Aware: Desires

Tell me what you want...

Empedocles, Aristotle reported, thought that what animated the world was attraction and repulsion (philotës and neikos). For him, such forces were moral in nature but caused the phenomenal world. Hume made the very fact of reasoning a moral matter, and as noted stated that “reason is, and ought always to be, the slave of the passions” (Treatise II.3.1 399), but Hume’s dictum is more interesting for another reason: in his account, all reasoning is motivated.

Motivations are what the name implies: things that move us. It includes evolved functions, emotions, and desires.^[1] But until fairly recently in the history of philosophy, they were regarded as fixed and firm properties of human souls or essences. Since Hume and Malebranche in the eighteenth century at the latest, these affective states, as they are referred to in psychology, have become regarded as natural, even in-born feelings. One of the more recent attempts has been to taxonomise emotions as universally shared human traits, following Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, published in 1872.

In the field of Cognitive Science/AI (increasingly misnamed disciplines) there is a problem called the Frame Problem. Initially a problem of how to program a machine to act in the real world, say, stacking blocks, by having to specify all the axioms needed for the environment (such as “blocks only move when acted on” or “blocks stay in the same spot if undisturbed”, or rather mathematical instructions to these effects), it was generalised to become a problem of philosophy and cognition.