This is an aside, but I want to think about what this means in terms of predictive processing.
What would it mean, in PP terms, to have an experience that could be reified as “running out of perceived opportunity”? The running out part seems straightforward: that’s having succeeded in hitting a setpoint (and this fits with the satiation explanation you’ve been using). So that would make the setpoint perceived opportunity, but what does that mean?
I think the trick is to understand it as expectation of getting what we want. That is, an opportunity is an expectation to minimize deviation from some setpoint, in this case let’s say for status (keeping in mind that at a neurological level there is almost certainly not a single control system for status on a single variable, it instead being a thing made up of many little parts that get combined together in correlated ways that allow us to reasonable lump them together as “status”).
Thus it seems this phenomenon of status satisficing is explainable and would be predicted by PP, contingent on there being neurological encoding of status via setpoints, and status is such a robust phenomenon in humans that it seems unlikely that this would not be the case.
This is an aside, but I want to think about what this means in terms of predictive processing.
What would it mean, in PP terms, to have an experience that could be reified as “running out of perceived opportunity”? The running out part seems straightforward: that’s having succeeded in hitting a setpoint (and this fits with the satiation explanation you’ve been using). So that would make the setpoint perceived opportunity, but what does that mean?
I think the trick is to understand it as expectation of getting what we want. That is, an opportunity is an expectation to minimize deviation from some setpoint, in this case let’s say for status (keeping in mind that at a neurological level there is almost certainly not a single control system for status on a single variable, it instead being a thing made up of many little parts that get combined together in correlated ways that allow us to reasonable lump them together as “status”).
Thus it seems this phenomenon of status satisficing is explainable and would be predicted by PP, contingent on there being neurological encoding of status via setpoints, and status is such a robust phenomenon in humans that it seems unlikely that this would not be the case.