OK. So, your “preference” is actually Hanson’s “image”. I see your words in the comment as mostly confirming this. Do you hold additional distinctions?
My preference in about your own self-interest (which however need not be about you), and I suspect that, unified with my usage of term “motivation”, you bundle them both in your usage of “motivation”. Does it sound correct to you?
OK. So, your “preference” is actually Hanson’s “image”. I see your words in the comment as mostly confirming this. Do you hold additional distinctions?
None that are directly relevant to the present context, no. (I do hold more near/far distinctions in general.)
My preference in about your own self-interest (which however need not be about you), and I suspect that, unified with my usage of term “motivation”, you bundle them both in your usage of “motivation”. Does it sound correct to you?
Not particularly. I’m using motivation largely to refer to the somatic markers (physio-emotional responses) keyed to actions or goal subjects, irrespective of any verbal explanations associated with those markers.
To put it another way, I understand a motivation to be a feeling about a concrete behavioral goal, regardless of how you came to have that feeling. A preference is a feeling about an abstract goal, as opposed to a concrete one.
So, “I prefer excitement over boredom” is distinct from “I am motivated to go rock-climbing today”. The former is an abstraction, and can be developed either top-down (e.g. through learning that excitement is a socially-valued qualtiy) or bottom up (summarization of prior experience or motivations).
However, even if it is derived by summarizing motivations, the preference is merely descriptive, not prescriptive. It can lead me to consciously try a new “exciting” behavior, but if I turn out not to like it, I will not still be motivated to carry out that behavior.
So, our preferences can lead us to situations that cause us to develop motivations, and we can even have the motivation to try things, because of a preference. We can even develop a motivation based on the feelings a preference may give us—e.g. a person who believes it is “good” to do a certain thing may be able to develop an inherent motivation for the thing, by feeling that “goodness” in association with the thing. Some people do this naturally for some things, others do not.
(Motivations can also form for reasons opaque to us: I’m still trying to track down what’s led me to such marathons of posting on LW this weekend, or at least figure out how to redirect it into finishing writing my book. I’ve probably written a book in my comments by now!)
I’m using motivation largely to refer to the somatic markers (physio-emotional responses) keyed to actions or goal subjects, irrespective of any verbal explanations associated with those markers.
Empirical, one-step-towards-subjective-from behavioral regularities, stimulus-response pairs. Not “should”, “is”. Is this correct? (I’m going to stop asking this question, but you should assume that I meticulously add it to every sentence in which I declare something about your statements, as a way of moving towards mutual understanding of terms.)
To put it another way, I understand a motivation to be a feeling about a concrete behavioral goal, regardless of how you came to have that feeling.
This confuses me, since you start using a word “feeling”, that has too many connotations, many of them deeper than the no-strings-attached regularity you seem to have just defined “motivations” to be.
A preference is a feeling about an abstract goal, as opposed to a concrete one.
So, there are two kinds of feelings: motivations (empirical stimulus-response pairs), and preferences, whatever that is.
So, “I prefer excitement over boredom” is distinct from “I am motivated to go rock-climbing today”. The former is an abstraction, and can be developed either top-down (e.g. through learning that excitement is a socially-valued qualtiy) or bottom up (summarization of prior experience or motivations).
So, preferences and motivations are not fundamentally different in your model, but merely the north and south of abstraction in “feelings”, in what the “stimulus-response” pairs are about.
(I drifted off after this point, I need more detailed understanding of the questions above in order to go further.)
Empirical, one-step-towards-subjective-from behavioral regularities, stimulus-response pairs. Not “should”, “is”. Is this correct?
Yes! Precisely. In NLP this would be referred to as one “step” in a “strategy”.
This confuses me, since you start using a word “feeling”, that has too many connotations, many of them deeper than the no-strings-attached regularity you seem to have just defined “motivations” to be.
See “Emotions and Feelings: A Neurobiological Perspective” for what I mean by “feelings”. This is also the NLP meaning of the term; i.e., Damasio’s paper supports the NLP model of subjective experience to this extent.
So, preferences and motivations are not fundamentally different in your model, but merely the north and south of abstraction in “feelings”, in what the “effect-response” pairs are about.
Yes, and as such, they lead to different practical effects, causing us to applaud and speak in favor of our abstract preferences, while only acting on concrete motivations.
Preferences only influence our behavior when they become concrete: for example, all those experiments Robin Hanson keeps mentioning about people’s donation behavior depending on whether they’ve been primed about in-group or out-group behaviors. That’s basically a situation where “preference” becomes “motivation” by becoming linked to a specific “near” behavior.
In general, preference becomes motivation by being made concrete, grounded in some sensory-specific context. If we have conflicting motivation, but try to proceed anyway, we experience “mixed feelings”—i.e., dueling somatic responses.
Now, the “stimulus-response” pairs are really predictions. The brain generates these responses that create feelings as a preparation to take action, and/or a marker of “good” or “bad”. So if you change your expectation of a situation, your feeling response changes as well.
