Totally agree although “consume” has a negative connotation I’d want to avoid.
Yeah, math nicely combines enjoyment, understanding, and creating to such a degree that it’s difficult to disentangle them.
Yeah, agreed. Any of these could be instrumental values or terminal values. Power can certainly be an end in itself for some, which is why I separated it out above.
Then wouldn’t you want them separate so you could distinguish the ethical from the unethical?
I’m not sure I’d say the drive for power is itself unethical, any more than any of the other drives are - unchecked, any of the drives could become Unfriendly like the paperclipper. It’s more how you go about gaining power and how you use it.
Maybe it’s my own bias, but I have a hard time seeing creating or caregiving as terminal values - they seem pretty instrumental to me. People create because they enjoy the act of creating or the things created, because they want to improve the world, or perhaps to gain understanding.
But there seem to be a lot of Creators on here, so I’d love to hear from them.
Same with caregiving - seems like it’s often done for power or to improve the world, or out of a sense of duty or doing the right thing (Hufflepuff). Is it really its own intrisic motivation?
The taxonomer example makes me wonder if anything could in theory be a fundamental motivation. The comment seems to indicate Hedonist and Philosopher leanings for taxonomizing, but what about someone who saw taxonomizing as an end in itself? Not to understand, create, or enjoy, but just to taxonomize?
But which category is that? Or would that fall under purely instrumental in that it could be used no matter what your fundamental motivation is?