If someone had commented with a one-line answer like “people are intellectually active if it is rewarding”, I would have been very meh about it—it’s obvious, but trivial. All the added detail you gave makes it seem like a pretty useful observation, though.
Two possible caveats --
What determines what’s rewarding? Any set of behaviors can be explained by positing that they’re rewarding, so for this kind of model to be meaningful, there’s got to be a set of rewards involved which are relatively simple and have relatively broad explanatory power.
In order for a behavior to be rewarded in the first place, it has to be generated the first time. How does that happen? Animal trainers build up complicated tricks by rewarding steps incrementally approaching the desired behavior. Are there similar incremental steps here? What are they, and what rewards are associated with them?
(Your spelled-out details give some ideas in those directions.)
If someone had commented with a one-line answer like “people are intellectually active if it is rewarding”, I would have been very meh about it—it’s obvious, but trivial. All the added detail you gave makes it seem like a pretty useful observation, though.
Two possible caveats --
What determines what’s rewarding? Any set of behaviors can be explained by positing that they’re rewarding, so for this kind of model to be meaningful, there’s got to be a set of rewards involved which are relatively simple and have relatively broad explanatory power.
In order for a behavior to be rewarded in the first place, it has to be generated the first time. How does that happen? Animal trainers build up complicated tricks by rewarding steps incrementally approaching the desired behavior. Are there similar incremental steps here? What are they, and what rewards are associated with them?
(Your spelled-out details give some ideas in those directions.)
Even the by product (ideas) are most trivial too.