For example, if I at first enjoy an activity, and then it becomes tedious, I may at some point “go over threshold” (in NLP parlance) and thus conclude that my tedious experiences constitute a better prediction of what will happen the next time I do it. At that point, my mental model is now updated, so I will no longer be motivated to do that activity.
That’s how it works, assuming that I “stack” (i.e. mentally combine) each tedious experience together as part of a trend, versus continuing to consider them as isolated experiences.
(It’s not the only way to change a motivation, but it’s a common one that people naturally use in practice. One NLP intervention for dealing with an abusive relationship, btw, is to teach a person how to mentally stack their representations of the relationship to “change their mind” about staying in it, by stacking up enough representations of past abuse and expected future abuse to create a strong enough feeling response to induce a model change. In general, NLP is not about anything spooky or magical so much as being able to deliberately replicate cognitive processes that other people use or that the same person uses, but in a different context.)
One place where akrasia comes into the picture, however, is when we don’t identify with the motivation to be changed, i.e., it’s not a preference. If you don’t know what you’re getting out of something, you can’t readily decide that you don’t want that thing any more!
This is why most of my interventions for procrastination involve finding out what prediction underlies the feeling response to a specific behavior being sought or avoided. Our feelings almost always occur in response to predictions made by our brains about the likely “near” outcome of a behavior.
These predictions are almost exclusively nonverbal, and brief. They normally “flash” by at subliminal speeds, faster than you can think or speed-read a single word. (Which makes sense, given that the same machinery is likely used to turn words into “meaning”!) You can learn to observe them, but only if you can quiet your verbal mind from “talking over them”. But once you see or hear them, you can hold them in consciousness for examination and modification.
It is these unconscious predictions that produce feeling responses, and thereby direct our actions. (They are probably also the basis of “priming”.)
When I or my students successfully change these unconscious representations, the corresponding behavioral motivation also changes. If a technique (whether it be one of mine or one of someone else’s) does NOT successfully change the representation, the motivation does not change, either. If one technique doesn’t work, we try another, until the desired result is achieved.
This is why I don’t care much about theory—if my hypothesis is that technique #1 will change representation X, and I’m mistaken, it only takes another few minutes to try technique #2 or #3. It’s catching the representations in the first place that’s much harder to do on your own, not the actual application of the techniques. I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing what techniques work better for what when I do them on other people, but oddly not as much on myself… which suggests that the certainty I appear to have may have more impact than the specific choice of technique.
Is that a placebo effect? Don’t know. Don’t care. As long as my student can also produce successes through self-application, and get whatever other results they’re after, what difference does it make?
I should note, however, that I personally never got any good results from any self-help techniques until I learned to 1) act “as if” a technique would work, regardless of my intellectual opinions about its probability of working, and 2) observe these sorts of unconscious thoughts. So even if it doesn’t matter how you change them, the ability to observe them appears to be a prerequisite.
(Also, these sorts of thoughts sometimes come out randomly in talk therapies, journalling, etc. Some particularly good therapists ask questions that tend to bring them out, and the NLP “Structure Of Magic” books were an attempt to explain how those therapists knew what questions to ask, given that the therapists each belonged to completely different schools of therapy. I use an extremely restricted subset of similar questions in my work, since I focus mainly on certain classes of chronic procrastination, and its patterns are very regular, at least in my experience.)
OK. So, your “preference” is actually Hanson’s “image”. I see your words in the comment as mostly confirming this. Do you hold additional distinctions?
My preference in about your own self-interest (which however need not be about you), and I suspect that, unified with my usage of term “motivation”, you bundle them both in your usage of “motivation”. Does it sound correct to you?
None that are directly relevant to the present context, no. (I do hold more near/far distinctions in general.)
Not particularly. I’m using motivation largely to refer to the somatic markers (physio-emotional responses) keyed to actions or goal subjects, irrespective of any verbal explanations associated with those markers.
To put it another way, I understand a motivation to be a feeling about a concrete behavioral goal, regardless of how you came to have that feeling. A preference is a feeling about an abstract goal, as opposed to a concrete one.
So, “I prefer excitement over boredom” is distinct from “I am motivated to go rock-climbing today”. The former is an abstraction, and can be developed either top-down (e.g. through learning that excitement is a socially-valued qualtiy) or bottom up (summarization of prior experience or motivations).
However, even if it is derived by summarizing motivations, the preference is merely descriptive, not prescriptive. It can lead me to consciously try a new “exciting” behavior, but if I turn out not to like it, I will not still be motivated to carry out that behavior.
So, our preferences can lead us to situations that cause us to develop motivations, and we can even have the motivation to try things, because of a preference. We can even develop a motivation based on the feelings a preference may give us—e.g. a person who believes it is “good” to do a certain thing may be able to develop an inherent motivation for the thing, by feeling that “goodness” in association with the thing. Some people do this naturally for some things, others do not.
(Motivations can also form for reasons opaque to us: I’m still trying to track down what’s led me to such marathons of posting on LW this weekend, or at least figure out how to redirect it into finishing writing my book. I’ve probably written a book in my comments by now!)
