A Brief History of Ends/Goals: How Can Goals (Motivation) Emerge from a Goalless World?

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.