It’s not always so easy to say which desire is actually first order and which is second order.
For instance, example 3 could be inverted:
Larry was brought up to believe God hates homosexuality. Because of this he experiences genuine disgust when he thinks about homosexual acts, and so desires not to perform them or even think about them (first order). However, he really likes his friend Ted and sometimes wished God wasn’t such a dick (second order).
There’s likely even a third order desire:
Larry was brought up to be a good Christian, and desperately wishes he didn’t wish God was anything other than He is (third order).
I imagine our desires are less like a logical hierarchy and more like a food chain. On any given day Larry’s libido could be the biggest fish in the sea.
This is not second order. It’s just D(God approved of homosexuality). If he himself were God, then it would probably be second order, but just wanting the rules to be different is first-order. Similarly,
Larry was brought up to be a good Christian, and desperately wishes he didn’t wish God was anything other than He is (third order).
is not third order. Third order gets weird. Third order would be that Mimi wants heroin, and in fact, wants to want heroin, (if you offered to magically make her not like heroin, she’d emphatically decline), but on top of that, she wants to want to not want to use heroin. Maybe she doesn’t have a problem with it, but her friends do. Maybe she would be well served if she could express an honest desire to quit while not actually quitting. Third-order desires get pretty confusing, though I may have just explained this one poorly.
Furthermore
I imagine our desires are less like a logical hierarchy and more like a food chain. On any given day Larry’s libido could be the biggest fish in the sea.
is not exactly in line with the post. I don’t think there’s any claim that these things are a logical hierarchy. One can have extremely weak first order desires and extremely strong second order desires, though the latter will tend to consolidate into changed first order desires if they are strong enough.
Second order desires do often stem from conflicting first order desires, but what determines the order is the object of desire (if it itself is about a desire, it’s 2nd order, and so on), not its magnitude.
I can see that I worded things in a misleading fashion. The main point is just that first orders desires and second order desires referring to them can often switch places. Rephrasing:
Larry wants to be straight… (first order)
...but wants not to want to be straight so he can be with his friend Ted. (second order)
I imagine our desires are less like a logical hierarchy and more like a food chain.
is not exactly in line with the post. I don’t think there’s any claim that these things are a logical hierarchy.
By logical hierarchy I just mean the notion there is some well ordering of terms here.
Each desire can be the first order desire to the other, forming a loop rather than a tier.
The main point is just that first orders desires and second order desires referring to them can often switch places.
Actually, it’s simpler to treat all desires as independent motivations. Whether they are “first-order” or “second-order” is a function of which is the organism’s current goal.
When an addict feels bad, their current goal is to not feel bad—so they indulge. Anything that would stop them from doing so—including any desire to reform—is now opposed, whether the thing being opposed is an external event or an internal desire to quit.
Conversely, when the addict is satisfied, their current goal may be to feel better about themselves, at which point whatever obstacles to that goal become relevant, whether external events or internal desires.
IOW, it’s not the case that desires are ever “first order” or “second order” in and of themselves. So-called “second order” desires are merely subgoals that arise as a side-effect of a conflict between an active goal and another desire that opposes the goal in some way.
And it’s important to understand their contextual nature. A subgoal that’s consistently reinforced can become a seemingly-independent desire via the standard “cached thought” or “promoted subgoal” mechanism, but this doesn’t always occur. And until it occurs, the second-order desires are just temporary subgoals. See for example, Alicorn’s example 1: the goal of liking Mountain Dew (or not disliking it) is strictly in the context of the alertness goal. If the alertness goal were satisfied in some other way, the subgoal would no longer be active.
I’m pretty sure that you are pointing to a correct proposition here but have overstated your case. At the very least, separate from goals its possible to build non-desire habits which desires can affirm or conflict with. More importantly, you are missing the point that second order desires can be about first order desires without the first order desires, even when active, being about the second order desires.
More importantly, you are missing the point that second order desires can be about first order desires without the first order desires, even when active, being about the second order desires.
