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All action as a motivation?

Little_Sticks

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Aug 19, 2009
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1,358
'kay, so, I have no homework and I'm bored and want to get this out of my head, so...

Can anyone come up with a good reason to not consider all thought and actions as a culmination and explanation of motivations? I can't see anything wrong with this idea since I can see everything else a human being talks about and communicates (Ni, Ne, Si, Se, Ti, Te, Fi, and Fe) as explained and interpreted through 'motivations'.

When we say we do something because it makes us happy or we choose not to do something because it makes us unhappy, we are really communicating motivation. When a child or person cries or tells someone that they are sad, the child or person believes that a good outcome will occur in doing so; this is their motivation. And it can get infinitely more complex than that, the more thought out the reasons are for doing an action. But, however, this also has to mean that all thought and action can't be considered 'illogical' because the events that lead to its outcome become the all-basic salient principle of cause-and-effect and nothing less. *This might explain why someone who is capable of producing well thought-out actions can be seen as threatening to those that either can't or just prefer not to produce well thought-out actions* - but this is just a preconceived thought and not intended as a focus of this thread, although I don't mind if it becomes the focus, if desired.

It also seems like all the abstractions human beings use to communicate with one another is used as a way to explain and understand the motivations of one another. Morality, logic, emotions, intuition, and our senses become a complex higher level abstraction built on the idea of our intrinsic motivations that are a result of our genetic makeup, environment, and the objective nature of time that allows everything to have a cause-and-effect relationship, independent of the subjective nature of time that we think of as like a vcr or dvd that rewinds and fast forwards and has a velocity and subjective interpretation; the rewinding or fast-forwarding is irrelevant since its existence is a matter of relative perspective (how the events are interpreted to occur, such as the interpreting of history that differs between individuals and is always up for debate), but the cause-and-effect relationship of it all that exists independent from the idea of speed or perspective is constant after it occurs...and arguable before it occurs, for those that believe everything is deterministic.

*I also think with this in mind it becomes clear that by existing in this time glue that to conceptually 'time-travel' a person needs to only recreate the exact state that they want to occur (including the entities that exist in the wanted state with only the knowledge they would have had in this wanted state), while having only the knowledge, mind, and body they had in the state right before 'time-travel'. This eliminates all time paradox, but then begs the question of what exists outside of time.* - this is also a preconceived speculation and is not intended to be a focus of the thread, although I don't mind if it becomes a focus, if desired.

But as a criticism, I could see someone saying I am contradicting myself by believing I am capable of understanding time when I am enclosed in it. I would refute this though by suggesting that we can grasp and view various aspects of time through independent observation of the cause-and-effect relationships of those things around us that always remain objectively remain true no matter how many times we test them, such as the behaviors of physics and particles, which allow us to create things like watches and clocks and be able to make very accurate predictions of various connections between ourselves and the world around us. Don't you think it is pretty amazing that we have this concept of time in the form of a clock that makes it so people are able to all congregate at a particular time? Before clocks we had to use other things such as measuring and systematizing the location of the sun or using an apparatus such as an hourglass, among other biological ways that were arguably not nearly as accurate as the invention of the clock. With time and knowledge our objective understandings become more accurate and broader.

*This also leads me to believe that human beings are non-determined entities. The belief mostly imbued in the idea that what I consider the lifeless physical world around us is actually a determined constant throughout the course of time when it doesn't have the abstraction of a life-form in it. It also relates entirely to this thread (http://www.typologycentral.com/foru...critic-psychological-types-not-functions.html) for definitions of what constitutes life and the idea that a life-form's imprint and appearance through time is a function of both the environment and genetics; also a life-form's current state will be dependent upon its past states, creating a logical problem where the 'now action' to be taken is a result of the life-form's interpretation of all its past states; because of this idea of environment and genetics I think it can be seen that a life-form is not a static creation like a cinder-block could be. The cinder-block can be put into various environments, but the acting nature of the cinder-block does not depend on its environment or its previous states (where time and environment can be used interchangeably since to talk about the effects of environment on a life-form we also have to talk about the states of time that preceded and shaped or molded the life-form) because it is observed to always react the same way due to external, but existing, abstract constraints such temperature, corrosion, magnetism, etc. In other words, when the external abstract constraints are constant, the cinder-block may change its physical properties depending on its environment, but it always acts as predicted, becoming an object (and determined). So if we think about all the possible environments we can have to start a life-form off in, I think you will find that the constraints on those possible environments inherently and objectively define the objects (determined things), but subjectively define the life-form (non-determined), since we can't talk about one environment to define a life-form. This is the primary difference between a life-form and an 'object'; and the constraints are what we would consider external or inherent happenings or forces, such as time, that are beyond our control, that could be considered our prison, but are constant in nature.* - but this is also a preconceived thought and not intended as a focus of this thread, although I don't mind if it becomes the focus, if desired.

