The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior | Hacker News Reader

The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior

themarginalian.org

210 pointsmizzao68 comments

Russell was an interesting character and I hadn't heard of this particular work by him.

It's important to understand that Russell was also limited by his own particular personality and world view. He was a good example of an ENTP or "debater" personality type as was Feynman. So in writing that he was very much bound by those limitations of his own world view and I'm sure he found a lot of the behavior of his (most likely autistic colleage) confusing and most likely it didn't adhere to these "universal desires".

This isn't totally related but I love this essay by Zapfe and I think that these 4 coping mechanisms he mentions in the article are a lot more "universal" (isolation, anchoring, distracting, and sublimation): https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah

We're all bound by our own world view of things and certainly Russell was as well. It might have been self selecting that the type of people he spent time with in that era were also very concerned with those things but I'd be really curious if he ever had this conversation about these "universals" with Wittgenstein because I feel like Wittgenstein would really disagree, and Russell would just keep trying to label autistic traits as forms of these when that's not a good characterization at all.

Given the long list of well-knwown scientific criticism towards MBTI, how can you categorically say things like: "He was a good example of an ENTP or 'debater'", and then derive such decisive conclusions from it: "he was very much bound by those limitations"?

You posed your question assuming he agrees with "scientific criticism towards MBTI".

I do agree with the scientific criticism towards MBTI. But I never claimed to be using it that way. It's possible to find value for yourself or use in things personally that aren't rooted in scientific trials or rigor and it's possible for one to engage with these things and be well aware of that fact. It's black and white thinking to assume that "X is into MBTI/tarot/etc, therefore they are not a scientifically minded individual". We can apply dialectical thinking to this, and challenge yourself and wonder if there can exist someone who is using these non science based things while at the same time is fully aware of the fact that they're not science based. Maybe it's more rare because many people try to prop themselves up and defend whatever they're interested in due to ego issues but that's not the case here. Do I personally see value in religion, and is religion science based? No on both of these counts. But there are people who derive personal value from their faith and that's not something I can argue with. Now when people double down and try to claim that X is real and actually happened and this and that, that's a problem, but there do exist religious people just like me who are able to be in both worlds. See my other comment.

AFAIK the criticism comes down to the notion the 4 traits need to be viewed on a scale, not as a binary.

I am under the impression the 4 traits do map fairly well to the 'big 5' [0] and there is little debate about that foundation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

> I am under the impression the 4 traits do map fairly well to the 'big 5'

Of the four axes of types on MBTI, and ignoring weak correlations, two each have a strong correlation to a Big-5 axis, one has a moderate correlation to an Big-5 axes, and the other has moderate correlations (one somewhat stronger) to two Big-5 axes (the weaker of which is one of the ones another MBTI axes has a strong correlation with.)

While it's true that the theory talks about a spectrum, would you agree that's not how people (like the original comment) use it, given that everything is reduced to 4 letters, with no nuance?

Whatever 4 letter combination becomes a "class", like "debater", and somehow it becomes appropriate to draw conclusions about a person based on that.

The big 5 has also been criticized quite a bit. The wikipedia article has a good section on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cr...

The big 5 is often considered simplistic, given the complex nature of human personality. It was called the “psychology of the stranger”.

Something doesn't have to have scientific validity to be helpful. I don't agree with MBTI trying to make claims in the way that Big 5 does because it's rooted in more rigorous research. But it's also wrong to throw out models for this reason.

Is there scientific criticism towards things like tarot, astrology, crystals, and so on? Sure. But does that make it invalid if it's a personal framework that helps you? You can be interested in something and get something out of an area of interest without believing in it. For example if I do a tarot reading you may start to judge that activity and say, "This isn't real, this isn't science based, this isn't telling the future, you're wasting your time." But I'm not you and you're making assumptions about the reason I'd be doing it. I don't have to believe in any kind of inherent "mystical" properties of tarot in order to use it as a form of introspection to help my creative process. And that's something that's personal and of value to me.

I have trouble with social stuff because I'm autistic. MBTI gives me a framework to generalize interactions between people and a way for me to predict human behavior in a way that works for me. Is it perfect? No. I'm not claiming that. But there are patterns, and there are stereotypes, and by using it I've been able to predict social interactions and people's intentions/goals slightly better and it gives me comfort to use it.

