pain are an important aspect of subjective experience. They are experiential opposites. Together, they constitute the hedonic dimension of experience. As motivation varies over time, we experience pain and pleasure. Those experiences are linked to the events that increase or decrease motivation, such as being poked by a pin, or eating a hamburger.

It is important to distinguish between motivation and pain. Motivation causes both pain and pleasure. Consider hunger, for example. Hunger is the motivation to eat. An increase in hunger is experienced as pain. A decrease in hunger is experienced as pleasure. The pleasure of eating is the decrease in one’s motivation to eat. Without prior hunger, there is no pleasure in eating. While you are eating, you are still hungry (motivated to eat), but you experience pleasure as the hunger decreases. This shows the difference between motivation and pain. The fact that you are eating demonstrates that you are still hungry (motivated to eat), but you do not experience pain from that motivation. Instead, you experience pleasure as the motivation is reduced.

Walking provides another demonstration of the difference between motivation and pain. To walk you must be motivated to walk, otherwise you would stop walking. Do you constantly experience pain while you walk? No. If someone gets in your way and slows you down, however, you will feel irritated. Or, if you suddenly remember that you are late for an appointment, then you might feel anxious and start walking faster. Those events cause pain because they increase your state of motivation. If you are just walking down the street, however, then you won’t experience pain, even though you are clearly motivated to walk. This shows that action is driven by motivation, not pain.

Pain and pleasure are transient experiences. They exist only in the moment. You can remember that you experienced pain or pleasure in the past, but you can’t re-experience those feelings. They aren’t stored in your brain. Only memories about the experiences are stored.

Pain and pleasure define the success or failure of action. An action that causes pleasure is a success. An action that causes pain is a failure. A successful action reduces motivation. To do so, it must solve one or more problems without creating bigger problems.

Pain and pleasure are the inductive basis of values. We learn what is good or bad for us from the effects of actions and events on motivation. We learn to recognize the causes of problems and how to solve them. For example, you could learn that going out in the rain without a jacket will make you cold, thereby creating the motivation to warm up. If you recognize being cold as a problem, then you can act to prevent that problem from occurring. You could wear a jacket, for example, or stay inside on a rainy day. That action is not a reaction to a stimulus. It is proactive and based on value-knowledge, aka “values”.

There are three aspects to conceptual knowledge: truth, value and action, which are induced from sensory, emotional and motor data respectively. Value-knowledge is the value aspect of conceptual knowledge. For example, my concept of a hamburger contains truth-knowledge (how to recognize a hamburger), value-knowledge (hamburgers satisfy hunger) and action-knowledge (how to hold a hamburger). Value-knowledge is used to make value-judgments and choices of action. If I am hungry, eating a hamburger will come to mind, especially if I am walking past a McDonalds.

I should be clear that values are not based on the total effect of action on pain and pleasure. For example, going out in the cold causes pain. It creates the motivation to warm up. It is also a necessary cause of the pleasure of warming up. You can’t experience the pleasure of warming up unless you are cold. So, going out in the cold causes both pain and pleasure. It directly causes the pain of being cold, and it indirectly causes the pleasure of warming up. But the way the brain induces value-knowledge only associates the pain with the action of going out into the cold. It associates the pleasure with the action of warming up. That is the biologically correct evaluation. To act effectively toward reproduction, you should avoid hypothermia, and if you are hypothermic, you should warm up.

Values do not reflect net pain and pleasure, or in other words, net hedonic utility. Action is not based on maximizing hedonic utility in the long run. It is based on reducing motivation in the short run. Proactive behavior is generated by creating the immediate motivation to do it. Value-knowledge is used to generate value-judgments (ideas of what is good or bad), and value-judgments create motivation.

For example, the value-judgment “being cold is bad” will generate the immediate motivation to put on a jacket before going outside. Then you will act to reduce that motivation by putting on a jacket. You will experience a very small amount of pain when the motivation to put on the jacket is created, and a very small amount of pleasure when the motivation to put on the jacket is satisfied.

Think about all the little things that you do during a day. Each of those actions had to be motivated. Some little bit of motivation was assigned to it, and then satisfied by doing it.

