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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Do Humans Want Things? - Less Wrong
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Given that one could use propositions about objective intensities of stimuli (as you do now, to point out that what's encoded in this particular simple way is not it), the thesis is still unclear.
Sure, but that depends on a different mechanism we don't know much about, then. What I'm saying is that "Whaddyaknow, we discovered a mechanism that actually encodes value for stimuli with neuron firing rates! Ah, but it can't encode value for the objective intensities of stimuli, because the brain doesn't have that information. So that constrains our theories about the motivation of human behavior."
The brain has (some measure of reference/access to) that information, just not in that particular form. And if it has (reference to) that information, it's not possible to conclude that motivation doesn't refer to it. It just doesn't refer to it through exclusively the form of representation that doesn't have the information, but then it would be very surprising if motivation compartmentalized so.
Right. I guess I'm struggling for a concise way to say what I'm trying to say, and hoping you'll interpret me correctly based on the long paragraphs I've written explaining what I mean by these shorter sentences. Maybe something like:
"Whaddyaknow, we discovered a mechanism that actually encodes value for stimuli with neuron firing rates! Ah, but this particular mechanism can't encode value for the objective intensities of stimuli, because this mechanism discards that information at the transducer. So that constrains our theories about the motivation of human behavior."
Also, this doesn't sound right. Why is that behavioral pattern "value"? Maybe it should be edited out of the system, like pain, or reversed, or modified in some complicated way.
Doesn't really help. The problem is that (normative) motivation is the whole thing, particular (unusual) decisions can be formed by any component, so it's unclear how to rule out stuff on the basis of properties of particular better-understood components.
Behavior is easier to analyze, you can see which factors contribute how much, and in this sense you can say that particular classes of behavior are determined mostly by this here mechanism that doesn't have certain data, and so behavior is independent from that data. But such conclusions won't generalize to normative motivation, because prevailing patterns of behavior might be suboptimal, and it's possible to improve them (by exercising the less-prevalent modes of behavior that are less understood), making them depend on things that they presently don't depend on.
What do you mean by 'normative motivation'?
Considerations that should motivate you. What do you mean by "motivation"?
Uh oh. How did 'should' sneak its way into our discussion? I'm just talking about positive accounts of human motivation.
Until data give us a clearer picture of what we're talking about, 'motivation' is whatever drives (apparently) goal-seeking behavior.
I guess the objection I have is to calling the behavioral summary "motivation", a term that has normative connotations (similarly, "value", "desire", "wants", etc.). Asking "Do we really want X?" (as in, does a positive account of some notion of "wanting" say that we "want" X, to the best of our scientific knowledge) sounds too similar to asking "Should we pursue X?" or even "Can we pursue X?", but is a largely unrelated question with similarly unrelated answers.
I'm using these terms the way they are standardly used in the literature. If you object to the common usage, perhaps you could just read my articles with the assumption that I'm using these words the way neuroscientists and psychologists do, and then state your concerns about the standard language in the comments? I can't rewrite my articles for each reader who has their own peculiar language preferences...
(Strictly speaking, it's not necessary to know something in order to be motivated by it. If a fact is considered relevant, but isn't known, that creates instrumental motivation for finding out what it is! And even if you can't learn something, you might want to establish a certain dependence of the outcome on that fact, no matter what the fact is.)