Thanks for your comment! The point you raise is a good one. I’ve thought about related issues over the last few months, but my views still aren’t fully settled. And I’ll just reiterate for readers that my tentative conclusions are just that: tentative. More than anything, I want everyone to appreciate how much uncertainty we face here.
We can crudely ask whether motivation is tied to the relative intensity of valenced experience or the absolute intensity of valenced experience. (‘Crudely’ because the actual connection between motivation and valenced experience is likely to be a bit messy and complicated.) If it’s the relative intensity, then, all else equal, a pain at the top end of an animal’s range is going to be very motivating, even if the pain has a phenomenal feel comparable to a human experiencing a very mild muscle spasm. If it’s absolute intensity, then, all else equal, a pain like that won’t be very motivating. I’m not sure what the right view is here, but the relative view that you endorse in the comment is certainly a live option, so let’s go with that.
If it’s relative intensity that matters for motivation, then natural selection needs a reason to generate big differences in absolute intensity. (Setting aside the fact that evolution sometimes goes kinda haywire.) You suggest the fitness benefit of a fine-grained valence scale, especially for animals that face many competing pulls on their attention. I agree that the resolution of an animal’s valence scale probably matters. But it’s unclear to me how much this tells us about differences in absolute intensity.
It seems possible to be better or worse at distinguishing gradations of valenced experience. It might be the case that animals with similar intensity ranges can differ in the number of intensity levels they can distinguish. (It might also be the case that animals with different intensity ranges have a similar number of intensity levels they can distinguish.) So if there were a fitness benefit to having 100 distinguishable gradations rather than 10, evolution could either select for animals with wider ranges or select for animals with better resolutions. (Or some combination thereof.) Considerations like the Weber-Fechner law incline me toward thinking an increase in resolution would be more efficient than an increase in range (though of course there are limits to how much resolution can be increased). But at this point I’m just speculating; there’s a lot more basic research that needs to be done to get a handle on these sorts of questions.
Hey Michael,
Thanks for your comment! The point you raise is a good one. I’ve thought about related issues over the last few months, but my views still aren’t fully settled. And I’ll just reiterate for readers that my tentative conclusions are just that: tentative. More than anything, I want everyone to appreciate how much uncertainty we face here.
We can crudely ask whether motivation is tied to the relative intensity of valenced experience or the absolute intensity of valenced experience. (‘Crudely’ because the actual connection between motivation and valenced experience is likely to be a bit messy and complicated.) If it’s the relative intensity, then, all else equal, a pain at the top end of an animal’s range is going to be very motivating, even if the pain has a phenomenal feel comparable to a human experiencing a very mild muscle spasm. If it’s absolute intensity, then, all else equal, a pain like that won’t be very motivating. I’m not sure what the right view is here, but the relative view that you endorse in the comment is certainly a live option, so let’s go with that.
If it’s relative intensity that matters for motivation, then natural selection needs a reason to generate big differences in absolute intensity. (Setting aside the fact that evolution sometimes goes kinda haywire.) You suggest the fitness benefit of a fine-grained valence scale, especially for animals that face many competing pulls on their attention. I agree that the resolution of an animal’s valence scale probably matters. But it’s unclear to me how much this tells us about differences in absolute intensity.
It seems possible to be better or worse at distinguishing gradations of valenced experience. It might be the case that animals with similar intensity ranges can differ in the number of intensity levels they can distinguish. (It might also be the case that animals with different intensity ranges have a similar number of intensity levels they can distinguish.) So if there were a fitness benefit to having 100 distinguishable gradations rather than 10, evolution could either select for animals with wider ranges or select for animals with better resolutions. (Or some combination thereof.) Considerations like the Weber-Fechner law incline me toward thinking an increase in resolution would be more efficient than an increase in range (though of course there are limits to how much resolution can be increased). But at this point I’m just speculating; there’s a lot more basic research that needs to be done to get a handle on these sorts of questions.