Before Thought, There Is Want

Working notes, not prose. This page is a research packet for drafting the chapter: the brief, source material, questions, examples, reader perspectives, and the earlier draft.

Brief

Must: Start from cogito ergo sum and ask why I would think at all, and whether it would count as my thinking if I didn’t want to. Use that to show we recognize a character in anything or anyone that wants something, and that without volition a thing is barely more than part of the environment.
Serves: It makes wanting (volo ergo sum) what separates a someone from their surroundings, the first move of Act I’s lens.

Quote options

“But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain…” — René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637), Part IV, trans. John Veitch. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59/pg59.txt] Why: The chapter’s hinge. In the very sentence that gives us the cogito, Descartes “wished” to think before he thought. The want comes first.
“By the word thought, I understand all that which so takes place in us that we of ourselves are immediately conscious of it; and, accordingly, not only to understand (INTELLIGERE, ENTENDRE), to will (VELLE), to imagine (IMAGINARI), but even to perceive (SENTIRE, SENTIR), are here the same as to think (COGITARE, PENSER).” — René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), Part I, §9, trans. John Veitch. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4391/pg4391.txt] Why: Descartes’ own “cogito” already contains velle, which gives textual license to move from cogito to volo.
“It is thus plain from what has been said, that in no case do we strive for, wish for, long for, or desire anything, because we deem it to be good, but on the other hand we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it, wish for it, long for it, or desire it.” — Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677), Part III, Prop. 9, Scholium, trans. R. H. M. Elwes. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3800/pg3800.txt] (Prop. 6, same source: “Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being.”) Why: Striving comes before judgment, and conatus is the minimal “want” that makes something a someone.
“It is the inmost nature, the kernel, of every particular thing, and also of the whole. It appears in every blind force of nature and also in the preconsidered action of man; and the great difference between these two is merely in the degree of the manifestation, not in the nature of what manifests itself.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1 (1818), §21, trans. Haldane & Kemp. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/38427/pg38427.txt] Why: Will as the thing we recognize across scales. It is also the view to push against, since the chapter says the non-wanting is “barely more than environment”.
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Book II, Part III, Sect. III. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4705/pg4705.txt] Why: The strongest version of “why would I think at all?”: thinking runs in the service of wanting.

Research

Core argument

Begin where Descartes began, then look one step earlier. The cogito secures that something is thinking. It never asks why thinking is happening at all. Descartes’ own sentence says he “wished” to think everything false before he found the certainty (Quote option 1 in the chapter file), so the doubt was already driven by something that wanted certainty.
Ask the ownership question. Suppose thoughts ran through you that you did not want, did not steer and did not care about, like a radio playing in the next room. Would that be your thinking? Most readers will say not quite. Intrusive thoughts, earworms and the “it thinks” objection (Nietzsche, Lichtenberg) show that the bare occurrence of thought does not settle whose it is. What makes a thought mine is that it serves, resists or answers something I am leaning toward.
Thinking is a scout for wanting. Hobbes and Hume (Quote option 5) put it bluntly: thought ranges ahead to find the way to what is desired. Aristotle had already argued that mind never moves an animal without appetite. The neurology of athymhormia (loss of psychic self-activation) gives the modern case: take away the drive and the patient often reports an empty mind, yet can reason well when someone else supplies the push.
We recognize a someone by its wants. William James’s test: filings pressed against a card versus Romeo climbing the wall. A fixed end reached by varying means is what makes us see a mind. Heider and Simmel’s moving triangles show we apply this test instantly and involuntarily, even to shapes.
Character is want made visible. A character in a story, a pet, a rival or a Roomba with a name all become characters the moment we can say what they are after. Remove the want and a figure turns into scenery or plot device. Dennett’s intentional stance makes the same point formally: we treat a system as an agent when crediting it with desires lets us predict it.
Without volition, a thing is barely more than environment. A stone rolls where it is pushed, and a river bends where the land lets it. We can describe them fully by what acts on them. An agent adds a second source of direction: something from its side of the boundary that pushes back, persists and prefers. That extra direction is the first line between a someone and its surroundings, and Chapter 5 later formalizes it as a system boundary.
Scale the lens down carefully. A bacterium swimming up a sugar gradient already shows a fixed end and varied means (run-and-tumble). This is “want” in a functional sense (orientation, persistence, preference), not a claim that the bacterium feels anything. The earlier draft’s line is worth keeping: will is “a modest use of an old word with a cape.”
Separate wanting from liking and from reasons. Berridge’s work shows that wanting (incentive salience) and liking (pleasure) come apart. Your hand reaching for the phone (the earlier draft’s opening scene) is a want that arrives before the reason and sometimes without the pleasure. Being a someone does not mean being a good judge of one’s own wants.
Land on volo ergo sum as a lens, not a metaphysics. “I want, therefore I am a someone” is the claim. It is weaker than “I want, therefore I exist” and it does not settle consciousness. It gives Act I its first cut: players are the things that lean. Chapter 2 then fills the world with many leaners.