This is a good example of a video that matches my views on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ea8SainI2o The person who has this channel understands the limitations of MBTI and has expanded the framework further to work on its weaknesses.

It's important to understand that OP is also limited by his own particular personality and world view. He is a good example of a TWRP or 'bater. It can make one go blind.

I read Russell, and sometime afterwards read [1] Becker, whose primary thesis is that all human behavior is driven by a denial of death, specifically the death of our own egos, so carefully crafted and shaped over a lifetime. I found this to be much more of an approachable philosophy, tied more closely to Darwinism than Russell ever was.

ISTR Russell wrote of “four desires” (i.e. four of many) not “the four desires” as the article asserts.

In particular his life doesn’t appear to have been focused on those four, though of course nobody is immune to them.

I've never really been able to accept Bertrand Russell. A lot of people evangelize his teachings but they feel so rudimentary and superficial.

I relate much more to the teachings of Abraham Maslow, concepts around self-realization and self-actualization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow

It's funny we want others to tell us who we are rather then just examining our own selves. Try it. Diligently and thoroughly examine yourself as if you were a third person. Every thought, feeling and impulse. All of it. No need for shame, censorship or judgement. This is a private space. If a thought brings up and uncomfortable feeling or emotion. Don't turn away, examine that feeling. What makes it uncomfortable? Why don't I like this feeling? This has completely changed me. It has freed me from the tyrannical rule of uncomfortable feelings. I highly recommend it.

Full disclosure, I'm all into self-realization now and the non-dual philosophy.

As of recently I started examining myself as well, but only ocasionally. I will try to perform it in more depth, Thanks!

To give my two cents, for a more effective experience I recommend getting to know the most common cognitive biases and trying to spot all of which we are subject to.

It's indeed a mind opening experience :)

How do you do it?

*DISCLAIMER: I am nobody with no credentials of any kind. This is just my opinions and things I've noticed in my own experience.*

Stay diligent. I think a lot is very subtle. We've gotten so use to our conditioning we don't even know it's happening.

I believe what we are observing is the ego and the ego is an artifact from our evolution. We survive in groups so when growing up we need a way to quickly become part of the group. We need to think like the group. We need to see the world as the group sees the world so we can be a productive member of the group and survive. With that it's easier to see the ego as a product of culture than as myself. It makes it easier to look at myself critically and see all the biases as @tcgv pointed out.

Why did I post this reply for instance? I want people to see what a clever, interesting and unique individual I am... "look at me!". After I posted it I had thoughts about what would be replied. They would ridicule me for being such a shameless self-promoter. "What does this even have to do with the article? You are just reaching for any excuse to show off." Things like that. There is a lot based on fear.

One time someone said something insulting right to my face and I did nothing. That use to eat me up so I tired not to think about it but it keeps coming back. Again and again I'd try and negotiate with the memory and suppress the feelings. This went on for years. One day I just let myself relive the memory; looked right into it and took all the feelings of shame, regret, emasculation etc. It was uncomfortable for sure but after a few moments I got use to the feelings. They weren't so scary. Then I could see the situation differently. Why would I care what this person does or says? He is just trying to score points in the masculinity game. What if I just don't play that game?

We play lots of games. Some we care about more than others. What's the difference? Why would we care so much about some games and be totally indifferent to others? Why not just be indifferent to all of them? Then we don't need those points to feel good. We don't need to go searching for portions of pride. What is pride? When you feel pride what are you feeling? Peace, happiness and contentment? Where do those feelings come from? They are within us. If so then why would we go outside of ourselves to get them? I say outside of ourselves here to make a point since we are speaking about the perspective of the ego.

Someone is coming toward you in the middle of the sidewalk. It's becoming clear he isn't going to move aside some so you both can pass. You will need to move aside. So stand aside and let him pass. Now, what thoughts come up? How do you feel? Let it happen. Let the feelings come.

Get use to the feelings and you wont care about the thoughts.

What about respect and consideration? If you need any random person that enters your experience to behave in a particular manner you've already lost. You can't control other people. The problem isn't them, it's you. The problem is that you feel you need to control that which can't be controlled.

