What I mean by preference is a valuation of how I want the world to be. It's not about cognitive ritual, although cognitive ritual, as a part of the world, may also be mentioned there. Preference is not the sort of thing that does anything, it is a statement of what I think should be done. Through the activity of the mind, the way preference is may influence other things, and conversely, other things may influence preference, as in the case of wireheading, for example.

I don't understand what you mean by "cognitive ritual".

This is a statement in connotation opposite to one that triggered my comment in the first place, see here. How do you recognize which motivations you choose to identify with, and which you don't? I guess in this model, the criterion may be said to derive from that very preference stuff.

I couldn't make heads or tails of that comment, sorry. I'm not entirely sure I understand what you wrote here, either, except that it sounds like you think we "choose" to identify with things. My observation is that choice is not the default -- we have the ability to choose, but mostly, we don't use it, and when we think we are, we are mostly lying to ourselves.

This doesn't much connect to standard theories or intuition, for the same reason that relativity doesn't: it's correct over a wider range of conditions than our default intuitions. If you view minds through a mechanical lens, their behaviors don't require such complex explanations.

How is this a fact? From my perspective, we are groping in the dark at this point, so any statement should either be intuitive, as raw material to build upon, generated from being primed by a representative sample of data, to give any chance of showing true regularities, or study the few true regularities that can be supported.

I say that it's a fact our preferences are barely related to our motivations because it's trivial to show that they function independently -- you've pointed this out yourself. That most people fail to change their motivation by modifying their preferences is more than sufficient to demonstrate the lack of connection in practice between these two brain functions. (See also the near/far distinction.)

I don't understand the relation between preference, motivation, shouldness, influence, and facts that you are making in the above quoted sentence.

By "should" I mean, expecting that merely having a preference will automatically mean you have corresponding motivation, or that the lack of ability to enforce your preference over your motivation equals a personal failure -- it merely reflects the "design" parameters of the systems involved. There is no evolutionary reason for us to control over our motivations, since they exist to control us -- to shape us to the world we find ourselves in.

What's a 'schema', what kind of object is this motivation thing that can be created or deleted?

By schema here, I'm referring to "near" vs. "far" thinking. Action versus abstraction.

A motivation is simply an emotional response attached to an outcome or behavior, through conditioning or simple association.

Are there many of them if one can be created and deleted?

Yep.

What role do they play in the cognitive algorithm?

They drive the planning process, which we experience as "motivation". See, for example, the video I and others have linked here before, which demonstrates how to induce a (temporary) motivation state to clean your desk. There is a lot of deep theory behind that video, virtually none of which is present in the video.

If there is no relation between preferences and these motivation instances, what is the role played respectively by preference and emotion in the overall algorithm?

If you really care about deep understanding of the "cognitive algorithm", you would be well advised to read "NLP Volume I", which explains the model I use quite well. As its subtitle calls it, "the study of the structure of subjective experience" -- i.e., what algorithms feel like from the inside.

The motivation video I made demonstrates one simple algorithm ("strategy" in NLP lingo) that is conveyed in terms of sensory representation ("near" thinking) steps. This is because most of our actual cognitive processing consists of manipulating sensory data, both in and out of consciousness. Verbal processing gives us flexibility and suggestibility, but a huge part of our outward verbalization is devoted to making up plausible explanations and things that make us sound good. And it is driven by our motivations (including hard-wired and trained status motivations), rather than being a source of motivations.

The distinction can be easily seen in my video, as I demonstrate using verbal thinking merely to suggest and "lead" the near system to evoke certain sensory representations in visual and kinesthetic form, rather than by trying to "talk" one's self into doing something through logic or slogan.

Btw, a lot of the disconnect that you're experiencing from my writing is simply that if you care more about theory than practice, you need to read a hell of a lot more than what I write, to understand what I'm writing about.

I've been studying NLP in my spare time for around 20 years now, and there is absolutely no way I can teach that entire field of study in off-hand comments. Since most people are more interested in practice than theory, I focus my writing to have the least amount of theory that's needed to DO something, or at least come to an understanding of why what you're already doing doesn't work.

If you insist on implementation-quality theory, and you don't "get" representational systems and strategies as the primary model of all behavior (internal as well as external), you're not going to "get" what I write about, because I presuppose that that model is the closest thing we have to a functional theory of mind, from a practical-results perspective. There is nothing in mainstream cognitive psychology that remotely approaches the usefulness of NLP as a model of subjective experience and behavior, which likely means there's nothing approaching its accuracy as an operational model.

(Disclaimer: Popular depictions of NLP are ridiculously shallow, so anyone who hasn't read "NLP, Volume I" or "The Structure Of Magic I", stands a very strong chance of not even remotely knowing what NLP actually is. Even some supposedly-certified "practitioners" have no clue, treating the theory as something they just had to learn to get their certificate, alas. Having a bit more epistemic hygiene probably would be helpful to the discipline as a whole... but then, you can say that about most fields.)