Key questions

Why would I think at all? What was Descartes doing before he doubted?
If a thought came to me without my wanting it, is it still my thought? What about an earworm, an intrusive thought or a dream?
Can there be thinking with no wanting behind it, even a faint want such as curiosity or the wish to finish a sentence?
Is curiosity a want? If so, is even “pure” contemplation driven?
When you describe your best friend, how much of the description is about what they want?
Why do we feel sorry for a Roomba stuck under a couch, and not for a chair stuck under one?
What is the smallest thing you would say “wants” something: a person, a dog, a fly, a bacterium, a thermostat, a river?
Is the wanting in the thing, or in the eye of whoever is watching it (Heider and Simmel, Dennett)? Does it matter, if the prediction works?
What would a person with no wants be like? Would we still call them “someone”? What do patients with athymhormia or akinetic mutism tell us?
Is a villain more of a character than a saint because their wants are louder?
Can you want something and not like it, or like something and not want it? Which one makes you a someone?
If advertising, algorithms or other people can install wants in me, are those wants still what makes me me?
Does a group (a company, a nation, a mob) want things? When we say “the market wants”, are we recognizing a someone or telling a story?
Why do religions and myths so often explain nature by giving it wants (angry seas, jealous gods)? What did that get right and what did it get wrong?
If an AI system reliably pursues goals by changing its means, does James’s test count it as a someone? What does that say about the test?
Is wanting what separates me from my environment, or is it the environment wanting through me (hunger, hormones, culture)?
Does “I want, therefore I am” survive the Buddhist claim that craving is exactly what builds a false self?
Is a sleepwalker who acts without wanting a someone at that moment?

Examples

Descartes by the stove (1619/1637). In Discourse on the Method Part II he describes spending a winter day shut in a stove-heated room with nothing to distract him, and Part IV opens with his decision to reject as false everything open to doubt. The whole project starts with a resolve, which makes it a scene of wanting, then thinking. Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59/pg59.txt
Iron filings versus Romeo; bubbles versus a frog. William James (1890) contrasts filings that press forever against a card with a lover who goes around the wall, and air bubbles trapped under an inverted jar with a frog that finds its way around the rim. Fixed end, varying means. Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57628/pg57628.txt (vol. 1, ch. 1)
Heider and Simmel’s triangles (1944). Participants watched a short silent film (about two and a half minutes) of a big triangle, a small triangle and a disc moving around a box. Almost everyone told a story of bullying, chasing, hiding and rescue, credited the shapes with intentions and personalities, and told broadly similar stories. Citation: Heider, F. & Simmel, M., “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior”, American Journal of Psychology 57(2): 243–259, doi:10.2307/1416950. Details via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Simmel. (The commonly cited figure, that only one of 34 participants described pure geometry, needs checking against the paper before use.) The film is online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9TWwG4SFWQ
Infants read goals. Gergely, Nádasdy, Csibra & Bíró (1995, Cognition 56: 165–193) showed that 12-month-olds expect a circle that “jumped” over a barrier to reach another circle to take a straight path once the barrier is removed. They treat it as an agent with an end. The appeal of James’s test shows up before language does. [check page numbers]
Toddlers help strangers reach their goals. Warneken & Tomasello (2006, Science 311: 1301–1303): 18-month-olds spontaneously picked up a dropped marker or opened a cabinet for an adult whose hands were full, but not when the adult dropped it on purpose. They helped only when they could see an unmet want. [check page numbers]
E. coli run-and-tumble. A bacterium swims in straight “runs” broken by random “tumbles”; when things are improving it tumbles less, so it drifts up an attractant gradient. There is no map and no plan, yet it shows a fixed end with variable paths, which is the minimal case of want. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotaxis (primary: Berg & Brown 1972, Nature 239: 500–504).
Slime mould in a maze. Nakagaki, Yamada & Tóth (2000, Nature 407: 470) put Physarum polycephalum in a maze with food at two exits; it retracted from dead ends and settled on the shortest path. It raises the question of where “wanting” starts, and whether it needs a brain. [check against paper]
Loss of psychic self-activation (athymhormia). Patients, often with bilateral basal-ganglia lesions (Laplane and colleagues, 1980s), sit motionless and report a mental blank. Yet when prompted they can carry out complex physical and mental tasks for as long as someone keeps prompting them. Intellect is intact; self-starting wanting is gone, and thought seems to go with it. This is the clinical version of the chapter’s opening question. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athymhormia ; Habib, M. (2004), “Athymhormia and disorders of motivation in basal ganglia disease”, J. Neuropsychiatry Clin. Neurosci. 16(4): 509–524.
Akinetic mutism. First described by Cairns et al. (1941, Brain 64: 273–290): patients are awake, eyes follow the examiner, not paralyzed, but lack the volition to move or speak. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetic_mutism
Elliot and the Iowa Gambling Task. Damasio’s patient “Elliot” (Descartes’ Error, 1994) lost part of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex after surgery for a tumour. He kept normal IQ and could lay out options at length but could not settle on a choice. Bechara et al. built the Iowa Gambling Task to measure this. Reasoning without felt weighting stalls. Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8941953/
Wanting without liking. In Berridge’s lab, suppressing dopamine in rats reduces how hard they work for sugar (“wanting”) but not their pleasure facial reactions when sugar is placed in their mouths (“liking”). Source: Berridge, Robinson & Aldridge 2009, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2756052/
Libet’s readiness potential (1983). Brain activity ramps up roughly 500 ms before a spontaneous finger movement, and subjects report the urge about 200 ms before it. Later work (Schurger et al., 2012, PNAS) reinterpreted the ramp as accumulating noise rather than a hidden decision. Useful for “the hand is on the phone before the reason,” with an honest caveat. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet
Named Roombas. Studies of home robot vacuums (Sung, Guo, Grinter & Christensen, “My Roomba is Rambo”, UbiComp 2007) found owners naming them, dressing them and “cleaning up for” them. A device that appears to pursue something gets a character. [check citation]
Braitenberg’s vehicles (1984). Valentino Braitenberg’s thought experiment: two light sensors wired to two wheels. Wire them one way and the vehicle “fears” light; cross the wires and it “attacks” it. Observers read emotion and intent into two wires. (Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, MIT Press, 1984.)
Civilization scale: Te Awa Tupua (2017). New Zealand’s Parliament gave the Whanganui River the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person, ending the longest-running litigation in the country’s history. The minister, Chris Finlayson, said it was “no stranger than family trusts, or companies.” It shows a culture deciding that something counts as a someone, and it is a good test case: does the river want anything, or do the people who speak for it? Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whanganui_River
Everyday: the phone reach (from the earlier draft): pull, then feeling, then explanation, then endorsement. It is the chapter’s home-scale example of want arriving before thought.

