Seems like you’re mushing together several loosely related things, including what we might call model-based motivation, explicit long-term planning, unified purpose, and precisely targeted goals.
Model-based motivation: being motivated to do something in a way that relies on your internal models of the world, not just on direct sensory rewards.
Explicit long-term planning: being aware of your goal, explicitly planning ways to achieve it, following those plans including over periods of months or years.
Unified purpose: a person’s motivations and actions in a domain fitting together coherently to work towards a single purpose, even across contexts.
Precisely targeted goals: having the goal precisely match something that can be specified on other grounds besides what we can empirically observe that people aim for (like “inclusive genetic fitness” which is picked out by theory).
The godshatter post is mainly about the last two—people have a collection of fragmented motivations which helped towards the selected-for purpose in the contexts where we evolved. Your argument here is mainly about the first two.
I think that the first two are pretty common, and are found in human romantic/reproductive goals, e.g. long-term planning around having kids, or motivations to improve ones appearance in ways that you expect potential partners to find attractive. I think that the last two are pretty rare, including for status—most people have a collection of somewhat-status-related motivations (though perhaps a small fraction of people (sociopaths?) have status as a more unified goal), and I haven’t seen anyone specify the “status” target well enough to even check if people’s motivations aim at that precise target.
Seems like you’re mushing together several loosely related things, including what we might call model-based motivation, explicit long-term planning, unified purpose, and precisely targeted goals.
Model-based motivation: being motivated to do something in a way that relies on your internal models of the world, not just on direct sensory rewards.
Explicit long-term planning: being aware of your goal, explicitly planning ways to achieve it, following those plans including over periods of months or years.
Unified purpose: a person’s motivations and actions in a domain fitting together coherently to work towards a single purpose, even across contexts.
Precisely targeted goals: having the goal precisely match something that can be specified on other grounds besides what we can empirically observe that people aim for (like “inclusive genetic fitness” which is picked out by theory).
The godshatter post is mainly about the last two—people have a collection of fragmented motivations which helped towards the selected-for purpose in the contexts where we evolved. Your argument here is mainly about the first two.
I think that the first two are pretty common, and are found in human romantic/reproductive goals, e.g. long-term planning around having kids, or motivations to improve ones appearance in ways that you expect potential partners to find attractive. I think that the last two are pretty rare, including for status—most people have a collection of somewhat-status-related motivations (though perhaps a small fraction of people (sociopaths?) have status as a more unified goal), and I haven’t seen anyone specify the “status” target well enough to even check if people’s motivations aim at that precise target.