Empirical, one-step-towards-subjective-from behavioral regularities, stimulus-response pairs. Not “should”, “is”. Is this correct? (I’m going to stop asking this question, but you should assume that I meticulously add it to every sentence in which I declare something about your statements, as a way of moving towards mutual understanding of terms.)
This confuses me, since you start using a word “feeling”, that has too many connotations, many of them deeper than the no-strings-attached regularity you seem to have just defined “motivations” to be.
So, there are two kinds of feelings: motivations (empirical stimulus-response pairs), and preferences, whatever that is.
So, preferences and motivations are not fundamentally different in your model, but merely the north and south of abstraction in “feelings”, in what the “stimulus-response” pairs are about.
(I drifted off after this point, I need more detailed understanding of the questions above in order to go further.)
Yes! Precisely. In NLP this would be referred to as one “step” in a “strategy”.
See “Emotions and Feelings: A Neurobiological Perspective” for what I mean by “feelings”. This is also the NLP meaning of the term; i.e., Damasio’s paper supports the NLP model of subjective experience to this extent.
Yes, and as such, they lead to different practical effects, causing us to applaud and speak in favor of our abstract preferences, while only acting on concrete motivations.
Preferences only influence our behavior when they become concrete: for example, all those experiments Robin Hanson keeps mentioning about people’s donation behavior depending on whether they’ve been primed about in-group or out-group behaviors. That’s basically a situation where “preference” becomes “motivation” by becoming linked to a specific “near” behavior.
In general, preference becomes motivation by being made concrete, grounded in some sensory-specific context. If we have conflicting motivation, but try to proceed anyway, we experience “mixed feelings”—i.e., dueling somatic responses.
Now, the “stimulus-response” pairs are really predictions. The brain generates these responses that create feelings as a preparation to take action, and/or a marker of “good” or “bad”. So if you change your expectation of a situation, your feeling response changes as well.
For example, if I at first enjoy an activity, and then it becomes tedious, I may at some point “go over threshold” (in NLP parlance) and thus conclude that my tedious experiences constitute a better prediction of what will happen the next time I do it. At that point, my mental model is now updated, so I will no longer be motivated to do that activity.
That’s how it works, assuming that I “stack” (i.e. mentally combine) each tedious experience together as part of a trend, versus continuing to consider them as isolated experiences.
(It’s not the only way to change a motivation, but it’s a common one that people naturally use in practice. One NLP intervention for dealing with an abusive relationship, btw, is to teach a person how to mentally stack their representations of the relationship to “change their mind” about staying in it, by stacking up enough representations of past abuse and expected future abuse to create a strong enough feeling response to induce a model change. In general, NLP is not about anything spooky or magical so much as being able to deliberately replicate cognitive processes that other people use or that the same person uses, but in a different context.)
One place where akrasia comes into the picture, however, is when we don’t identify with the motivation to be changed, i.e., it’s not a preference. If you don’t know what you’re getting out of something, you can’t readily decide that you don’t want that thing any more!
This is why most of my interventions for procrastination involve finding out what prediction underlies the feeling response to a specific behavior being sought or avoided. Our feelings almost always occur in response to predictions made by our brains about the likely “near” outcome of a behavior.
These predictions are almost exclusively nonverbal, and brief. They normally “flash” by at subliminal speeds, faster than you can think or speed-read a single word. (Which makes sense, given that the same machinery is likely used to turn words into “meaning”!) You can learn to observe them, but only if you can quiet your verbal mind from “talking over them”. But once you see or hear them, you can hold them in consciousness for examination and modification.
It is these unconscious predictions that produce feeling responses, and thereby direct our actions. (They are probably also the basis of “priming”.)
When I or my students successfully change these unconscious representations, the corresponding behavioral motivation also changes. If a technique (whether it be one of mine or one of someone else’s) does NOT successfully change the representation, the motivation does not change, either. If one technique doesn’t work, we try another, until the desired result is achieved.
This is why I don’t care much about theory—if my hypothesis is that technique #1 will change representation X, and I’m mistaken, it only takes another few minutes to try technique #2 or #3. It’s catching the representations in the first place that’s much harder to do on your own, not the actual application of the techniques. I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing what techniques work better for what when I do them on other people, but oddly not as much on myself… which suggests that the certainty I appear to have may have more impact than the specific choice of technique.
Is that a placebo effect? Don’t know. Don’t care. As long as my student can also produce successes through self-application, and get whatever other results they’re after, what difference does it make?
I should note, however, that I personally never got any good results from any self-help techniques until I learned to 1) act “as if” a technique would work, regardless of my intellectual opinions about its probability of working, and 2) observe these sorts of unconscious thoughts. So even if it doesn’t matter how you change them, the ability to observe them appears to be a prerequisite.
(Also, these sorts of thoughts sometimes come out randomly in talk therapies, journalling, etc. Some particularly good therapists ask questions that tend to bring them out, and the NLP “Structure Of Magic” books were an attempt to explain how those therapists knew what questions to ask, given that the therapists each belonged to completely different schools of therapy. I use an extremely restricted subset of similar questions in my work, since I focus mainly on certain classes of chronic procrastination, and its patterns are very regular, at least in my experience.)