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The moral paradox of intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation is somewhat mysterious: why would we do something effortful or costly, without reward?
What would happen if you did nothing at all? If you did not eat or drink, you would soon succumb to malnutrition and dehydration, and die. Regardless of your inclination to produce offspring and fertility, if you did not attempt to find a mate and engage in the necessary behaviour, you would never realize the continuation of your genes. And by any standard, the limited life that would await you once you made and implemented the choice to do nothing would be pretty miserable. Much of our motivation to do stuff rather than do nothing can be traced back to our ultimate aspirations: to survive, thrive and procreate — with the former two eventually enabling the latter.
That may seem a little, well, simplistic for sophisticated, evolved creatures that we are. That unicellular organisms, plants and even more complex animals are preoccupied with survival and procreation, that is not so hard to see, but are we really that primitive? And yet, when you think about it, a lot of what we do does seem to serve these three imperatives.