How so? That is, how am I missing that point? I’m simply saying that second-order desire can only arise as a subgoal of some other desire, even if that other desire is to simply have a certain social image. This doesn’t imply any sort of symmetry being required, so I’m not clear on why you think I said it does. (In fact, my reference to example 1 describes an asymmetric conflict case.)
Asymmetry between 2nd order and 1st order desires can be explained easily if 2nd order desires didn’t really exist, or if only one specific 2nd order desire existed, namely a desire for resolution. “I want to want X” then just becomes some person’s rationalization about their conflicted situation. I find this idea attractive, because a desire for resolution seems a natural thing for a conscious being to have.
I find this idea attractive, because a desire for resolution seems a natural thing for a conscious being to have.
But such a thing isn’t intrinsic. People routinely do things that are in conflict, without ever resolving the conflict. If anything, we have a drive to appear consistent to other people—a more evolutionarily-relevant drive than a desire to actually be consistent.
Meanwhile, second-order desires are just subgoals, like “walk across the room” is a subgoal of “get a glass of water”. We experience wanting to (not) want something because it supports some other goal—whether the other goal is something we want to admit to or not.
But that other goal is never really “get some resolution”—that’s just a verbal explanation that deflects attention from whatever the real goal is. (Because without some conflicting goal being present, there would be nothing to “resolve”!)
I disagree. Conflict resolution is intrinsic, however most people resolve many of their conflicts in irrational ways, including distraction. Come to think of it, a desire/goal-conflict resolution urge explains procrastination quite handily.
Let’s not confuse “a desire to resolve conflicting urges” with “a desire to be rationally self-consistent.” These are two different things. Everyone will have the former. Some will be able to cultivate the latter. A drive to appear consistent to others is yet a third thing.
I suspect that our drive for “getting resolution” is much like our preference for clearly annunciated speech, sunny vistas, and uncluttered rooms. We are driven to optimize our perception, and this drive is expressed as aesthetic desire. Our sense of the aesthetic even extends to internal perception of our ideas—there is an attraction to elegant ideas. Religions often exploit this. For example, Islam is said to be popular in parts of the world because it presents itself as straightforward.
I think you’re right that “getting resolution” is not a goal. It is more like a drive. Much like our desire to see all of what we are observing often results in our craning our neck. Like other drives it can result in goals. I also like your subgoal formulation. I would posit that the urge towards “clarity” is what drives it. But remember, just because one can imagine some scenario and take it as a desired goal, doesn’t mean that the situation is sensible. I think wanting to want X is along the same lines as wanting to hear the sound of one hand clapping.
So, in the Mountain Dew example, the subject wants to stay awake and the subject also wants to avoid the unpleasant stimuli of Mountain Dew. To resolve this goal conflict, they formulate the subgoal, “I want to want Mountain Dew,” which is a condition where there is no conflict. I note, however, that the subject wouldn’t mind drinking chilled but flat Mountain Dew if it were readily available. Most likely they would immediately want to drink it. I posit that they always wanted to drink the Mountain Dew, but that they had a conflicting goal (that of avoiding carbonation), and were distracted by a poorly formulated subgoal.
Let’s not confuse “a desire to resolve conflicting urges” with “a desire to be rationally self-consistent.” These are two different things. Everyone will have the former. Some will be able to cultivate the latter. A drive to appear consistent to others is yet a third thing.
My point is that “a desire to resolve conflicting urges” is an unnecessary hypothesis. Conflict resolution is an emergent property of goal-seeking, not an independent goal or desire of itself, nor even a component of goal-seeking.
If you have a goal to get a soda from the fridge, and therefore a subgoal of walking across the room, but there is something in your way, then you will desire to go around it. To posit even a “drive” to “get resolution” is adding unnecessary entities to the equation.
Now, if you said that we experience conflict as painful, and desire to avoid it, I’d agree with you. However, experiencing the pain of conflict does not consistently motivate people to resolve the conflict. In fact, it frequently motivates people to avoid the subject entirely, so as to remove awareness of the conflict!
