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This is: A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation , published by on the LessWrong.
[PDF of this article updated Aug. 23, 2011]
[skip to preface]
Whenever I write a new article for Less Wrong, I'm pulled in two opposite directions.
One force pulls me toward writing short, exciting posts with lots of brain candy and just one main point. Eliezer has done that kind of thing very well many times: see Making Beliefs Pay Rent, Hindsight Devalues Science, Probability is in the Mind, Taboo Your Words, Mind Projection Fallacy, Guessing the Teacher's Password, Hold Off on Proposing Solutions, Applause Lights, Dissolving the Question, and many more.
Another force pulls me toward writing long, factually dense posts that fill in as many of the pieces of a particular argument in one fell swoop as possible. This is largely because I want to write about the cutting edge of human knowledge but I keep realizing that the inferential gap is larger than I had anticipated, and I want to fill in that inferential gap quickly so I can get to the cutting edge.
For example, I had to draw on dozens of Eliezer's posts just to say I was heading toward my metaethics sequence. I've also published 21 new posts (many of them quite long and heavily researched) written specifically because I need to refer to them in my metaethics sequence.1 I tried to make these posts interesting and useful on their own, but my primary motivation for writing them was that I need them for my metaethics sequence.
And now I've written only four posts2 in my metaethics sequence and already the inferential gap to my next post in that sequence is huge again. :(
So I'd like to try an experiment. I won't do it often, but I want to try it at least once. Instead of writing 20 more short posts between now and the next post in my metaethics sequence, I'll attempt to fill in a big chunk of the inferential gap to my next metaethics post in one fell swoop by writing a long tutorial post (a la Eliezer's tutorials on Bayes' Theorem and technical explanation).3
So if you're not up for a 20-page tutorial on human motivation, this post isn't for you, but I hope you're glad I bothered to write it for the sake of others. If you are in the mood for a 20-page tutorial on human motivation, please proceed.
Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain. Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana.
- Don DeLillo, White Noise
Preface
How do we value things, and choose between options? Philosophers, economists, and psychologists have long tried to answer these questions. But human behavior continues to defy our most subtle models of it, and the algorithms producing our behavior remained hidden in a black box.
But now, neuroscientists are directly measuring the neurons whose firing rates encode value and produce our choices. We know a lot more about the neuroscience of human motivation than you might think. Now we can peer directly into the black box of human motivation, and begin (dimly) to read our own source code.
The neuroscience of human motivation has implications for philosophy of mind and action, for scientific self-help, and for metaethics and Friendly AI. (We don't really know what we want, and looking directly at the algorithms that produce human wanting might help in solving this mystery.)
So, I wrote a crash course in the neuroscience of human motivation.
The purpose of this document is not to argue for any of the ...
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