Source material

“Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card.” — William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890), ch. 1, “The Scope of Psychology.” [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57628/pg57628.txt] Use: The chapter’s central image for how we recognize a someone. It could anchor step 4, or open the chapter instead of Descartes.
“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance.” — William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890), ch. 1. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57628/pg57628.txt] Use: States the test outright. The very next line (“We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything”) supports “barely more than environment.”
“For the Thoughts, are to the Desires, as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired … For as to have no Desire, is to be Dead” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Part I, ch. 8, “Of the Vertues Commonly Called Intellectual.” [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3207/pg3207.txt] Use: A direct answer to “why would I think at all?” It is earlier and more vivid than Hume’s “slave of the passions” (already in the chapter’s quote options). The same passage says a man with no great passion “cannot possibly have either a great Fancy, or much Judgement.”
“a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think."" — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), §17, trans. Helen Zimmern. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4363/pg4363.txt] Use: The strongest challenge to the cogito’s “I”, and it is worded in terms of wishing. It sets up the ownership question (step 2). §19, in the same text, warns that willing “is a unity only in name,” which is a good caution for step 9.
“mind is never found producing movement without appetite (for wish is a form of appetite; and when movement is produced according to calculation it is also according to wish), but appetite can originate movement contrary to calculation” — Aristotle, De Anima III.10 (433a), trans. J. A. Smith. [verified: https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.3.iii.html] Use: Shows that “want before thought” is roughly 2,300 years old; the chapter is renaming an old insight, not inventing one. In III.9 the same text also says “no animal moves except by compulsion unless it has an impulse towards or away from an object.”
“My weight, is my love; thereby am I borne, whithersoever I am borne.” — Augustine, Confessions (c. 397–400), Book XIII, ch. 9, trans. E. B. Pusey. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3296/pg3296.txt] Use: A beautiful and risky counterpoint. In the same passage Augustine says stones and fire “seek their own places,” which blurs the line between a thing’s tendency and a someone’s want. It is good for testing whether “barely more than environment” holds.
“Usually a brain ‘likes’ the rewards that it ‘wants’. But sometimes it may just ‘want’ them. Research has established that ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’ rewards are dissociable both psychologically and neurobiologically.” — Kent C. Berridge, Terry E. Robinson & J. Wayne Aldridge, “Dissecting components of reward: ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning,” Current Opinion in Pharmacology 9(1): 65–73 (2009). [verified: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2756052/] Use: Supports step 8. The want that marks a someone is not the same as pleasure, and it can run without it (the phone reach).
“first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have” — Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (MIT Press, 1987), ch. 2 “True Believers,” p. 17. [verified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance, a secondary source; check against the book before print] Use: Formalizes “we recognize a character in anything that wants.” It also raises the question the author must answer: is want something we find, or something we attribute?