*I also think that quantum physics suggests and affirms the basic idea of relativity though, in that there are hypothetically an infinite amount of details to be studied in an object since what we are studying depends upon the size of what we are viewing. And with the slit-experiment and other similar experiments evidencing the illogical nature of studying physics as we get smaller (not that that means there isn't a logical explantion, I'll explain) we see that essentially as soon as we come to understand a whole objective understanding of a side of physics, we encounter a new layer of illogical 'slit-experiment' happenings and questions. The whole purpose of the slit-experiment to me seems to be to suggest that the fact that we observe (the very nature of a life-form) will affect the results and will always keep us from completing a full understanding of physics, even if we were infinite machines. This could suggest that the physical world is non-determined or made up of layers of determined and non-determined happenings, instead of saying everything is determined. But If we say determined, I go to the argument I have above. If we say non-determined or made up of determined and non-determined happenings, then I can not be certain of anything that I ever say or do or the meanings behind them as well and everything becomes truly pointless and meaningless; so I say determined.* - but this is also a preconceived thought and not intended as a focus of this thread, although I don't mind if it becomes the focus, if desired.
 

Stevo

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Jun 16, 2010
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You seem to be advocating the principles of psychological behaviorism with your first paragraph, and yet also stating your belief that humans are non-determined entities in the fifth. This is rather mutually exclusive.
 

Little_Sticks

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Aug 19, 2009
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^ Perhaps you're right. I think what I was trying to show is that if we take yourself at the moment you were conceived and copy that self and put it in another dimension that has the same laws of physics, but the arrangement and/or number of the objects in that dimension differ, your actions and thoughts will only be relevant to that instance of your dimensional environment. So if you were to meet yourself in this other dimension you would essentially see this 'other you' as someone or something that is not yourself, other than the possibility that you might look the same, depending. But that's a minor detail, I think.

So what I'm getting at is that we are defined by time and our environments (and without time everything becomes one state and an object, and without an environment how can we even discuss ourselves, let alone exist?), whereas an atom of silicon in one dimension will still be the same atom of silicon in another dimension, because the laws of physics are the same. Now that I think about it, perhaps it is more appropriate to suggest the arrangement of the environment and time as an extension of life because the three depend on each other to exist. So with that in mind, the atoms and physical forces that make up everything, or hold everything together, can be seen as a constant and determined, whereas the movement and changes of the environment and life through time can be seen as the non-determined higher level abstraction of the determined aspects of reality that make up the arrangements of matter that are started with. And with that in mind, when I say non-determined, I mean that from our point of view of current time that because the future hasn't happened yet, we can't be sure of what will happen until it happens (because by living in the current moment we can only use the past to predict the future, which means random patterns will be predicted, but wrong and undecipherable to us unless looked at from the whole of time) and that to be sure requires the ability to exist outside time and understand all the cause and effect states and events as a continuous constant spectrum. The reasons for this random pattern phenomenon being presented by the following proposition: if it were possible to understand everything, by existing inside time, a person paradoxically changes the future, thus making it so they can never truly know everything, which correlates with the problem of 'observing' (shown in many famous quantum level experiments like the slit-experiment) when trying to understand physics in its entirety.

So from the theoretical viewpoint of an entity that existed outside time, we would be viewed as a constant and determined that the entity can not change (i.e. it can not affect or enter into our timeline). But from our point of view, we are non-determined. So if you think about this, this also affirms the idea of relativity, I suppose.

Does that make more sense?
 
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