Taxi Driver post=18.75058.856878 said:
Saevus post=18.75058.856244 said:
No. You have completely failed to address any existential motivations, instead naively (and perhaps misanthropically) deciding that so long as instinctual needs are met, a human being is satisfied.
Could a human being be dissatisfied even when all their needs are met? Could existential motivation be instinctual in its roots? Could existential motivation ultimately be shallow and simple?
These are questions I legitimately don't know, and am simply asking you about them because you might know. Please don't take offense to them. Also when explaining your answer, if you choose to answer, could you put it in terms relatively easy for someone less knowledgeable about the topic to understand?
A person who has met all their needs is, by definition, satisfied. The question is moreso if someone can ever meet all their needs - and the answer is, probably, yes. There are probably a few people who are completely satisfied with and fully reconciled to their lives, however they went about it. The vast majority of people don't really know what their more ephemeral needs are, though, let alone how to meet them.
Existential motivations are, from my understanding, the result of our human faculties being confounded by the world; the 'Why?' questions. Instinct in the animal sense of 'Eat, drink, sleep, reproduce' is satisfied by knowing 'what' and 'how'. In a hurricane, an animal does not ask 'Why is this horrible event happening?', it just knows that it needs to get to safety and how to get that safety. An animal doesn't ponder 'Why am I here and what should I do?'; being there to propagate their species is enough.
Of course, there are a lot of very fine points concerning sapience and sentience that are controversial, to say the least, so that's really only a convenient analogy to demonstrate my hypothesis.
Existential motivations can be phrased simply to give an overview of a motivation. For example, the phenomena of science could be stated to have a few very broad needs:
1. To understand the world, as it does not make sense in its current state and thus threatens the basic understanding that an individual exists in (i.e. physics, biology, or meteorology).
2. To improve something, as it is not satisfactory or sufficient in its current state (i.e. any technological developments or sciences that impact the earth itself).
And there are, of course, quite likely more. I'm not a student of the philosophy of science, and the actual textbook examples either relate to more esoteric subjects or to controversial ones (no way I want to bring religion into this thread).
But while you've got those two basic motives, they can be pared down infinitely into motivations specific to one person at one time in their life. So, I guess the tl;dr is generally, yes; specifically, no.