Counterarguments and limits

Projection, not detection. Heider and Simmel, Braitenberg and the Roomba show that people see wants where there are none. If our want-detector fires at triangles, then “we recognize a character in anything that wants” might just mean “we recognize a character in anything that moves a certain way.” The chapter should grant this and argue that the attribution is still useful (Dennett), while saying clearly where it misleads (animism, conspiracy thinking, “the market wants”).
The cogito is about certainty, not motivation. Descartes was not claiming thought is the origin of the self in a causal sense. He wanted an indubitable starting point. A philosopher will say “volo ergo sum” answers a different question. Answer: agreed. The chapter is asking a different, earlier question, and the move should be framed as a sidestep, not a refutation. Note too that Descartes counts velle (willing) as a kind of cogitare (Quote option 2), so volo may simply be one case of cogito.
Wanting is also doubtable. I can be wrong about what I want (confabulation, Wegner’s work on the illusion of conscious will, Libet). If the cogito’s value was certainty, volo ergo sum loses it. The chapter should make volo a lens, not a certainty.
Continuum problem. If a bacterium “wants”, why not a thermostat, a candle flame that “seeks” oxygen, or a river “seeking” the sea? The line between want and tendency is graded. The chapter needs a criterion. Candidates: James’s varied means; self-maintenance (autopoiesis, Maturana and Varela); or doing work to stay far from equilibrium. The chapter should admit that any criterion is a cut (anticipating Act II).
“Barely more than environment” is harsh. It could be read as demoting people with severe apathy, coma or advanced dementia, as well as plants and ecosystems. Athymhormic patients are still persons. Be clear that the claim concerns how agents are individuated, not how much they matter. Ethics comes later (Chapter 3).
The Buddhist and Stoic objection. Some traditions treat wanting as the thing to quiet, not the thing that makes you real. Are practitioners who reduce craving becoming less of a someone? A possible reply: they redirect or refine wanting (the want for peace or liberation) rather than end it, but that reply should be tested honestly.
Social origin of wants. Girard (mimetic desire) and advertising show that many wants are borrowed. If wanting separates me from my environment, but my wants come from my environment, the separation is porous. This is a setup for Chapter 5’s “never a system in complete isolation.”
Libet is contested. Do not use it as proof that “want precedes thought.” Schurger et al. (2012) reinterpret the readiness potential as noise, not a hidden decision.
Anthropocentric vocabulary. “Want” carries human connotations. The earlier draft’s functional definition (organized so some changes support its activity and others disrupt it) is safer and should be stated early.

Connections

Preface: motion, then pattern, then life. Wanting marks the step where pattern starts holding itself together, so the chapter can point back to it.
Prologue: the humility contract. Mark volo ergo sum explicitly as a lens and mark what is unknown (consciousness in simple systems).
Chapter 2 (Will Creates Difference): many leaners in one ecosystem; the E. coli and slime-mould examples can hand off there. Sapolsky’s layers explain why a want arises.
Chapter 3 (Love, Growth, and Meaning): Augustine’s “my weight is my love” is a natural bridge, since wants that include others come next.
Chapter 4 (Subjectivity): the projection objection (triangles, Roombas) foreshadows the limits of seeing into other minds.
Act I close (Unnatural in Volition): this chapter defines volition functionally. The close then asks how far human wanting exceeds animal wanting (second-order wants, wanting to want).
Chapter 5 (First Blade: Me and World): “without volition a thing is barely more than environment” is the informal version of the system boundary; the porousness objection lives there.
Chapter 7 (Third Blade: Good and Bad): good and bad as survival starts from the bacterium’s gradient; wanting gives the first valence.
Chapter 10 (Thingification): legal personhood for rivers and corporations shows cultures deciding who counts as a someone.
Chapter 18 (Loops That Learn): Hofstadter’s strange loop as an alternative account of what makes an I, which could be compared with “want.”

Exercise ideas

The triangle test (10 minutes). Watch the Heider and Simmel film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9TWwG4SFWQ) once with no instructions. Then write three sentences describing what happened. Circle every verb that implies wanting (chase, hide, try, want, escape). Then try to rewrite the story using only geometry: positions, speeds, contacts. Notice: how hard the geometric version is, and how quickly the shapes became characters the moment you could say what each one was after. Why: It shows the chapter’s claim that we recognize a someone by its wants, and it shows the projection risk that comes with that recognition.
The wall test (one day). Pick three things you watch today: a person, an animal or insect, and a machine or natural process (a robot vacuum, a river, a thermostat, a plant turning to light). For each, ask James’s question: when something blocks it, does it press against the obstacle, or does it find another way to the same end? Write one line per case: “Fixed path” or “fixed end, varying means.” Notice: which ones you felt were “someone” before you tested them, and whether the test agreed with your gut. Why: It turns the chapter’s criterion for separating a someone from environment into something the reader can apply. It also shows where the line blurs.
Why am I thinking this? (three times in one day). When you notice you have been thinking about something for a while, stop and ask: “What do I want that this thought is serving?” Write the want in five words or fewer. If you find none, write “none” and note whether the thought felt like yours. Notice: how often a want sits behind a thought (to be right, to be safe, to finish, to be liked), and whether the “none” cases feel more like weather passing through than like your own thinking. Why: It tests the chapter’s opening question, whether it would count as my thinking if I didn’t want to, on the reader’s own mind. It replaces the earlier four-field “Before the explanation arrives” exercise with a single question tied to the argument.

Open questions for the author

Opening scene: Descartes (the chapter’s must-have), the phone reach (earlier draft), or James’s Romeo? A possible order: phone reach as the hook, Descartes as the argument, Romeo as the test.
Strength of the claim: Is volo ergo sum “I want, therefore I am” (existence) or “I want, therefore I am someone” (individuation)? The second is far easier to defend.
The criterion: Which test for wanting will the book commit to? James’s varied means, self-maintenance (autopoiesis) or Dennett’s predictive usefulness? The choice shapes Chapter 5.
How far down: Does the book grant functional want to bacteria and slime moulds explicitly? To thermostats and AI systems? It needs a stated position on AI, since readers will ask.
“Barely more than environment”: keep the phrase (it is vivid) but add the clarification that it concerns individuation, not moral worth? Or soften it?
Wanting versus liking: introduce Berridge here, or save it for Chapter 7 (good and bad)?
Nietzsche’s “it thinks”: does the chapter adopt it (thought happens to us and the want is what makes it ours) or push back?
Tone of the religious and mystical counterpoint: engage the Buddhist view of craving here, or defer it to Chapter 21?
Unverified details to check before drafting: the Heider and Simmel participant counts; the Gergely 1995 and Warneken and Tomasello 2006 page numbers; the Roomba study citation; Dennett p. 17 against the book itself.

