what makes you want something? is it the thing itself or the effect the thing has? we need food,air,water to maintain our body, beyond that what causes us to desire? when an idea comes into mind, what pushes us past the threshold of thinking into action?what causes us to act? i think it could be a desire for a particular effect. now if thats true what causes us to desire one effect over another? could it be our prior conceptions of good and bad?
This is how I see it: Its all an evolutionary mechanism. When we are just born, I would say we dont have “desires.” When you cry as a baby you dont actually conciously want milk. Your body goes through some process’ that are designed to indicate to your mother that something must be done. By some other evolutionary mechanisms, your mother knows to breast feed you. I dont know exactly when a baby becomes concious and self aware, if its not already, but at some point, when that milk touches your tongue, certain process’ initiate in your body that result in the release of certain chemicals that cause a sensation we know of as pleasure. Whatever chemicals that are associated with pleasure are such that our concious minds are driven to persue the release of those chemicals. Being so young, one would not be able to fully comprehend exactly what causes the sensation of pleasure, but we are aware that this sensation is something that must be achieved again. Its difficult to describe pleasure, all I can say is that the essential property of pleasure is that it is something to be persued. This is the birth of desire. Once you have felt pleasure once, you are driven (by some complex mechanisms) to achieve that state again. It can at this point be said that you desire pleasure.
As time goes on, you start to more fully comprehend how pleasure is achieved. For instance, you will notice that often times when you cry, this thing you will later know as your mother will reveal what you will later know as a breast and pleasure will soon follow. You will associate your bare breasted mother with that pleasure. That association will transfer the desire for that sensation of pleasure to the circumstances that you percieve accompany that sensation. Thus, you now have a desire for your mother’s breast. Not only that, you also associate this act of crying with the pleasure, and in no time, you might conciously choose to cry to achieve the pleasure.
That was a theoretical description of how I think the mechanism of pleasure works, and the mechanism of pain works similarly only in the opposite direction. Pain can only be described as something that you are driven to avoid. When you reach into fire for the first time, you feel pain, and it is a function of pain to cause your concious mind to work to avoid that pain. You build associations with the circumstances that caused the pain (touching fire) and you strive to avoid those circumstances.
Now to answer your question… Ive described how it is we might desire milk, and how it is we might desire avoiding fire, but what about all those other seemingly superfluous desires. Let me first remind you of what I mentioned in the breast feeding example. Your desire of the pleasure involved in tasting milk literally transfered over to the circumstances you happend to associate with that sensation. When I say you now desire your mothers breast, that literally means that when you see your mothers breast, you feel pleasure. No longer is the taste of that milk (which is inherintly/geneticly designed to cause pleasure) the only bringer of pleasure. Simply the sight of your mother’s bare breast will release those pleasure chemicals. Now depending on the strength of the association, you might percieve the pleasure diffirently. If youve only happend to notice that 2 times in a row now, the sight of your mother’s breast was followed by pleasure, upon seeing your mothers breast the third time, you may only feel anticipation of the expectant pleaure, which is pleasurable in itself. Now, after 100000 times of experiencing the pleasure after seeing your mother’s breast, the sensation you get upon seeing it the next time will be much more powerful. If the association is strong enough, the simple sight of your mother’s breast will initiate a significant pleasurable response. So much so that you may even lose sight of the association. You will no longer persue your mother’s breast only because it is the milk you want from it. No, you will desire simply to see the breast.
This same effect occurs with the pain process. A great example is the movie “A Clockwork Orange.” Have you seen it? Well in the movie, authorities made the main character repeatedly watch images of violence while at the same time causing him extreme pain. From that point on, whenever the main character would see similar images in real life, he would actually feel pain through the association that was forced upon him. This caused him to avoid violent situations, even though there was nothing inherintly painful in the images of those situations, just like there is nothing inherintly pleasurable in images of your mother’s breast, yet through the power of association, those circumstances have become subconcious ques for the release of pain or pleasure.
This is how I think we come to desire the things we do. Its all a chain of association starting from the few inherent causes of pain and pleasure such as food, sex, physical harm, and others. An example of this chain of association is as follows:
Why does Billy desire to avoid stealing? His dad would hit him when he was young and call billy “bad.” Billy happend to associate that word “bad” with the pain of the physical harm his father was causing him. Later, society barraged Billy with statements allong the lines of: Stealing is bad. The chain of association continued from “bad” to the concept of stealing. Billy wants to avoid being “bad” because he associates being bad with pain. Since Billy associates “bad” with stealing, billy wants to avoid stealing.
This is my theory on desire and I believe pain and pleasure and their role in desire are the cause of all human action.
ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=146432
Though this thread turns a bit nasty towards the end it is a reasonable discussion of where I tend to stand on such topics. A nice little thread, less than a page long…
so would you say that desire is the source of all motive?