Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 4, 17 May 2023
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A Brief History of Ends/Goals: How Can Goals (Motivation) Emerge from a Goalless World?
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Abstract
This paper will be devoted to the discussion of the concept of goal in human understanding. The scientific discussion of it can be traced back to ancient Greece, where it was called teleology. This triggered a lot of questions: as theories prostrating the universe as uniformed emerged, these types of teleological ideas were attracted by natural philosophers studying determinism: things do not exist to serve a purpose, they exist only because, under the influence of other things in the world, they have to be there. The sun is not there to provide brightness to the world, it was there long before the exitance of the world. Nevertheless, the unsettling problem is that human beings do, a lot of times, think in a goal-directed way, so how to reconcile the fact that no teleological language can explain natural phenomena with the fact that teleological thinking exists in human understanding becomes the million dollar question. Still, there could be a solution, not as straightforward as the problem, but sufficient to demonstrate how goals can emerge from a goalless nature. With the conatus theory as the basis, this paper is going to review how it can be the building block of the nowadays negative feedback loop model and such a model is also a variation of Hume theory of association and passion.
Keywords
Ends/goals, Teleology, Conatus Theory, Negative Feedback Loop, Like V.S Want, Motivation.
References
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies (ICIHCS 2022), Part 2
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-915371-31-7
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-915371-32-4
- Published Date
- 17 May 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/4/20220102
- Copyright
- 17 May 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited