I’ll agree but I think that my consciousness and those choices outweigh my biological needs 
which may not make perfect sense because I understand that my consciousness is a result of my body… but I can discuss further if you wish.
your body still exists. the materials that create conciousness still exist. they just dont work like they used to.
a rock isn’t alive yet a rock exists,.
It’s a fair assertion but it seems like you’re interested in making the term useful. I agree entirely that we should probably use the erms the way you’ve described, but here in this thread we are entertaining ourselves by trying to define the essence of “need”. I’ve been asserting that examining contextual circumstance allows needes to be described, and outside of cirumstance no need is constant.
fire needs oxygen… to continue burning…
need can be universally defined as a critical condition required for a certain event… without a defined event need becomes synonamous with desire.
Yes, but that isn’t me, thats something else aside from me. I am not eternal.
well i was talking about the material you, not the potentially illusory you. not your consciousness or self awareness.
The material me changing form so drastically no longer means the material me exists either. I am a biological organism that only exists as long as the biological organism exists. Once dead I am no longer a biological organism, I am something else. What happens to the materials are not what happens to me, thus I don’t exist, other things come into existence. starting with a cadaver and later, wormwood… or what have you.
That is not how the world works. It is tied together by necessities. You strife for some objective understanding of it, but fail to recognize the most basic laws and mechanisms.
Exactly.
Sure, we must have conext to understand the concept, but ‘life’ is speficic enough for that.
On the one hand you want to speficy the context, on the other hand you try to escape even the widest possible context into a kind of absolutivist subjectivism.
I’m not interesrted in universal needs, but in human needs.
I haven’t claimed that human needs are universal, or even that they apply to all humans. But I still recognize human needs like food and sleep. You can play the sophist all you want, but it won’t change my orientation on reality.
You come across as quite the opposite.
Yes, thank you for clarifying.
That was not my intention. I am interested in need versus desire - that is that what is physically required to exist versus that which is aimed at by some other motivation than physical necessity. Sometimes the latter surpasses the former in necessity - that is when the human condition becomes different from the animal condition. When desire is placed above need, I think we have a metaphysical motivation.
But sometimes motivations get tangled up, they struggle for priority.
When does desire and want surpass need in importance? And why?
Wonderer, my goal isn’t about semantics, rather I think that the concepts need better defining. And I believe the most efficient definitions are those based on scientific analysis.
Anyways, continuing… Lets discuss motivation, this will require a collaborative effort, because some of this analysis must be based on introspection. Scientific analysis is all good and well but chemicals and particles cannot express the human perspective. “Feelings” can be said to be associated and even caused by neurobiological mechanisms, but the “feeling” itself is a separate phenomenon. And we must try to understand the “feeling” before we can attribute it to a physical phenomenon.
It seems to me that this force I have called motivation is the ultimate influence on conscious, rational decision making. But based on my experience, motivation comes in “packets.” It is not as if at any given time a person has only one motivation. Rather, at any given time, there could be any number of different motivations exerting themselves on the human psyche. And when I said that a motivation does not force action before, I believe this is only due to the exertion of other, opposing motivations. I think, given any motivation, in the absence of any overriding, opposing motivation, the person will inevitably act on that motivation.
Now, as I said, desires, needs, wants, and others such as fears and aversions, are specific kinds of motivation. Some of them are similar motivations that we distinguish by intensity, while others are completely distinct. These terms actually refer to packets of “motivational feelings” composed of what may be our “atomic” feelings. From a neurobiological perspective, these are the feelings directly caused by the release of dopamine, stress hormones, and other specific mechanisms. These are the chemicals associated with pleasure, pain, stress, anticipation and maybe others. As you can all tell, its not an exact science attributing the physical phenomenon to the phenomenon that exists in the human perspective. So this is all a little speculative.
It is also important to note that our conscious minds, our reasoning process is able to influence our human motivational mechanisms. If I read a logical argument and decide that the conclusion is true, and the conclusion says that giving to charity is awesome… then I may suddenly develop a strong motivation to donate to a charity. This happens to me all the time, and I am sure it happens to all of you. What this means is that, through a process of reasoning and the functions of the rational mind, the triggers which activate some of our “motivational feelings” and which release chemicals such as dopamine or stress hormones are subject to change. We have some measure of conscious control over them. There exist techniques to improve motivation. Athletes constantly use techniques to get “fired up” which improves their motivation to perform.
