Compiled entry

Volo Ergo Sum

Volo Ergo Sum

“I want, therefore I am” — the claim that wanting, not thinking, is the most fundamental observable fact of being alive.

Overview

Volo ergo sum is the book’s name for a deliberate shift in philosophical starting point. Descartes’ cogito placed thinking at the foundation of being: to doubt is to think; to think is to exist. The book argues this locates the floor several storeys too high. The subtitle of Chapter 1 — “Thought, feelings, want — climbing down the stack” — names the move: walk down the stairs.

The stack has three explicit floors. Thought is the first floor: explicit propositions, arguments, what Descartes took as his bedrock. Feelings sit underneath it: the continuous somatic/affective signal the body uses to orient before anything reaches words. This is the layer we share with every animal that turns toward or away, and Damasio’s work makes it precise — patients with intact reasoning but damaged somatic signalling cannot decide; they list pros and cons forever because the feelings that normally collapse deliberation into action are gone. Feelings are not an ornament on cognition; they are the substrate cognition runs on. Below feelings is the basement: want, present even in creatures with no nervous system. A bacterium following a sugar gradient does not feel hunger, because there is no feeling machinery, but it unmistakably leans. Chemotaxis is wanting in its minimal form: an orientation, an asymmetry between toward and away.

Thought rides on feeling; feeling rides on want. The claim is observable at every level of life. A bacterium turns toward a sugar gradient without consulting anything like cognition. A newborn roots for milk before it has formed any concept. A human adult can find their own want in any moment by checking where their attention is already pointing before any deliberation begins. Want, in this sense, is not confined to conscious desire: it names the entire layer of oriented, motivated motion — attraction, aversion, care, preference — most of which never reaches awareness. Will, in the book’s vocabulary, is want’s broader name: the whole motivated layer, not just what reaches conscious choice.

The philosophical lineage is explicit: Schopenhauer’s will-as-thing-in-itself is the most direct ancestor. Spinoza’s conatus (we judge something good because we strive for it, not the reverse) establishes the same ontological priority. The enactivist tradition — Varela, Thompson, and Rosch — shows that wanting and orienting are not add-ons to cognition but its substrate. Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis provides the neuroscientific grounding: without bodily feeling as a first-order signal, deliberation cannot proceed even when reasoning is intact. Across Descartes’ Error, Self Comes to Mind, Feeling and Knowing, and The Strange Order of Things, Damasio builds a coherent line from emotion and embodiment through consciousness to culture as an outgrowth of life-regulation — not a rebuke to biology but its continuation at a new layer.

The biological mechanism underlying wanting is homeostatic regulation: organisms maintain viability by detecting deviations from set-points and acting to correct them. Interoception — the body’s sensing of its own internal states — is the informational substrate for what reaches experience as hunger, pain, desire, or ease. The concept of allostasis extends this: not a single fixed set-point but an anticipatory, adaptive regulatory system that adjusts its targets based on predicted need. Wanting, in this reading, is not a decorative overlay on a neutral information-processing machine; it is the regulatory signal that the machine runs on. The enactivist phrase for this — the organism enacts its world — captures the same observation: from the first moment of life, living matter is not passively receiving the world but actively composing a viable version of it through motivated engagement.

Key claims

  • The stack is layered: thought sits on feelings, feelings sit on want. Most of the book’s arguments operate at the want layer, the one shared by every living thing. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • Feelings are the affective/somatic layer shared with animals; Damasio’s somatic-marker work shows decision-making collapses when this layer is damaged, even with reasoning intact. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • Want goes further down than feelings. A bacterium has no feelings, yet it leans along a chemical gradient. Lean is the minimum definition of wanting. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • Want is the lowest common denominator of life — shared by bacteria, plants, mammals, and humans without flattening any of them. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • Thought presupposes a thinker oriented toward something; that orientation is want, so thought rides on want, not the other way around. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • Will is not the same as conscious choice; it is the entire layer of motivated motion, most of which never reaches awareness. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • Refusing to start with want forces you to invent ghosts (pure reason, free-floating subjects) to do the work that wanting was already doing. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • The wanting layer is the floor, not the ceiling; the claim is about priority, not sufficiency. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
  • Homeostatic regulation and interoceptive feeling are the biological substrate of wanting; the felt signal precedes the deliberative response. — Source: /dump/overall.md
  • Self-determination theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the central conditions for healthy, self-endorsed action — a specification of what wanting needs to remain aligned. — Source: /dump/overall.md

Consequences traced across the book

The premise propagates through every subsequent act:

  • Difference (Ch. 2): when beings want from different positions, variation and individuality arise as free side-effects.
  • Love/Growth/Meaning (Ch. 3): these three are the same thing seen from different angles — what oriented wanting looks like when it aligns, expands, and persists.
  • The Three Blades (Ch. 5–7): the cuts a wanting creature makes to become operative in the world.
  • The MMM Loop (Ch. 13–15): the mechanism by which wanting creatures grow.

Connections

  • [[Act 1 — Volo Ergo Sum]] — the act that develops this concept fully
  • [[Want and Will]] — thematic treatment of want’s consequences
  • [[The Three Blades]] — what a wanting creature does once it becomes operative
  • [[The MMM Loop]] — how wanting creatures grow
  • [[Objectivity]] — the intersubjective grounding of objectivity (Ch. 4) depends on many wanting creatures sharing constraints
  • [[Meaning: Coherence, Purpose, Significance]] — the book’s meaning framework maps directly onto the structure of wanting: purpose = clear aim, coherence = workable model, significance = felt effect
  • [[Intellectual Lineage]] — Damasio, enactivism, and SDT are the primary scientific scaffolds for Act 1
  • [[The Denial of Death (Becker)]] — death-awareness is what distinguishes human want from animal want; the book’s title “UNNATURAL” rests on this threshold within the volo

Death-awareness and the human volo

The volo ergo sum premise covers all life — bacteria, plants, mammals, humans — but the book’s title UNNATURAL marks a specific threshold within it. Human wanting is not simply more complex animal wanting; it is wanting held inside the knowledge of death.

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973) supplies the philosophical underpinning: the moment an organism can represent the future in which it no longer exists, the clean pathway from instinct to action is permanently interrupted. Every animal lives and dies without bearing the foreknowledge of its own annihilation. Humans cannot. This means that human wants are never purely instinctive orientations; they are always also chosen, framed, and invested with existential stakes that animal wanting does not carry.

The practical consequence is what the book’s title names. “Unnatural” does not mean deficient or fallen; it means a creature from nature that can no longer live as nature, because death-awareness has severed the unreflective bond between biological drive and action. Humans must construct what to want in a way no other animal must. The volo is therefore not the same act for humans and bacteria — its structure is the same (wanting precedes thought), but in the human case that wanting takes place under a mortal horizon that forces choice, justification, and meaning-making. This is the gap the book inhabits.

Open questions

  • The book acknowledges it cannot fully explain why anything wants. That something does is treated as observable; the deeper mechanism is left open.
  • The relationship between wanting and consciousness: is all wanting in some sense experienced? The book does not resolve this.
  • Whether there is a meaningful distinction between “want” in a bacterium and “want” in a human, beyond complexity and bandwidth, is flagged but not answered.
  • Whether death-anxiety is the primary driver of uniquely human want-structures, or one factor among several, is left open. Becker’s case is strong but not the only account.

Last updated: 2026-04-16 | Sources: 3 (Ch. 1; /dump/overall.md; Becker 1973); propagates through all 22 chapters — three-floor stack framing added 2026-04-16