Reader perspectives

Curious young child

First reactions:

“I think therefore I am” sounds silly: “Obviously I am. I’m right here.” The kid doesn’t see why anyone needed to prove it, which is a useful reaction to have on record.
“I want therefore I am” makes instant sense to them. Wanting is the loudest thing in a kid’s day: wanting the swing, the last cookie, five more minutes.
The phone example is an adult habit. The kid equivalent is the hand already in the candy bowl before they decided anything.
“Without wanting, a thing is barely more than part of the environment” delights and unsettles them: “So my pet rock is just… background? But I love him.”
They like that you can spot a “character” by seeing what it wants. That’s how cartoons work.

Questions they’d ask:

“Why would I think if I didn’t want to? Sometimes thoughts just come, like the scary thought at bedtime. Did I want that?”
“If I think about a math problem only because the teacher makes me, is that still my thinking?”
“Does my cat want things or does she just do things?”
“Does a plant want the sun? It leans at the window like it wants it.”
“Does a Venus flytrap want flies?”
“Does the car want to go? Dad talks to it like it does.”
“Does a bacterium get hungry? Does it have a tummy?”
“What if I want two things at once, like the swing AND the slide? Am I two people?”
“If a toy robot moves toward the light, does it want the light?”
“What’s the difference between wanting and needing? Mom says I don’t need a new toy, I just want one.”
“Can you stop wanting? What happens to you then?”
“Why did my hand grab the cookie before my brain said yes?”

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

The four-way split (pull, feeling, explanation, endorsement) is exactly the right idea, but “endorsement” is a grown-up word. “Do I still want it after I think about it?” works.
“These layers trying to borrow one another’s coats” is a lovely image but they’d take it literally and ask whose coat.
The Damasio paragraph (brain damage, somatic markers, choosing becomes difficult) is abstract. The kid would want the actual story: a person who could talk perfectly well about choices but got stuck choosing. Tell it plainly, and say the details come from Damasio’s patient accounts in Descartes’ Error (1994).
“Will is a functional word for the lean” can’t be understood without a picture of leaning: a sunflower turning, a dog pulling on a leash toward a smell.
They’ll be unconvinced by the claim that non-wanting things are “barely more than environment” if their stuffed animal counts as a someone to them. The chapter should say kids (and adults) give wants to things that don’t have them, and that this is how we spot characters.

Examples they’d bring:

The Venus flytrap: it only snaps shut after its trigger hairs are touched twice within a short time, so it isn’t fooled by a single raindrop. Is that “wanting”, or just a clever trap? It’s the right borderline case for “barely more than environment”.
A dog on a walk pulling toward a smell: a wanting you can literally feel through the leash. Want made visible.
The marshmallow test: Walter Mischel’s Stanford experiments (from the late 1960s) where kids could have one marshmallow now or two if they waited. Kids know this instantly. It’s pull versus endorsement, and it’s their age group.
A Roomba bumping around: it “looks” like it wants to clean, but does it? This is where kids naturally draw the character/environment line.
A baby crying before it can talk: wanting clearly comes before thinking in words. It’s the strongest everyday case for volo before cogito.
Sunflowers: young sunflowers track the sun across the day. A plant that looks like it wants.

What would win them over:

A test the kid can apply: “Does it try again if you block it?” A dog does, a plant sort of does, a rock doesn’t.
Letting Descartes be a bit funny: he said he “wished” to think everything was false. So he wanted something first!
Taking their stuffed animal seriously: explain that seeing wants everywhere is how brains find characters, even when it’s wrong.
The phrase “I want, therefore I am” as something to chant.

Cynical adult

First reactions:

“Volo ergo sum.” Clever, but Schopenhauer got there in 1818 and Nietzsche turned it into a whole career. What’s new?
The phone-before-decision opening is the strongest, most recognizable thing in Act I. Keep it.
“Pull, feeling, explanation, endorsement” is actually useful. It’s also basically Harry Frankfurt’s first-order and second-order desires with a new coat. Credit it.
“An old word with a cape” is funny. Then the chapter dilutes “will” to “a system organized to approach or avoid,” and at that level of dilution a thermostat qualifies. That seems to empty the word out.
The brief says “without volition a thing is barely more than part of the environment.” That’s a big claim with ugly consequences (coma patients? infants? severe depression?). The draft quietly doesn’t make it. Which is it?

