Psychology's Secret: No One Knows What a Motivation Is

Science prides itself on its internal consistency and most of all, on its empirical testing. It works great for figuring out what’s more likely to be true in physics but when it comes to the big picture about life and mind, consciousness, and whether AI has real intelligence, rigorous theorizing and empiricism aren’t enough to settle debates.

There have been two scientific revolutions. The first was way back with ancient Greek philosophy: the birth of math and logic, in a word “formalization,” ways to impose rigor on the generation of hypotheses.

The second is popularly regarded as the scientific revolution. It imposed rigor on the testing of hypotheses.

We need a third scientific revolution that would impose rigor on how big-picture scientists and philosophers posit entities and forces. I have a suggestion for what that would require, but, first, I have to explain my controversial claim.

In the life and social sciences, we posit lots of technical terms, for example in the life and social sciences a force we call “motivation.” When we see an organism making an effort, we assume it has a motivation. That’s using motivation as an explanation. But have we explained what motivation actually is?

Not really. How is that different from claiming that when we see an organism making an effort, it must have a soul? “Motivation” sounds more technical, but otherwise “soul” and “motivation” are just names for unexplained forces that we use to explain things.

Big-picture scientists are like virtual engineers. We imagine combining real-world stuff and forces with unexplained entities and forces to build models of how we would design living beings. Well, we don't actually build them. We simply describe them in words, diagrams, or mathematical models. In that respect, it’s different from engineering. Engineers have to implement their abstract models in the real world, whereas big-picture scientists don’t.

For example, we might say that this real-world hormone triggers a motivation to eat. The hormone is a real chemical molecule, but it has no motivations. But it triggers this unexplained force called an appetite. Maybe there’s some information in those hormones. Information triggers motivations, which trigger the effort to find food. OK, but what’s information?

Again, it’s an unexplained explanation. It obviously exists, sort of like an entity or a force. But no one’s ever seen it. They’ve seen things that have it but they’re no different from things that don’t. Anything can become information but only when it triggers motivations. So maybe everything’s information. Or maybe nothing is. Never mind. We can use it to explain things even though it’s unexplained.

Science is a campaign to find natural explanations for all natural phenomena. Motivation is real. It’s natural, so science ought to be able to explain it.

There’s no evidence for motivation at the origins of the universe or even for the first 10 billion years in our region. But here it is, and there is lots of it.

A third scientific revolution would impose rigor on positing entities and forces. I suggest a new standard. It’s simple. I call it emergent reductionism. It’s different from reductionism.

Reductionism assumes that all there is in the universe is matter in motion, so all explanations must be reduced to the simplest possible level.

Why? Because that’s all there is. Nothing new under the sun. New entities and forces never emerge.

Scientists reject reductionism. Even the few scientists who defend reductionism are motivated to defend it and therefore aren’t walking their talk.

Emergent reductionism is different. Once we’ve explained how motivation emerged from the matter in motion that preceded it, we can reduce our explanations to it. Until then we have to remember that motivation is an unexplained force that we’re using in our explanations. The same goes for information, effort, interpretation, drives, even function or fittedness, and all the other unexplained entities and forces that scientists and philosophers posit.

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Darwin employed emergent reductionism. He assumed individuals struggling for their own existence and explained how they would evolve adaptations and speciation through natural selection. Some of his supporters celebrated his explanation for life.

Darwin disagreed. He didn’t explain organisms and their motivated struggle for existence. He knew that his theory was built on unexplained assumptions and that the burden was still on scientists to explain them.

Emergent reductionism: Work to explain how forces and entities emerged from what precedes them. Once you’ve explained their emergence, you can reduce your theory to them. For example, once you’ve explained how motivation emerged from matter in motion, you can reduce your theory to motivations without having to reduce your theory all the way down to matter in motion. Emergent reductionism is especially important for explaining the essential assumed entities in the life and social sciences. Motivation, information, effort—you can’t do biology without them, and they are currently unexplained.

Emergent reductionism would impose a standard for deciding which theories are better.

But maybe we don’t really want that. Maybe we’re having too much fun debating our abstract theories with no way to decide which is better and no way to be proven wrong.

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