That’s why I believe that talking about “conflict resolution as intrinsic” or an urge to “get resolution” is both unnecessary and erroneous: people DO experience negative reinforcement from conflict, but this is not the same thing as a desire for resolution. In humans (as in all animals that I know of), a drive to avoid one thing does not produce the same results as a drive to approach its opposite (nor vice versa).
That’s why I believe that talking about “conflict resolution as intrinsic” or an urge to “get resolution” is both unnecessary and erroneous: people DO experience negative reinforcement from conflict, but this is not the same thing as a desire for resolution.
A very good point. It’s much more accurate to say that people have an aversion to internal conflicts, and that this is part of the inbuilt mechanism for mediating between conflicting desires. This is a better way to word what I am getting at. “Desire for resolution” can be easily misinterpreted. For example, I did not mean a “desire for a rational resolution in actuality.” That would preclude the mechanism from being a factor in procrastination, and I believe it is a part of that. I think it is also related to the Paradox of Choice.
As with many evolved mechanisms, it works imperfectly, but well enough (especially when viewed in the context of a Stone Age denizen’s life).
If you have a goal to get a soda from the fridge, and therefore a subgoal of walking across the room, but there is something in your way, then you will desire to go around it. To posit even a “drive” to “get resolution” is adding unnecessary entities to the equation.
I don’t think it’s an unnecessary entity, merely a mis-stated one.
Remember the context of the OP. I thought we were talking about perceived conundrums. When a way to “go around it” is not immediately obvious, then one sometimes makes up an impractical subgoal, like “I want to want to have sex with women,” from example 3. It’s often the case that there is an awareness of the impracticality of such subgoals, and as such it offers inadequate relief, but the impractical subgoal still becomes a fixation. I have generally found myself in conundrums actively seeking some answer. But it seems reasonable that this is not going to be everyone’s reaction, and the drive is actually avoidance of conflict.
This is kind of tangential to your actual statement, but I’ve never found an originally carbonated beverage that was flat enough to be drinkable. I’d think it had more to do with the flavorings used in sodas if I didn’t have the same problem with seltzer water and sparkling juices.
But if someone had a magic powder that was tasteless and could remove all carbonation from a drink, then perhaps you could drink it and in a given context would want to. My point is that “2nd order desires” are probably just due to mis-formulated goals and subgoals. I don’t think people really want to want X. Most often, they want X but don’t also want Y, or they want X but cannot give up Y. I suspect it often helps if you can get as close to the level of basic drives as possible. In the Mountain Dew conundrum, it’s self preservation and avoidance of noxious stimuli. These desires are not in conflict, only the particular goal+subgoal scheme resulting from them.
In other words, I doubt many people really “Want to want X.” They often convince themselves of this in order to enable fulfilling some other directive.
Of two conflicting desires, we call second-order the one we don’t expect to go away, and as such more invariant, part of self, even if not ever in control.
Most second-order desires are not about first-order desires, they are about the same thing as the first-order desire. For the second-order desire, modifying the first-order desire is instrumental, not terminal, and the same applies in the other direction. The differences I see come from first-order desire being actually in control, and being stupid enough not to work on eliminating the second-order desire.
First , these two statements are 2nd order and 3rd order respectively (taboo “straight” and you get -very roughly- “Larry wants to want to have sex with women” ). Second, they are not representations of the same thing, since they point in opposite directions. Thus, they don’t seem to support the claim that first and second order desires can switch places.
More importantly, you can’t just infer n-th order desires from n-m, n>m>0 order desires.
“I want chocolate,” does not imply: “I do not want to want to want to not want to want to not want to not want to want to want to not want to not want chocolate,” even though the two happen to point in the same direction. The first one is true, the second one is almost certainly false, since I really don’t think that hard about chocolate.
Higher-order desires get really, really convoluted if you use imprecise language, and they’re not exactly simple to begin with.
I am starting to agree with other posters that the whole construction may not map reality too accurately, but if you actually use precise language, n-th order desires are distinct and meaningful. Without precise language, you’re just showing it’s possible to say the same thing in more than one way, which is true, but not insightful.
More importantly, you can’t just infer n-th order desires from n-m, n>m>0 order desires.
