(snip)
>The author of the research project defined it as measuring 'desires behind
>all human behavior'. That mixes up the very bottom of Maslow's pyramid --
>guaranteeing survival -- with the very top the pyramid, i.e. the discussion
>of values above.
>
>Does this make any sense?
>
>lena
It does to me. I'm not familiar with Maslow, but I would also agree with
the synopsis you provided, with one caveat; the pyramid is an inverted one.
But as I alluded to before, the creation of the list in the first place
begs the question: what was the author getting at? What did he hope to
reveal, or illuminate by this list? When you reduce (or, in this case,
/attempt/ to reduce) a system to its bare essentials, you're trying
to separate the wheat from the chaff to get the clearest picture you
can, in the hopes that you will either see a pattern, or that you will
be able to correlate what you see with something else you've seen.
The real problem here is, even if he /had/ reduced it to its essentials,
it wouldn't have helped him plumb the nature of the emergent mind,
because it only clears up one aspect of it: the motivator. It does
nothing to point to the fact that the mind is an emergent system
risen out of the synergistic co-operation of motivator (emotion),
facilitator (intelligence) and memesphere (memory). So, assuming that
was his motivation for making the list (or even thinking along those lines)
in the first place, he missed the mark twice.
Dan