Questions they’d ask:

Descartes “wished” to think. Isn’t that just the translator’s verb choice? Would it survive the Latin or the French original?
If a bacterium “wants” and I “want,” is “want” doing any work, or is it a word that fits everything and so explains nothing?
Do I get to choose my wants, or only notice them? If only notice, what’s the point of “endorsement”?
Someone deeply depressed wants nothing. Are they “barely more than environment”? Answer that before a reader who has been there answers it for you.
You cite Damasio. Hasn’t the somatic-marker hypothesis been seriously criticized? What’s the current standing?
Is this just “your gut decides and your brain justifies,” which I’ve already read in Kahneman and Haidt?
Who benefits from telling me my reasons arrive after my hand? Advertisers love that idea.
Why do we see characters in things that want? Is that a truth about wanting, or a bug in how we see (the reason people name their Roomba)?
What changes if I accept volo ergo sum instead of cogito? Show me a single decision.
Is “What pull has already begun?” an actual technique with evidence behind it, or a nice sentence?
Is my phone habit “want” or a designed compulsion? Is there a difference, and does the book care?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Unconvinced: the move from “I wished to think” to “wanting precedes thinking” risks leaning on one English verb in Veitch’s translation. The Principles §9 quote (thought includes velle) is the stronger textual footing, but it arguably cuts the other way: for Descartes, willing is a kind of thinking, not prior to it. A skeptic who knows Descartes will pounce. Address it head on.
Unconvinced: “we recognize a character in anything that wants.” That’s the setup for Dennett’s intentional stance, and the obvious rejoinder is that we also see characters in things that don’t want (clouds, cars, triangles on a screen). The chapter has to handle over-attribution or the claim looks naive.
Offended: “without volition a thing is barely more than part of the environment,” read by someone caring for a parent with advanced dementia. Needs care and explicit limits.
Bored: the Damasio paragraph is hedged into mush (“a specific, useful claim. It does not make feeling infallible, and it does not reduce thought…”). Either tell the Phineas Gage / patient “Elliot” story properly, or cut it.
Lost: “In this book, will is a functional word for the lean.” So will = lean = orientation = pull = want? Five near-synonyms in one chapter. Fix one term and define it once.
Preachy: “Use [Before the explanation arrives]…” A practice link mid-argument feels like a sales page.

Examples they’d bring:

Heider and Simmel (1944), “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” American Journal of Psychology. People watching moving triangles and a circle describe a bully, a chase and a romance. It’s real evidence for “we see a character wherever something seems to want,” and also the warning that we see it when nothing is there.
Libet et al. (1983), readiness potential appearing before reported awareness of the decision to move. It’s the famous “the hand before the explanation” study, and it’s heavily disputed since (e.g., Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene 2012, PNAS, reinterpreting the readiness potential as accumulated noise). A cynic knows both halves and will judge the book by whether it does.
Nisbett and Wilson (1977), “Telling More Than We Can Know,” Psychological Review. People confidently give reasons for choices that were actually driven by position effects (the stockings study). It’s direct support for “the explanation arrives after.”
Infinite scroll and the notification badge. A cynic’s example of a want engineered by someone else. It sharpens the question of whose want it is.
Quitting smoking. The textbook case of a first-order want (a cigarette) at war with a second-order want (to not want one). It’s Frankfurt’s “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (1971, Journal of Philosophy) in a form everyone knows.
Burnout / anhedonia. Wanting that has gone quiet. It tests whether the chapter’s definition of a someone survives contact with an ordinary bad year.

What would win them over:

Name the lineage (Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Hume, Frankfurt, Dennett), then state plainly what this chapter claims that they don’t.
Show where the lens fails: over-attribution (triangles, Roombas) and under-attribution (the depressed person). Draw the line and admit it is a choice.
Give one crisp consequence: “If wanting comes first, then arguing someone out of a belief with reasons alone will usually fail. Here’s what to do instead.”
Handle the Descartes translation issue openly. Getting a classic exactly right is the fastest way to earn a skeptic’s trust.

Believer / spiritual reader

First reactions:

Volo ergo sum is an old Augustinian intuition. Augustine: “my weight is my love; by it I am carried wherever I am carried” (pondus meum amor meus, Confessions XIII.9). A Christian reader will be delighted and then annoyed that Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Hume get the stage while Augustine, who put will and love at the centre of the self 1,200 years before Descartes, is absent.
The Buddhist reader splits. Yes, craving (taṇhā) is what drives the whole cycle, but a self defined by wanting is the Buddhist diagnosis, not a definition to celebrate. They would push back hard on wanting as what makes a “someone”.
The Hindu reader recognizes it immediately. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.4.5 ties what a person is to their desire, then their resolve, then their deed. The book is restating a Vedantic claim as if new.
The phone-reach example is a nice, humble start. The four layers (pull, feeling, explanation, endorsement) resemble the desert fathers’ analysis of how a thought (logismos) moves from suggestion to consent, and that resemblance is worth knowing.
“Without volition a thing is barely more than part of the environment” worries anyone who holds that stones, rivers or the land have standing (Shinto kami, many Indigenous traditions, Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures with Brother Sun and Sister Water).