I am starting to agree with other posters that the whole construction may not map reality too accurately
I agree. Generally people don’t have very high order desires. Discounting the accuracy/usefulness of the notion of ordered desires was the entire thrust of my original comment.
First , these two statements are 2nd order and 3rd order respectively
This is still a matter of interpretation based on wording. In my original phrasing it’s more apparent that the desire is first order. My set up was that Larry “experiences genuine disgust when he thinks about homosexual acts”, the intent being that his reaction to homosexuality is involuntary, and his desire is simply to avoid that unpleasant reaction. This is first order.
I’m not claiming the order can always be reversed. I was just giving a particular construction where it could.
It’s not always so easy to say which desire is actually first order and which is second order.
For instance, example 3 could be inverted:
Larry was brought up to believe God hates homosexuality. Because of this he experiences genuine disgust when he thinks about homosexual acts, and so desires not to perform them or even think about them (first order). However, he really likes his friend Ted and sometimes wished God wasn’t such a dick (second order).
There’s likely even a third order desire: Larry was brought up to be a good Christian, and desperately wishes he didn’t wish God was anything other than He is (third order).
I imagine our desires are less like a logical hierarchy and more like a food chain. On any given day Larry’s libido could be the biggest fish in the sea.
This is not second order. It’s just D(God approved of homosexuality). If he himself were God, then it would probably be second order, but just wanting the rules to be different is first-order. Similarly,
is not third order. Third order gets weird. Third order would be that Mimi wants heroin, and in fact, wants to want heroin, (if you offered to magically make her not like heroin, she’d emphatically decline), but on top of that, she wants to want to not want to use heroin. Maybe she doesn’t have a problem with it, but her friends do. Maybe she would be well served if she could express an honest desire to quit while not actually quitting. Third-order desires get pretty confusing, though I may have just explained this one poorly.
Furthermore
is not exactly in line with the post. I don’t think there’s any claim that these things are a logical hierarchy. One can have extremely weak first order desires and extremely strong second order desires, though the latter will tend to consolidate into changed first order desires if they are strong enough.
Second order desires do often stem from conflicting first order desires, but what determines the order is the object of desire (if it itself is about a desire, it’s 2nd order, and so on), not its magnitude.
I can see that I worded things in a misleading fashion. The main point is just that first orders desires and second order desires referring to them can often switch places. Rephrasing:
Larry wants to be straight… (first order)
...but wants not to want to be straight so he can be with his friend Ted. (second order)
By logical hierarchy I just mean the notion there is some well ordering of terms here. Each desire can be the first order desire to the other, forming a loop rather than a tier.
Actually, it’s simpler to treat all desires as independent motivations. Whether they are “first-order” or “second-order” is a function of which is the organism’s current goal.
When an addict feels bad, their current goal is to not feel bad—so they indulge. Anything that would stop them from doing so—including any desire to reform—is now opposed, whether the thing being opposed is an external event or an internal desire to quit.
Conversely, when the addict is satisfied, their current goal may be to feel better about themselves, at which point whatever obstacles to that goal become relevant, whether external events or internal desires.
IOW, it’s not the case that desires are ever “first order” or “second order” in and of themselves. So-called “second order” desires are merely subgoals that arise as a side-effect of a conflict between an active goal and another desire that opposes the goal in some way.
And it’s important to understand their contextual nature. A subgoal that’s consistently reinforced can become a seemingly-independent desire via the standard “cached thought” or “promoted subgoal” mechanism, but this doesn’t always occur. And until it occurs, the second-order desires are just temporary subgoals. See for example, Alicorn’s example 1: the goal of liking Mountain Dew (or not disliking it) is strictly in the context of the alertness goal. If the alertness goal were satisfied in some other way, the subgoal would no longer be active.
I’m pretty sure that you are pointing to a correct proposition here but have overstated your case. At the very least, separate from goals its possible to build non-desire habits which desires can affirm or conflict with. More importantly, you are missing the point that second order desires can be about first order desires without the first order desires, even when active, being about the second order desires.