It's hard not to care about these games. We have to let go. For me it's been a process. Layer by layer I'm peeling the onion. The principle is the same tho. Be an indifferent witness to everything in your experience. When you are indifferent to the events in your experience there is nothing for you to feel but peace, happiness and contentment. It's hard to believe at first but start peeling back the layers and you'll see. You will still care about things but your selfish desires and impulses will subside because the feelings wont hold sway over you.

My ex girlfriend and I broke up last year. We love each other very much but want different things out of life. It was very hard to let her go but I love and care for her. I want her to be happy. If she has a better chance at getting what she wants out of life with someone else than I want that for her. Why would I need her to stay with me? The only reason was I was afraid of facing all the uncomfortable feelings of jealousy, insecurity, and loss that came with the idea of letting her go. Once I got use to those feelings it was clear; let her go and find what she's looking for.

Rupert Spira has a lot of videos on youtube. I have seen a few and he has a remarkable way of describing the ideas of the ego being an illusory "separate self", dealing with uncomfortable feelings and the non-dual philosophy. If this interests you I'd check them out. He's much better at describing this kind of stuff than me.

Thank you for reading this. This has been good for me. I'm finding that writing this stuff down helps me not think about it as much. Or am I just indulging my ego again?... uh oh...

*DISCLAIMER: I am nobody with no credentials of any kind. This is just my opinions and things I've noticed in my own experience.*

Thank you for your reply. That is a lot to process. I will definitely watch Rupert Spira. As I said it's a lot and I need more time to think about this. It's all a bit foggy right now

Thanks for reading. Maybe the next time you get all wrapped around the axle about something you'll remember this and it might help in some way. Cheers mate

Man, I notice more and more biases all the time.

EDIT: "Every thought..." that's ridiculous, as often as you can.

The four "desires" driving all human behavior are: noradrenaline, acetylcholine, serotonin and dopamine.

And free Wi-Fi.

And good parking spots

Those you mention are biological bits in bio logic gates.

The desires FTA are more abstract

Bits is a rather poot analogy. Response to a transmitter is not a 1:1 relationship of input:output. In reality, the relationship is one on a sliding scale depending on protein expression and post translational modifications

Also oxytocin.

How are those mapped to behaviours/desires?

To love and to hate, two perfectly human desires https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jan/30/bright-id... https://time.com/49399/oxytocin-racism-study/

I have a notion estrogen and testosterone deserve considering as well.

From the article:

Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power

Love of power seems like a form of acquisitiveness to me.

These are non-exclusive sets imo. I'm curious what you think about it and why you might form one on the other.

I would put the acquisitiveness thing as a form of any obsession - acquisition of money, books, lovers, things with the color red, to more abstract things - renown in the community, power... as with many things in human existence on a behavioral spectrum, some of these forms of acquisition would appear neurotic from the outsid ne (acquiring things with the color red for example) and some would easily meld into each other - money and power for example.

The acquisition of possessions is probably one of the more commonly observed patterns of the behavior, probably because a socially accepted and even applauded behavior.

Acquiring lots of lovers is for example somewhat frowned upon, so if you can move your love of acquisition from sex to money that's moving from being despised by the community to being respected.

'Acquisitiveness' must be clearly defined as a category, given the colloquial definition of it being the "desire to get things" seems tautological. Otherwise Russel is failing to say anything more than, "humans are driven by four desires, one of which is the desire to have things".

Although, I think it's somewhat absurd to have power and things as separate categories given that 'ownership' is a social construct where we agree that certain people get to have power over certain objects, and can thus exert power over anyone else that wishes to use them.

aren't all four just desire for status?

And often vanity.

And I do want to take power from my rivals..

"All human activity is prompted by desire."

This seems like a pretty inaccurate statement. He's explicitly saying that moral actions are also desire-driven, because if we didn't desire to do the thing, we wouldn't do it. But we know we don't wish to do the things we sometimes do, because we have internal conflict over it; if we wished to do it, it wouldn't be hard to make ourselves do it. Clearly we know the things we "wish" to do, because we do them quickly and freely without internal pain. Other things we "don't wish" to do, we do have internal pain over and do take more effort to make ourselves do. So Bertrand's word "desire" is really just a synonym for "motivation".

If you said "All human activity is prompted by motivation," then that wouldn't work for human activity prompted by, say, heuristics. We now know that much of human beings' immediate actions are actually just an automatic response to pattern-matching algorithms in the brain. Those actions can't be driven by desire, because they're almost subconscious; it's not what we "wish for", it's what the body immediately responds to in order to keep itself alive in a dynamic and dangerous environment.

