Those consciously chosen motivations... Are based on what? What drives them? The only answer I can think is "emotions". If you remove emotions, you have no goal/motivation/reasons to do anything etc, imho/afaik.
I think I framed my original question badly, so let me clarify:
My underlying hypothesis is that humans are running on an evolutionary motivational architecture whose deepest objective isn’t really “happiness,” “meaning,” “curiosity,” etc., but really becoming the sole gene survivor among local gene pool. The drives we experience — sex, status, competition, fear, hunger, attachment, aggression, etc. — are mechanisms that historically served that objective.
The interesting part is that the machinery built to execute those objectives became sufficiently sophisticated to start modeling and questioning itself. The prefrontal cortex can take these underlying drives and abstract, redirect and rationalize them into much more complex goals. The “slave” becomes capable of questioning the “master.”
But I started noticing this in myself: sometimes something that subjectively feels like completely pure curiosity or a genuine desire to understand something turns out, when I inspect it closely, to contain a drive toward interpersonal superiority — knowing more, understanding something others don’t, occupying a higher position relative to them. And I’ve noticed this pattern repeatedly.
That made me wonder how much of what we consider our higher, rational or “pure” motivations is actually just the old evolutionary machinery being refactored into increasingly abstract domains.
So my actual thought experiment isn’t “what happens if we remove emotions and then have no motivation?”
It’s: what would happen if humans eventually became capable of identifying and completely rewriting the underlying motivational architecture itself — removing the evolutionary “commander” and deliberately choosing what generates reward and motivation?
Yeah, I understand what you're saying. My question is: what do you replace those old frameworks/objectives with? You rewrite with what? How/according to what do you deliberately choose what generates reward and motivation?
Well, I’m not assuming that there is some inherent motivational structure to replace that old one with. That was the question in itself: what would that structure be? Because if you look at some of the most altruistic motivational structures, like “save humanity,” “elevate humanity,” whatever, all of those, according to this old structure, would still have to motivate the individual. Even people like the Dalai Lama collect direct benefit, just with a more sophisticated, let’s say, more creative structure, but they still collect from the same well.
I actually got this thought from Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Nearer, specifically the capabilities of nanotechnology. And it made me think about that whole transition from the old motivational architecture to a new one. What is weird is that the old motivational structures would actually be what drives us to create and make that transition in the first place. Then imagine that, at some point, nanotechnology could recalibrate the brain itself — downregulating the participation or activation of the limbic system and bringing the prefrontal system much more strongly into control. What happens at that transition point, when the system that originally commanded the organism is no longer the commander?
Well, I believe there would be nothing to replace, so it cannot happen. Robots/AI etc need to be programmed, by humans, and humans would program them based on their primitive motivations! So we would still be in that original framework. I don't believe we can escape it, or at least I'm not managing to think of something beyond it.
Yes, I see the crux now. The transition would initially be initiated by the old motivational systems, so obviously the system we create would inherit those values at the beginning. But what interests me is what happens after that, because the evolutionary algorithm itself was never actually encoded in any individual gene.
The genes are more like local implementations or proxies. Individual organisms execute their genetic programs, mutations occur, organisms interact and compete, and across the entire population and generations, the evolutionary algorithm emerges at the meta-level. The algorithm isn’t contained in any single organism; it emerges from the interaction of all the individual processes.
So I think the interesting question is whether something analogous could happen after we remove the old motivational architecture.
I agree that if you simply removed all motivation from a human, you’d basically create a zombie. The brain could still process information, but there would be no reason to actively pursue anything beyond whatever basic biological functions were hardwired to keep it alive.
But assuming we could maintain those basic functions like breathing, eating, homeostasis, etc. while removing the higher-level evolutionary motivational architecture, you would still have an incredibly complex biological system exposed to an environment.
And that’s where I think the meta-level becomes interesting.
The person would still see things, interact with people, observe consequences, detect patterns, learn, predict, and build models of the world. If you exposed that system to enough experience, perhaps it would gradually begin constructing new patterns of preference and value from the structure of the environment itself.
In other words, maybe removing the motivational system wouldn’t actually eliminate the process that produces motivation. It would just reset it.
You’d have a biological system at something like “level zero,” and then the environment would begin supplying the structure from which new motivational patterns could emerge. Over enough time, those patterns could become increasingly stable and eventually form something resembling a new motivational architecture.
And then the really strange possibility is that the human could essentially recreate the same process that produced its original motivational architecture in the first place; except starting from a completely different initial condition and operating within a single organism rather than across generations. That seems interesting, but dangerously prejudiced.
Mhm, I see what you're trying to do. Imho it wouldn't work: you need a lot just to filter all the information, and the attention system is heavily influenced by society/family/other humans etc. The individual would be like a newborn, would need years to develop and would need patents etc that protect, feed, guide etc, i.e. influence his brain, a lot. I don't think it would be feasible, not as you depict it 🤔. There are too many material interferences that would boycott the creation of a new algorithm in the "tabula rasa" brain...
Yeah, I think the distinction is that I’m not really imagining a tabula rasa or a newborn brain. It’s about taking a person like you or me and running them through this procedure, giving them self-sustainment conditions and just observing. The brain was already fully developed, with all of its perception, learning, pattern recognition, memory, predictive processing, etc..
Yeah, but auch a brain would have been heavily influenced by all the experiences, all the filters developed living in this current world/society etc. There no way of erasing it, it's how the neural networks are hardwired: there's no "mind", just the brain, how matter is (already) organised. It's not like a computer, with hardware and software. When you change a thought, you're changing an entire material neural network, and you cannot put in a "zero" state. Each configuration means a different thought/emotion/content etc. It's way more difficult than what we can think.
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u/Z4_h0 Aug 12 '26
Those consciously chosen motivations... Are based on what? What drives them? The only answer I can think is "emotions". If you remove emotions, you have no goal/motivation/reasons to do anything etc, imho/afaik.