How so? That is, how am I missing that point? I’m simply saying that second-order desire can only arise as a subgoal of some other desire, even if that other desire is to simply have a certain social image. This doesn’t imply any sort of symmetry being required, so I’m not clear on why you think I said it does. (In fact, my reference to example 1 describes an asymmetric conflict case.)
Asymmetry between 2nd order and 1st order desires can be explained easily if 2nd order desires didn’t really exist, or if only one specific 2nd order desire existed, namely a desire for resolution. “I want to want X” then just becomes some person’s rationalization about their conflicted situation. I find this idea attractive, because a desire for resolution seems a natural thing for a conscious being to have.
But such a thing isn’t intrinsic. People routinely do things that are in conflict, without ever resolving the conflict. If anything, we have a drive to appear consistent to other people—a more evolutionarily-relevant drive than a desire to actually be consistent.
Meanwhile, second-order desires are just subgoals, like “walk across the room” is a subgoal of “get a glass of water”. We experience wanting to (not) want something because it supports some other goal—whether the other goal is something we want to admit to or not.
But that other goal is never really “get some resolution”—that’s just a verbal explanation that deflects attention from whatever the real goal is. (Because without some conflicting goal being present, there would be nothing to “resolve”!)
I disagree. Conflict resolution is intrinsic, however most people resolve many of their conflicts in irrational ways, including distraction. Come to think of it, a desire/goal-conflict resolution urge explains procrastination quite handily.
Let’s not confuse “a desire to resolve conflicting urges” with “a desire to be rationally self-consistent.” These are two different things. Everyone will have the former. Some will be able to cultivate the latter. A drive to appear consistent to others is yet a third thing.
I suspect that our drive for “getting resolution” is much like our preference for clearly annunciated speech, sunny vistas, and uncluttered rooms. We are driven to optimize our perception, and this drive is expressed as aesthetic desire. Our sense of the aesthetic even extends to internal perception of our ideas—there is an attraction to elegant ideas. Religions often exploit this. For example, Islam is said to be popular in parts of the world because it presents itself as straightforward.
I think you’re right that “getting resolution” is not a goal. It is more like a drive. Much like our desire to see all of what we are observing often results in our craning our neck. Like other drives it can result in goals. I also like your subgoal formulation. I would posit that the urge towards “clarity” is what drives it. But remember, just because one can imagine some scenario and take it as a desired goal, doesn’t mean that the situation is sensible. I think wanting to want X is along the same lines as wanting to hear the sound of one hand clapping.
So, in the Mountain Dew example, the subject wants to stay awake and the subject also wants to avoid the unpleasant stimuli of Mountain Dew. To resolve this goal conflict, they formulate the subgoal, “I want to want Mountain Dew,” which is a condition where there is no conflict. I note, however, that the subject wouldn’t mind drinking chilled but flat Mountain Dew if it were readily available. Most likely they would immediately want to drink it. I posit that they always wanted to drink the Mountain Dew, but that they had a conflicting goal (that of avoiding carbonation), and were distracted by a poorly formulated subgoal.
My point is that “a desire to resolve conflicting urges” is an unnecessary hypothesis. Conflict resolution is an emergent property of goal-seeking, not an independent goal or desire of itself, nor even a component of goal-seeking.
If you have a goal to get a soda from the fridge, and therefore a subgoal of walking across the room, but there is something in your way, then you will desire to go around it. To posit even a “drive” to “get resolution” is adding unnecessary entities to the equation.
Now, if you said that we experience conflict as painful, and desire to avoid it, I’d agree with you. However, experiencing the pain of conflict does not consistently motivate people to resolve the conflict. In fact, it frequently motivates people to avoid the subject entirely, so as to remove awareness of the conflict!
That’s why I believe that talking about “conflict resolution as intrinsic” or an urge to “get resolution” is both unnecessary and erroneous: people DO experience negative reinforcement from conflict, but this is not the same thing as a desire for resolution. In humans (as in all animals that I know of), a drive to avoid one thing does not produce the same results as a drive to approach its opposite (nor vice versa).