There are also subconscious influences on our motivational mechanisms. It appears that our motivational mechanisms are subject to influence from outside sources, not just our rational minds. A perfect example is hypnosis. More common is simple association. This may not be totally subconscious, but often times one is not aware of some of the associations their mind makes. For example, if I hear a particular song, I may suddenly develop a motivation to watch a movie, without being totally conscious of the fact that the song is from the movie.
Lastly, there are many hard wired motivational mechanisms which react to external and internal stimuli which are either impossible to influence or are just more stubborn. These include the sex drive, hunger, thirst, fear of danger, aversion to pain. These are also often the most intense urges. And these are, I think, what Jakob means by needs.
Jakob, I would like to point something out to you. These terms, “sex drive”, “hunger”, “fear of danger” can all be understood as “needs” in BOTH senses. They can be understood as a describing a physical relationship, AND as a feeling. Heres what I mean. A person needs to eat in order to survive (this is describing the physical condition). Also, the need to eat is very strong! (this is describing the intensity of the feeling) Now, there is obviously a direct correlation between the intensity of the feeling and the feeling’s evolutionary utility. The fact that a human needs to eat to survive definitely influences the intensity of the feeling. But you have to understand that the neurobiological mechanism that creates the feeling of hunger is still just a motivational mechanism, albeit a very intense, powerful one.
My point is that the feeling of need is still subject to to the same principles of motivational mechanisms. If there is no other, more powerful, overriding motivation, then the need will trump. BUT, if there is a more powerful, overriding motivation, then the human will choose against the need. And as I said, our rational minds and subconscious minds and external circumstances are able to influence the triggers and the intensity of our motivational mechanisms. So, it is completely conceivable, (and in fact happens every day through, for example, social conditioning) that a motivational mechanism not associated with evolutionary utility becomes more powerful then a need. And this is your honor. This is your sexual morality. This is your martyrdom. This is your idealism.
That is not how the world works. It is tied together by necessities. You strife for some objective understanding of it, but fail to recognize the most basic laws and mechanisms.
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oh not at all. pragmatically i assume many things are true, logical, or necessarily “whatever”.
The universe runs on a certain set of laws, and it needs to adhere to those laws. things need to exist as they are. determinism.
The thing is we can never fully understand the laws of the universe. there is always the possibility that we incorrectly percieve a law or that there are laws which are impossible to discover.
The sun doesn’t need to rise tomorrow. Something could happen to prevent that.
I’m a gambling man, and i only gamble when i can at least understand the variables.
Saying you need something is a prediction about the future. If i don’t get X, i wont get Y. This is the same as gambling. Even if the odds of being wrong are atronomically low, like some controlled experiment goign wrong because the light from an exploding quazaar 50 million light years away hit the atmosphere in a certain way, it’s still a gamble an unknown.
I don’t believe humans will ever be able to use determinism to the extent that we can predict anything with 100% accuracy or certainty.
Talking about needs generally makes people talk about what they need in their life, what their goals require. But my beef against need used in this way isn’t that they are potentially wrong, it’s that they’re improperly using the idea of necessity amidst the wordplay (not semantics)
when someone says “i need some milk” they are defining a need without defining the goal. When you do this you use a contextual definition of need which does not reflect the definition of needs as it pertains to deterministic necessity.
contextual need refers to your plan, not the universes determined plan, so i can say “well no, those things don’t need to happen”.
All this can be easily avoided if you qualify a need when you use the term.
especially in philosophy when you say things like " our needs are important to us "
so there is left this unclear definition of need 
Sure, we must have conext to understand the concept, but ‘life’ is speficic enough for that.
On the one hand you want to speficy the context, on the other hand you try to escape even the widest possible context into a kind of absolutivist subjectivism.
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Just gathering my thoughts here, If you’re speaking contextually, you had better get used to defining the context. And that’s great. But in the absence of context, without defining the objective, there is none. I’m a firm disbeliver in objectivity. I suppose you could see it similar to something like responding to “can i go to the washroom?” with “i don’t know, can you?”. But in this case, when you drag importance into the fray, and say that needs are important, you cannot blame me for calling needs subjective.
What’s important to one man might not be to another. we really havn’t gone beyond that . I thought that showing why need in this case is actually just desire would help us get past that.
i’m not trying to. In hopes of discovering something important i was only trying to shine a light on the difference between need/desire and necessity (improperly expounded). I also have no interest in universal needs. I think it’s time we put the term need behind us, don’t you? does desire or goal not work as a suitable replacement?