Therefore, all human activity is not prompted by desire, but by whatever kooky biological processes make up our brains and control our actions, voluntary or involuntary. But that's not a very sexy quip for a talk :-)

I once heard a quote by Anthony Robbins that there are 6 human needs that drive all behaviours: 1) certainty, 2) variety, 3) significance, 4) love and connection, 5) growth and 6) contribution Interesting to match to the 4 desires…

Growth is very important. There is also 7) greed.

This is a much less cynical Outlook.

IMO, Russell's idea here is reductionist and lacking a thorough examination of causality:

>a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries

This quote barely and only begrudgingly touches on causality and only skirts with the idea that these "desires" are merely born out of dysfunction.

I think that human behavior is much better explained by the NVC model of a complex matrix of human needs e.g. https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory and that all dysfunctional behavior stems from poor strategies for meeting those needs.

I’ve heard these referred to as the four Ps.

Property - Acquisitiveness

Pride - Rivalry

Prominence - Vanity

Power - Power

I’ve also seen a list where these where exemplified by certain American cities.

Property - NYC (financial district)

Pride - this one was missing from the list I saw. Perhaps Chicago during the heyday of mafia/political corruption/competition?

Prominence - Hollywood

Power - Washington D.C.

In energetic terms, localisable and quantifiable by biochemists, what is “desire”?

How might we measure it?

The closest jargon would be incentive salience in which activation of dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area which is necessary but probably not sufficient. If you're interested in the neurological substrates of wanting (desire) and liking (pleasure) than check out the review papers over at Berridge Lab, https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/...

In mice they have a stain for the expression of a particular type of "early" expression gene which coincides (most of the time) with neural activity. But this kind of staining is only useful for animal models you can sacrifice. I suppose if you wanted to explore this in humans you'd have to use PET with some neuronal population specific ligand or some fMRI modality(s).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivational_salience - this wikipedia article is helpful, but they mistakenly (as was tradition) cite the neurological substrates of liking (the shell of the nucleus accumbens) as the source. And that isn't correct even if the ventral tegmental area (wanting) projects heavily to it.

Reinforcement Learning describes a mechanism based on goals: evaluate each situation you're in, select the best action, observe effect, learn the reward signal. We're born with a few instinctive desires which act as a base operating system for the brain.

>How might we measure it?

That is a good question. A desire is a term of the mind, and it is not easily connected to the brain and physiology. The only one I can think of is the conscious desire to breathe - iirc, it is directly correlated to the amount of CO2 in the blood (not O2, the first suspect). We don't yet have strong correlates to hunger, for example, so it might take a while for other desires, but I would bet there would be some correlates. On the other hand, behavior can reveal a lot. Some economists would say we can find the strength of one desire by comparing it to another. How much of A are we willing to give in order to get some exact amount of B? It is not exactly measurement of desire, but we can end up with a list of priorities.

Maybe cortisol levels.

We usually appreciate 'desire' as desire for something positive but perhaps a better approximation would be separation from a state of peace.

This could be a nice way to further dig into the two human modes of desire and fear talked about in the Matrix Resurrections. I used to think pride and fear were the two modes, but I think "desire" is a nicer superset term.

It's interesting to note that stoicism -- in my experience perhaps the most difficult thing I've ever done and still fight hard every day to follow -- could be said at its core to work against these baser motivations.

Considering this, one must ask deeper questions about one's view on life. Are these base motivations part of something bigger than one may one day assimilate rather than succumb to or separate from? What in our lives makes expression of base desire so detrimental to expression of other desires?

This and similar categorizations, seems like they say virtually nothing, personally, I have different personality based on environmental context (warzone country passing checkpoint versus family dinner), fairly sure I am not the only one, furthermore environments context activates different set of "personalities" in each individual human, I don't think there can be derived useful average of sort, because humans adapt behaviors to environmental contexts to some degree, in addition to changing perception of context.

> Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. There are some days where I just don't feel like getting out of bed, and spend half a day to the full day in my bed. I don't even feel bad or depressed, at least I don't feel a direct negative feeling, I just don't want to do anything else. This reminded me of my cats, which spend most of the day sleeping/resting, sometimes go eat a bit, sometimes go play a bit. I don't know what to think about it. Is this peace? For some reason, it doesn't feel like it.