A very good point. It’s much more accurate to say that people have an aversion to internal conflicts, and that this is part of the inbuilt mechanism for mediating between conflicting desires. This is a better way to word what I am getting at. “Desire for resolution” can be easily misinterpreted. For example, I did not mean a “desire for a rational resolution in actuality.” That would preclude the mechanism from being a factor in procrastination, and I believe it is a part of that. I think it is also related to the Paradox of Choice.
http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/0060005688
As with many evolved mechanisms, it works imperfectly, but well enough (especially when viewed in the context of a Stone Age denizen’s life).
I don’t think it’s an unnecessary entity, merely a mis-stated one.
Remember the context of the OP. I thought we were talking about perceived conundrums. When a way to “go around it” is not immediately obvious, then one sometimes makes up an impractical subgoal, like “I want to want to have sex with women,” from example 3. It’s often the case that there is an awareness of the impracticality of such subgoals, and as such it offers inadequate relief, but the impractical subgoal still becomes a fixation. I have generally found myself in conundrums actively seeking some answer. But it seems reasonable that this is not going to be everyone’s reaction, and the drive is actually avoidance of conflict.
This is kind of tangential to your actual statement, but I’ve never found an originally carbonated beverage that was flat enough to be drinkable. I’d think it had more to do with the flavorings used in sodas if I didn’t have the same problem with seltzer water and sparkling juices.
But if someone had a magic powder that was tasteless and could remove all carbonation from a drink, then perhaps you could drink it and in a given context would want to. My point is that “2nd order desires” are probably just due to mis-formulated goals and subgoals. I don’t think people really want to want X. Most often, they want X but don’t also want Y, or they want X but cannot give up Y. I suspect it often helps if you can get as close to the level of basic drives as possible. In the Mountain Dew conundrum, it’s self preservation and avoidance of noxious stimuli. These desires are not in conflict, only the particular goal+subgoal scheme resulting from them.
In other words, I doubt many people really “Want to want X.” They often convince themselves of this in order to enable fulfilling some other directive.
Of two conflicting desires, we call second-order the one we don’t expect to go away, and as such more invariant, part of self, even if not ever in control.
Most second-order desires are not about first-order desires, they are about the same thing as the first-order desire. For the second-order desire, modifying the first-order desire is instrumental, not terminal, and the same applies in the other direction. The differences I see come from first-order desire being actually in control, and being stupid enough not to work on eliminating the second-order desire.
First , these two statements are 2nd order and 3rd order respectively (taboo “straight” and you get -very roughly- “Larry wants to want to have sex with women” ). Second, they are not representations of the same thing, since they point in opposite directions. Thus, they don’t seem to support the claim that first and second order desires can switch places.
More importantly, you can’t just infer n-th order desires from n-m, n>m>0 order desires.
“I want chocolate,” does not imply: “I do not want to want to want to not want to want to not want to not want to want to want to not want to not want chocolate,” even though the two happen to point in the same direction. The first one is true, the second one is almost certainly false, since I really don’t think that hard about chocolate.
Higher-order desires get really, really convoluted if you use imprecise language, and they’re not exactly simple to begin with.
I am starting to agree with other posters that the whole construction may not map reality too accurately, but if you actually use precise language, n-th order desires are distinct and meaningful. Without precise language, you’re just showing it’s possible to say the same thing in more than one way, which is true, but not insightful.
I agree. Generally people don’t have very high order desires. Discounting the accuracy/usefulness of the notion of ordered desires was the entire thrust of my original comment.
This is still a matter of interpretation based on wording. In my original phrasing it’s more apparent that the desire is first order. My set up was that Larry “experiences genuine disgust when he thinks about homosexual acts”, the intent being that his reaction to homosexuality is involuntary, and his desire is simply to avoid that unpleasant reaction. This is first order.
I’m not claiming the order can always be reversed. I was just giving a particular construction where it could.
Isn’t that just second order? Third order would be wanting to want to want heroin.
It included the next sentence (wanting to want to not want); edited to make it less ambiguous.
Ah. Sorry!
Why’s that second order?