Not a realist? Despite our misunderstanding i can assure you i’m only concerned with what affects me, what is important.
i agree that need is something for a scientist to determine. If you’ll check back, i think i labored to define need from the get go.
contextually, need is a critical requirement for the success of some defined objective
universally, need or necessity is a prediction which is made with 100% certainty (relatively). the universe needs to follow it’s laws, and that’s where we get our predictive power from, the consistency of the universe, even if it is for the most part unknowable.
And finally, “human need”, usually refers to the things we need to survive, or the things we need to be happy. i.e desire
Jakob
“But sometimes motivations get tangled up, they struggle for priority.
When does desire and want surpass need in importance? And why?”
Yes, I tried to address that at the end of my last post. Just to reiterate. If a need is just one of those motivations with evolutionary utility (meaning it helps the species survive) then a need is just a powerful motivation which can be overrided if there happens to be a simple “desire” which is intense enough. And a desire can get intense enough to trump a need through many different ways (I used the example social conditioning)
Some other examples:
If someone is raised to be strictly religious and truly believes in the tenets of, say, christianity, then they may develop significantly powerful motivations to live a life of celibacy, which is in opposition to their need to have sex. And it it obvious that many people struggle with these conflicting motivations. Yet some people are capable of motivating themselves enough to remain celibate.
Some people starve themselves because they have come to believe that they can reach some kind of transcendent state through starvation. These people struggle with the motivation of hunger, and some are capable of conquering it, nearly starving to death.
Some people will suffer pain, starvation, deprivation of sex for some of the simplest things, such as aesthetic pleasures. People jump out of airplanes in spite of overwhelming, evolutionarily induced fear, just to say they did, or to achieve the adrenaline rush associated with the stressful situation.
The how is complicated. There can be a billion different reasons that a simple desire overpowers an evolutionarily induced feeling of need. It may help to realize that evolution is not perfect. Evolution does not operate by looking at a problem (such as how to get organisms to seek sustenance or reproduce) and figuring out clever, intelligent ways to solve it. Rather, evolution is trial and error. Often times evolutionary changes are “buggy” and prone to backfire. A simple example is the mechanism of hunger. Humans were not installed with effective motivational mechanisms to prevent overeating. This is because when these mechanisms were evolving, food was scarce. Gorging on food non stop, when it was available, was actually “encouraged” by the environment, and so we evolved the mechanisms which make eating so pleasant. Yet as circumstances have changed, that pleasantness of eating has not dissipated, and so people eat more than is healthy for them.
So keeping in mind that evolution is not perfect, it isn’t hard to imagine that our neurobiological mechanisms might allow for simple, evolutionarily useless desires to develop and trump powerful evolutionary needs.
When it happens, it serves no purpose. Evolution serves no purpose. Its just a curious consequence of natural forces.
RussianTank, If you had the capability, would you seek to satisfy all your desires and follow up on all your motivations, or would you control your motivations directly, eliminating many and creating an easily accomplishable desire, in order to perpetuate happiness?
I ask this because after reading your article i’m left with the feeling that you think our whims are all we have…
Should we take what we have and indulge? is that our best option? The most important?
lol I said Overrided… I even saw the squiggly red line underneath but I decided spellcheck is just stupid… Overridden… Silly me.
Wonderer, thats a tough question.
It depends on how… intense the satisfaction of that single desire would be, and whether or not that intensity persists. If I could engineer a desire that was sufficiently intense and that I never got bored of, then I may just do that. But I dont think that is possible. I actually think boredom and the natural thrill of “new pleasures” are evolutionary mechanisms. They keep us moving and trying new things, which generates creativity and ingenuity. So I dont think I could be satisfied doing one thing for the rest of my life.
But what I would like to do is eliminate some motivations. I would eliminate alot of fears and stress/pain causing motivational mechanisms. At this point, I would think that my intellect is developed enough and society is developed enough to protect me sufficiently without the need of powerful neurobiological mechanisms that may hinder the pursuit of pleasure causing motivations.
When you ask if indulging is our best option, I would say… theres no such thing as a “best” option. I dont believe in objective value. Nothing is supposed to happen or is good or bad if it happens. Value is a function of the human mind. If according to your motivations, your values, your psyche, there are more important things then indulging in sex, food and drugs, then so be it. But if another person values those things the most, then… so be it. Neither are right nor wrong, good or bad. They can only be said to have any type of value in the context of somebody’s subjective preferences.