Ataraxia, plenitude, serenity, all these are variations on the theme of attaining 'peace'. Whether it's religion (ie Buddhism) or philosophy (ie stoicism), there is this notion that the ultimate goal is to reach this state of contentment: not desiring more, not being driven by overwhelming emotions, just satisfied with what you have, regardless of what you think you can achieve, or what expectations others have of what you could achieve.

All these can be summed into greed, pride, jealousy etc.

The biggest delusion for the human is to think I am the body. To know the human will die but behave like it will live forever due to being driven by the senses chasing sense objects

Seems like he was stumbling towards the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.

Why did you choose this particular verb, "to stumble"? Came across as awfully arrogant, which doesn't match my basic understanding of Buddhism.

Can't speak for GP but stumbling through life and occasionally finding bits of wisdom seems to be the basic mode for all of us. That Russell would be different would imply he got perfect knowledge from somewhere.

Ah perhaps my reading was unnecessarily negative.

a human being is a bio robot that is driven by a very complicated neural network that has the only 2 goals: 1) to survive 2) to reproduce itself.

This is very obviously untrue.

tell me one thing that you did yesterday that does not fit into aforementioned goals.

Posting my response to your post.

I find this article really interesting, but really difficult to read. Uses stuffy language to the point of showing off.

Shallow and forgets compassion

"Philosophy"

I count myself as one of the many Russel fans, but I have to admit that if this article were my first encounter with his thoughts then my opinion on him would probably be very different.

In this speech Russel loosely identifies 3 competing views regarding what constitutes the central motives behind human actions:

- His own view, that he states upfront: All human activity is prompted by desire and men differ from each others and from animals mainly because they desire different things.

- All human activity is governed by a sense of virtues (Russel focus on "sense of duty" but I think it's fairer to enlarge this class of arguments a bit). This is a major leitmotiv in conservative worldviews although Russel does not name it as such.

- All human activity is governed by the material circumstances in which they live, mentioned rather "en passant", and the landmark of the other end of the spectrum as far as worldview is concerned, the one that cannot be named.

Russel goes on by enumerating (some of?) those desires/motives: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity and love of power.

He gives some illustrations, many of which are funny but none convincing.

His posits that the most important determinant of human behavior is how much one is sensible to each of those desires, yet he has to concede that human desires do not merely differs in intensity but also in quality, noting that, for instance, acquisitiveness can come in various shapes: accumulation of money for some, of potatoes for others. But then, one might ask, what causes some to seek gold rather than potatoes ? Russel's answer: it depends on the material circumstances that one was subjected to in childhood. Oh, but wait...

All in all, I find this speech not only unconvincing but actually reactionary in the sense that it seems to ignore what we actually know about behaviors, desires and feelings (especially today, but maybe even in 1950). And we know actually a thing or two about behaviors of social apes, but that's not usually written in sociology books nor in psychology books nor in history books. One have to resort to evolutionary sciences or even better: primatology.

Russel mentions observing apes in the zoo and recognizes that they can exhibit curiosity ("escape from boredom"). Youtube addicts might remember that viral video of a chimp entertaining himself by teasing a tiger. But that goes well beyond that: primatologists have indeed observed a range of motives in chimps that are familiar to us humans. But when its about chimps we don't tell ourselves stories about idealized motives: at the end of the day, it's all about mating partners, although the chimps themselves may believe in more sophisticated explanation.

Desires and feelings, it turns out, might not be that unique. It is no longer believed that they originates from the human-only evolved cortex, but more likely from the brain stem, of ancient descent and thus commonplace in the animal kingdom. We don't know what it feels like to be a bat, except that in some way we do know: the bat experiences fear, hunger, sexual attraction, social competition, tiredness, curiosity... We have no idea what the world "feels like" for a bat, having different senses and different brainpower, but the desires and emotions we can recognize easily, because we share many of them.

So if one is after what makes human actions distinct, one should probably look at something else than desires.

Also, the nail on the coffin for my unquestioning admiration for Russel could be the passage were he suggests that the human race survival might not be desirable. Was it just intended as a joke? Or was he in such a bad mood around that period? Misanthropy is so the opposite of Russel that I had to read the passage several times over.

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