Questions they’d ask:

If wanting makes a someone, does God want? Does the Ground of Being lean? Or is the divine precisely what is beyond want?
Is the monk who has sincerely extinguished craving less of a someone, or more? Your definition seems to make the arhat disappear.
Where do good wants come from? Augustine would say the problem isn’t wanting but disordered love (ordo amoris). Does the book have a way to rank wants?
“Would it count as my thinking if I didn’t want to?” What about prayer that comes unbidden, or intrusive thoughts? Are those mine?
You call “will” a functional word for “the lean”. Isn’t the lean what traditions call conatus, nafs, yetzer, taṇhā? Which one are you closest to?
If a bacterium “leans”, is there an ethical line between it and me, or only a difference of degree (as Schopenhauer says)?
Endorsement, meaning whether I would choose it again: from where do I endorse? Is that another want, or something like conscience?
Is the goal to act on wants, to watch them, or to transform them? Religions differ sharply, and the chapter doesn’t say.
Would you treat a sense of vocation, “being called”, as a want like the phone-reach, or as something of a different kind?
Does “none acquires authority simply by being noticed” apply to the desire for God?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Unconvinced by “the want comes first” as a reading of Descartes’s “wished”. Religious readers who know Augustine’s si fallor, sum (“if I am deceived, I am”, City of God XI.26) will say the cogito’s lineage runs through a theologian who already paired being with loving.
Bothered that the chapter treats wanting as morally neutral data. Every tradition they know says the quality of wanting is the whole question: the Gita’s desire without attachment to fruits (2.47), the Buddha’s three roots (greed, hatred, delusion), Paul’s flesh and spirit.
Lost in the bacterium paragraph (“an old word with a cape”). The joke works, but it drops the reader from the self into microbiology just when the soul question is live.
Bored by the Damasio aside if it stays a lab result. It needs a human face.

Examples they’d bring:

Augustine, Confessions I.1: “our heart is restless until it rests in you”. The purest statement that a human is constituted by a want. A believer would argue this is the want under all the phone-reaches.
Midrash Genesis Rabbah 9:7: were it not for the evil inclination (yetzer hara), no one would build a house, marry, have children or do business. The rabbis already said that raw wanting is what makes a creature go, and that it is “very good” (Gen 1:31) even when dangerous.
The hadith “Actions are only by intentions (niyyah)” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, hadith 1). Islam begins its most important hadith collection with volition as what makes an act yours, close to the chapter’s endorsement layer.
The Second Noble Truth (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, SN 56.11): craving as the origin of dukkha. This is the necessary counterweight, because a whole civilization built its practice on not identifying with wanting.
Evagrius Ponticus and later the Philokalia’s account of how a passing thought becomes consent, then action. It is a pre-modern version of pull → feeling → explanation → endorsement.

What would win them over:

Putting Augustine next to Descartes and naming the Buddhist objection squarely. Wanting makes a someone, and some of humanity’s deepest traditions say the someone is the problem. Let the chapter hold both.
Adding a line on ordering wants, not just noticing them, even as a promise the book keeps later.
Softening “barely more than environment” for non-wanting things so it doesn’t read as a verdict that the world is dead matter.

Skeptical scientist

First reactions:

Volo ergo sum is a fun inversion, but “want” is doing at least three jobs: a bacterium’s chemotactic bias, a dopaminergic urge, and a reflectively endorsed desire. The draft separates pull, feeling, explanation and endorsement well for humans, then collapses them again under “will” for cells. Keep the layers separate all the way down.
The brief’s claim that “without volition a thing is barely more than part of the environment” is an interesting, contestable hypothesis about how humans attribute agency. It is not a finding about what agency is. The chapter should keep those two apart. The developmental psychology on agency detection is strong; the metaphysics is not.
The Damasio paragraph is well hedged, but it cites the somatic-marker hypothesis without mentioning that its flagship evidence (the Iowa Gambling Task) has been seriously challenged.
Using the thermostat test is unavoidable. If “will” means “organized so some changes support its activity,” the reader will ask whether a thermostat or a candle flame wants. The chapter has to answer that.
The “hand on the phone before you decided” opening invites Libet, and readers who know Libet know it has been reinterpreted. If the chapter gestures at it, it must be current.

Questions they’d ask:

Operationally, what distinguishes a system that wants from one that merely has a stable attractor? A ball rolling to the bottom of a bowl “approaches” something.
Is “wanting” in your sense the same as Berridge’s “wanting” (incentive salience, dopamine-dependent), which he showed dissociates from “liking”? If not, pick another word, because neuroscientists already own this one.
Would it count as my thinking if I didn’t want to? What about mind-wandering, intrusive thoughts and earworms? Those are thoughts I didn’t want and still clearly mine.
What about patients with akinetic mutism or severe abulia, who are awake but show little spontaneous initiation? Are they less of a someone? That is the brief’s claim taken literally, and it has ethical weight.
When you say “we recognize a character in anything that wants,” is that about us (an agency-detection bias) or about the world? Heider and Simmel’s triangles “want” things too.
E. coli’s chemotaxis uses a short memory (about a few seconds, via receptor methylation) to compare now against then. Is that minimal memory what earns the word “orientation”? If so, say so. It is a lovely precise fact.
Does Descartes’ “wished to think” really support volo over cogito, or is it a translation artifact? Check the French (“je voulais ainsi penser”).
If reasons arrive after the hand, what evidence says they are usually post hoc, rather than sometimes?
Where does a plant fall? Where does a slime mold fall? Where does an LLM fall?
What prediction does “want precedes thought” make that “thought and want co-arise” doesn’t?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