Thanks for the reply, i understand.
“best” option really isn;t the best way to word the question, and i agree with you insofar as i don’t believe in objective rule.
Still though, doesn’t hurt to look 
This is a little hard to reply, but i will try my best.
I think what matters most is what each individual values for themselves. Now, what they value is what they decided to choose from a series of things to do that is on their mind. Then what they decide to choose is what they value at that moment.
For example, what one may have valued yesterday will not be the same as of what they have valued today.
Why i think this is important to us is because we do not do the same things twice. You can only do them once. You may have done similar things in the present, but not exactly like in the past. You can also plan for the future, but as we all know, the way you planned it will not be the exact same way it will happen.
I would say, this would be that everyone experiences something new everyday or something similar to the past, but not the exact same thing as in the past.
Now you’re getting somewhere.
I suggested earlier that desire, which I still see as fundamentally different from survival-need, yet even so as an agent of evolution, is the key to metaphysics. You mention aesthetic pleasures, and such things as celibacy.
You and wonderer differ from my thinking in that I do not believe that ascribing motivations to chemical processes is in any way an explanation. For starters, our observation of these chemical processes is also a chemical process. I prefer to think about motivations in terms of the way they present themselves to us - in consciousness.
So I distinguish such aesthetics motivations from those that are strictly needs - I do not have to be consciously involved for the latter to exist, such as hunger. If I am in a coma, I will still need to be fed.
Celibacy, on the other hand, is, when it is not rooted in a lack of power to acquire a mate, is the result of a thought, an idea. So is honor.
I might have made it a bit complicated or confusing by attributing the latter type of motivations to the word ‘desire’ - true. Perhaps I need to find a different word. But do you see what I’m getting at? This is a question for wonderer as well.
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Again, I try to avoid thinking in terms of unnamed generalities. I’d prefer five specific examples over billions of unspecified.
Regarding evolution, I would like to suggest hat it is exactly those ‘desire’ motivations, instead of the ones I call ‘needs’, that are often an agent in furthering the transformation of a species. For starters, sex. It is not a need (I know plenty of celibates from freethinking and atheist families), it is a specific desire that is strong enough for people to put their needs aside for it.
I still consider the prolongation of life to be the most general need we can identify. There are many exceptions to this rule, but these aren’t, as far as we know, innate. Something has to change or go wrong in the psychology or biology of an organism for the need to live is canceled out. I see this consideration might have no value if we desire for the argument to be perfect. But that is not my intention - I want it to be practical. Suicide seems common, but there is an overwhelmingly great majority of non-suicidal organisms. I want to recognize it’s place in the margin, not let exceptions undermine the rule.
‘Why are things important to us?’ is not answered, not in a way that clarifies, by attributing motivations to neuro-chemical processes. Neurobiology is only one layer of the total description - and not a layer any of us seems to be exhaustively familiar with. Neither is that layer understood to an exhaustive extent by biologists - the phenomenon thought, which is quite elemental to this distinction between need and desire, or, for example, survival- and aesthetic motivations, has not been identified. So in terms of acquiring the greatest clarity, it is advisable to stick to what we do know - our own experience of the motivations.
In order to respond to that, I would have to understand what you mean by ‘purpose’.
As far as we’ve examined it now, evolution (of a species - it is not a thing in itself) at least serves the purpose of fulfilling needs and desires (of members of that species) on more and more effective ways.
Note that I’m not referring to a metaphysical purpose, I do not propagate a ‘plan’ - I identify, with as much precision as is possible for me at this point, the immediate consequences of the existence of lifeforms, i.e. a set of experiences. These consequences are in turn motivations.
In other words, Need as always the result of fulfilling another need. If I do not act on my motivation to eat, I will not be motivated to do it again. Evolution of the species has as it’s purpose to prolong the existence of that species. That is the only value of the idea of evolution - that it does have a purpose. But that purpose is not metaphysical.
Why then, do metaphysical purposes exist? You suggest it is because of an excess of pleasure, such as the adrenaline rush. Adrenaline serves to protect us, to keep us alive, when we are threatened by external circumstances. I agree many desires are based on the out-of-context use of of biological functions. But not, as far as I can see now, honor, nor celibacy, or, for example, poetry. Why are these things important to us?
Why are things important to us? tell that to a Buddhist or meditator who has learned to let go of all things, for they ‘Neither aspire nor desire’ …
Um - why is it important to him to let go of all things?