Homunculus fallacies are a common pitfall in reasoning about the mind/brain. The homunculus fallacy is a type of conceptual question-begging. It explains some aspect of consciousness in terms that presuppose a deeper level of consciousness: agency inside the agent. An example is thinking of motivation as “pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain”. There is an element of truth to this metaphor, but it is also misleading. Pursuit and avoidance are behaviors, and thus they require motivation. When a lion pursues a gazelle, the lion is motivated to catch the gazelle, because the lion values that outcome positively. The gazelle avoids the lion, because the gazelle is motivated to escape, and negatively values being caught. Pursuit and avoidance depend on motivation and value-judgments. Thus, they cannot explain motivation or value-judgments.

Likewise, it is a fallacy to consider pain a punishment and pleasure a reward. What makes something a punishment is that it causes pain. What makes something a reward is that it causes pleasure. Pain does not cause pain. Pleasure does not cause pleasure.

Pleasure and pain are the experiences of changing motivation, not something we are motivated to pursue or avoid. Value-knowledge is induced from pleasure and pain, in association with sensory and motor data. Value-knowledge is then used to generate value-judgments and intentions, which motivate complex behavior.

These are the concepts I have introduced so far, and their relationships:

• Motivation: The impulse to act, generated by emotions.
• Emotions: Specific motivation generators that evolved to motivate different behaviors.
• Pain and pleasure: The subjective experience of changing motivation. Pain is an increase in motivation. Pleasure is a decrease.
• Value-knowledge: An aspect of conceptual knowledge. It is induced from pain and pleasure, and their correlations with other aspects of embodied experience.
• Value-judgment: A conscious idea of what is good or bad for oneself.
• Intention: A conscious plan of action.

In addition to the motivation created by internal and external conditions, the brain generates a background level of motivation automatically. This motivation is not tied to any stimulus. It motivates proactive behaviors. We call it “boredom”, “anxiety” or “restlessness”. It is the urge to do. It motivates us to think and act, even when there is no immediate problem to solve. Sometimes, it motivates simple exploration behavior, such as going for a walk, or play behavior, such as playing video games. Sometimes, it motivates us to work on long-term projects, such as fixing the roof, doing the taxes, or writing a book. The attention system automatically generates problems for us to work on, based on value-knowledge. If it can’t find something to do, then we think about what to do, or we go looking for something to do.

The theory implies that pleasure and pain balance out in the long run.

Mathematically, we can model pain and pleasure (the hedonic dimension) as the first derivative of motivation as a function of time. Let’s use M to denote motivation and P to denote the first derivative of M. When M increases, P is positive, which corresponds to pain. When M decreases, P is negative, which corresponds to pleasure. If we assume that your life begins and ends with M = 0, then the integral of P over your lifetime is zero. In other words, total pain + total pleasure = zero.

It could be argued that, at the end of your life, you can experience pain that is not balanced by pleasure. For example, suppose that someone shoots you in the leg, causing extreme pain, and then shoots you in the head, ending your consciousness (like that scene in “Pulp Fiction”). If we don’t count the moment of death as pleasure, then you have experienced net pain. However, in that case, your net pain and pleasure only depends on the circumstances of your death. It depends very little on how you lived your life. And by the time it could (theoretically) be added up, you no longer exist.

The theory implies that the pursuit of happiness is futile.

Satisfaction is not a long-term condition. It is transient. If you satisfy one desire, another one is created. New motivation is always being generated by the brain, to drive us to think and act. This is biologically adaptive. There is always something you could do to improve your reproductive fitness, such as looking for a mate, acquiring power, improving your defenses, acquiring knowledge, etc. So, even if you have comfort, shelter, food, power, mates, etc, you will not be satisfied. You will want more.

This theory explains the hedonic treadmill: the observation that people habituate to their circumstances, and only experience pleasure from improvements. It explains why people living in very different circumstances display the same range of emotional experiences. Rich people are not happier than poor people. Young people are not happier than old people. Beautiful people are not happier than ugly people. Everyone would like to be rich, young and beautiful, but it would not make you happy.

Again, this makes sense biologically. We did not evolve to be happy. We evolved to act toward the purpose of reproduction.