“Will is a functional word for the lean: a system is organized so that some changes support its activity.” That covers thermostats, flames and hurricanes, not only living things. Either accept panpsychism-lite openly or add the missing criterion: self-production, meaning the system builds and repairs the components that do the leaning (autopoiesis, Maturana and Varela). This is the scientific crux of the chapter, and the draft doesn’t touch it.
The phone example leans on the intuition that the action preceded the decision. If the author reaches for Libet (1983), be aware that Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (2012, PNAS) showed the readiness potential can arise from stochastic neural noise crossing a threshold. That undercuts the “decision made before you knew it” reading.
The somatic-marker evidence: Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio (1997, Science) reported advantageous choices before conscious knowledge in the Iowa Gambling Task. Maia & McClelland (2004, PNAS) found that with better questioning, participants had substantial conscious knowledge earlier than claimed. The draft’s hedging is good, but it should name this dispute.
Calling a cell’s behavior “will” and a person’s behavior “will” risks offending biologists (anthropomorphism) and philosophers (it deflates volition to the point where Act I’s close, “unnatural in volition,” loses its contrast). The chapter needs a scale or a ladder of wanting with clear rungs.

Examples they’d bring:

Heider & Simmel (1944), American Journal of Psychology: people watching animated triangles and a circle describe bullying, chasing and courtship. It is direct evidence for the brief’s “we recognize a character in anything that wants,” and it also shows how cheaply we over-attribute.
Gergely, Nádasdy, Csibra & Bíró (1995), Cognition, “Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age”: infants expect a goal-directed dot to take efficient paths. Goal attribution is early and automatic.
Berg & Brown (1972), Nature: tracking of E. coli’s run-and-tumble motion. Bacteria bias tumbling based on whether attractant concentration is rising. It is precise, beautiful minimal “orientation” with no need for feeling.
Berridge & Robinson (1998), Brain Research Reviews: dopamine depletion abolishes “wanting” (working for food) while “liking” (hedonic facial reactions) persists in rats. This is empirical support for the draft’s pull/feeling separation.
Nakagaki, Yamada & Tóth (2000), Nature: the slime mold Physarum polycephalum finds the shortest path through a maze to food with no neurons. It is a good borderline case for “someone versus environment.”
Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010), Science, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”: people’s minds wandered in about 47% of sampled moments. That is a lot of thinking nobody chose, a direct challenge to “would it be my thinking if I didn’t want to.”

What would win them over:

An explicit ladder of wanting (gradient-following, then self-maintaining and self-repairing, then learned incentive, then felt desire, then reflectively endorsed will), with an example organism at each rung and a note on where the evidence thins.
A precise criterion that excludes thermostats and flames (self-production or autopoiesis, or a stake in one’s own persistence), stated once.
Honest handling of Libet and the Iowa Gambling Task, current as of Schurger (2012) and Maia & McClelland (2004).
Separating “we detect agency in wanting things” (well supported) from “wanting constitutes being a someone” (philosophical stipulation), and labeling which is which.

Earlier draft

From “Before Thought, There Is Want”

Your hand is already on the phone before you have decided to pick it up. There is a small disappointment when nothing new is there. Then comes the explanation: a break, a habit, research, a deserved minute. The explanation may be perfectly respectable. It has also arrived after the hand.

It helps to separate a few things that ordinarily arrive in one unruly bundle. There is the pull: the movement toward the screen. There may be a feeling: boredom, anticipation, unease, comfort. There is an explanation: why this seems sensible or necessary. And there is endorsement: whether, after noticing all that, you want to continue.

None of these cancels the others. An urge can be vivid without being a command. A reason can be good without being the first thing that moved you. You might enjoy something you later decide not to do; you might keep a difficult appointment that brings no immediate pleasure. Much of adult life consists of these layers trying to borrow one another’s coats.

Antonio Damasio’s somatic-marker work gives one reason to take the bodily layer seriously. In studies of people with damage affecting emotional signalling, articulate reasoning can remain while choosing becomes unusually difficult. Bodily and emotional signals can help make one option matter more than another. That is a specific, useful claim. It does not make feeling infallible, and it does not reduce thought to decorative aftercare.

Go lower, but change the question. A bacterium moves toward some chemical conditions and away from others. We can describe that orientation from the outside. We should not infer that it feels hunger, has a private point of view, or deliberates over lunch. In this book, will is a functional word for the lean: a system is organized so that some changes support its activity and others disrupt it. It is a modest use of an old word with a cape.

“Volo ergo sum”—I will, therefore I am—is a starting lens, not a conclusion about consciousness. It asks what a creature is organized to approach, avoid, preserve, or change before asking what it can say about itself. A hungry person, a dog following a scent, and a cell crossing a chemical gradient are not versions of one mind. They are different kinds of systems that can all be described, carefully, as oriented.

The lens is most useful close to home. Suppose you keep scrolling after the pleasure has gone. Perhaps you want the next surprising thing. Perhaps you want rest but have not arranged it. Perhaps an uncomfortable thought is waiting in the quiet. These are possibilities, not diagnoses. The question “What should I do?” remains important. Beside it, try: “What pull has already begun?”

Use Before the explanation arrives with one ordinary reach. Name the immediate pull, the feeling, the reason you give, and the enjoyment that follows. Then ask whether you would choose it again. Leave a field blank if it does not fit. Several motives may become visible; none acquires authority simply by being noticed.

Once several beings are leaning from different places, life gets more interesting. The next question is what happens when those directions meet at the same window, stove, table, or patch of world.