Truisms 2

I'm not sure what "on balance" means. There are some obvious sequences of events: yes, having a colonoscopy sucks, but although I do not manifestly want to do it, my need for the results makes me ultimately want it.

Is your point then, whenever one consents, even if the situation is hateful, that counts as wanting? One discounts, of course, choices made under threat or actual instance of violence.

I see your point. Coercion is taken care of: you want to do the least worse thing. I guess the critical problem comes when it goes beyond that, to cases where you are given no choice (rape would be one example, but I hope there are less unpleasant examples that could be used).

As a matter of logic I don't see how the corollary follows. Surely it's a corollary of us having non-spiritual brains.

Depends what you mean by "do". If I suffer an epileptic seizure, fall onto the floor and thrash around for 2 minutes, clearly I didn't "want" to do that, and most people will say I didn't "do" anything, the seizure "happened to" me.

But what if I have an epileptic seizure in a different part of the brain (temporal lobe) causing me to start babbling incoherently? Did I "do" that? It might well seem to me, at the time, that I wanted to do it, but to an external observer it "happened to" me...

This is a statement that is dependent on choice, arguably an imaginary. Something like epilepsy, or instinct (pull your hand away from a hot stove), and other 'real' phenomena, do not really apply here.

People always choose their most desired option from a given list. We like things that make sense. While you may not be happy with a list of choices, or your ultimate choice, you've still selected what you feel is the most desirable option. You choose what you want. In that respect I agree with the truism.

I'm not sure what is meant by a neurological foundation. If this is in reference to the notion that all things people do have a direct functional utility, I'd have to disagree. People, again, tend to do things because they feel they make sense based on historical experience. What we feel makes sense, and what 'really' makes sense, are completely different realms. And sometimes those things that make sense like leisure, excessive consumption of material culture, etc don't seem to fall into the innate neurological category.

...but if you try sometimes
you just might find
you do what you need.

(with apologies to the Glimmer Twins)

Define "want"...

Define "want"...

I agree with Derek's statement first of all. But I think I know John is getting at, and I think that this is not a truism at all, but an assumption or a theory. Perhaps a very good one with some good supporting evidence, but not proven yet.

Define "want"...

If you really didn't know what 'want' means you wouldn't have been capable of reading and making sense of John's post, so asking him to define it is just a cheap cop out.

"Want" is a variety of motivation, which by definition is the psychological mechanism (or mechanisms) underlying why people tend to do some things on balance more than others. Motivations are combined functions of evolutionary preparedness, changing physiological states, reinforcement history, and cost-benefit analysis.

That "what we want to do" has a "Neurological foundation" only really means motivation is constrained by the neural architecture that makes behavior possible in the first place.

Nobody here wants a dentist to drill holes in our teeth, yet we pay to have dentists drill holes in our teeth. Paradox! That's why I asked for a definition of want.

Nobody here wants a dentist to drill holes in our teeth, yet we pay to have dentists drill holes in our teeth. Paradox! That's why I asked for a definition of want.

What we want is healthy teeth and sometimes to achieve that we have to suffer a little. Where's the paradox?

The dictionary definition of "want" doesn't imply a thoughtful, logical decision. In fact there are several interpretations of "want."
http://www.answers.com/want

Perhaps the truism would be less ambiguous if "want" were replaced with "decide". I.e.,

Truism 2: Nobody does anything they don't decide to, on balance

Corollary: Everything we decide to do has a neurological foundation

That's a good gloss, Derek, but I expected you all to focus on something else: altruism.

we are the neurologic.

The statement is a double negative and don't make no sense to me.

There ain't nothing wrong with a good double negative.

In the case of dentistry, as Thony C says, most people don't want to go because of the discomfort but they also want healthy teeth that don't ache. They choose which of the 'wants' they want most so they can be said to do what they want.

Similarly, I don't want the headache I get when I read all this philosophising but I want the benefits of the brain workout it gives me so it's worth a few mental aches and sprains.

I'm not sure why you expected the comments to focus on altruism. We're social animals who enjoy the warm fuzzies we get when other people like us. Doing good deeds for others apparently without expectation of personal gain is a good way to earn that kind of social approbation. I say "apparently" because I believe that there is "personal gain" involved in any apparently altruistic behaviour, it's just not something as overt and crude as financial reward.

"Nobody does anything they don't decide to, on balance"

That still doesn't take care of the whole rape scenario (where there are no other options) and misses the whole point of the statement, which is that "want" is always a matter of preference.

I think you probably meant "No one ever decides to do something they don't want to, on balance."

For instance, women who prostitute themselves want to prostitute themselves, because the option of not prostituting themselves exists. If they didn't want to prostitute themselves, they wouldn't prostitute themselves.

The argument that women wouldn't prostitute themselves if they weren't paid, that somehow the money means they don't want it, is silly. The reason we get paid for work is because we wouldn't do it otherwise- very few people would do their job without pay. People who work want to work, because they want money! The benefit to them of receiving the money is greater than the cost of working.

In the end, the decisions you make are what you want to do. It is possible to have conflicting wants, but the end result maximizes your "want." When someone says something like "what I really wanted to do" etc, what they really mean is that "I had this other wants, and it was fairly large, but in the end it was smaller than something else" or that what they want NOW is different than what they wanted then.

A great resource for a very thorough discussion of this whole idea is actually a relatively entertaining essay by Mark Twain, called "What is Man?" It's relatively easy to find on a google search and I think is a pretty good example of what this truism is attempting to express.
Also, my personal take on instincts and twitches and such is that the "neurological foundation" here does not imply, as was discussed, a considered decision; it just means the brain/nerve center/whatever (excuse my ignorance of neural networks) experienced the greatest "desire" (as we'd call it) at that moment to perform that specific movement. At a level below what we'd colloquially "want", we really do want to stare at the CEO's wife's chest when she drops by during our performance evaluations. Though maybe it's not well-considered.