Re: virus: 15 desires behind all human behavior

Dan Plante (danp@CS347838-A.gvcl1.bc.wave.home.com)
Sat, 20 Jun 1998 17:38:01 -0700


At 04:41 PM 6/20/98 -0600, David McFadzean wrote:
>
>At 09:27 PM 6/19/98 -0600, Aaron Hughes wrote:
>>David,
>>I concur with the list being human desires; however, only items such as food
>>and sex are essential to genetic perpetuation, should the list be grouped
>>accordingly? Some members of the list are memes such as honor and sex...If
>
>I think every one of the 15 can be related to genetic perpetuation
>within the context of human society (some obviously more than others).

I think what Aaron was trying to point out was that most of the items
on the list were either derivative, or derivative and redundant, and was
in response to the author's apparent assertion that the list was
composed of only the basic, fundamental core of drives/desires that
ultimately motivate human behaviour. If this is the case, then I agree
with Aaron; the author missed the mark on this one.

Sure, you can include on the list items that are derivative, but where
do you stop? You can zero in on more and more complex and specific desires
until you have hundreds of items, but then the rule you use to include
or exclude items from the list get more and more arbitrary. It seems to me
that the only reasonable approach for inclusion is to pare down the list
until you have only the most irreducible drives-desires that /directly/
serve the goal of "living long enough to reproduce successfully".

If the author's main goal in this approach was to shine some light on
the basic functional structure of the human mind with respect to evolutionary
psychology and sociobiology (and I have the feeling that was the case),
then that would have been a better approach, since those results would
more closely reflect the /motivator/ portion of the irreducible
motivator-facilitator-memory model of the human mind that I think he may
have had some inkling of, and which subsequently motivated him to pursue
that direction of thought in the first place.

Dan