Want and Will

How the concept of wanting, introduced as the floor of life in Chapter 1, propagates through the book’s three acts as the engine of difference, the ground of love and meaning, and the fuel that drives the MMM loop.

Overview

The book is built on a single premise — want is prior to thought — and then traces that premise’s consequences across three acts. This page synthesises what “want” and “will” come to mean across the full arc, rather than just in chapter 1 where they are introduced.

The distinction between want and will is introduced early but not always maintained rigidly. “Want” typically names the specific lean in any moment — attraction, aversion, care, preference. “Will” is the broader term for the entire layer of motivated motion, most of which never reaches awareness. Neither is the same as conscious choice, and both are prior to any explicit cognition.

The three-floor stack: thought, feelings, want

Chapter 1 walks explicitly down three floors. Thought is the first floor — explicit propositions, what Descartes took as bedrock. Feelings are the middle floor — the continuous somatic/affective signal shared with every animal that turns toward or away. Want is the basement floor, present even in organisms with no nervous system at all.

Feelings matter for this theme because they are the layer that actually runs cognition. Damasio’s somatic-marker work shows that patients with intact reasoning but damaged somatic signalling cannot decide — they can list pros and cons forever because the feelings that normally collapse deliberation into action are gone. Feelings are not an ornament on thought; they are the substrate thought runs on.

Want goes further down still. A bacterium following a sugar gradient does not feel hunger — there is no feeling machinery — but it unmistakably leans. The minimum definition: an asymmetry between toward and away. Thought rides on feeling; feeling rides on want. This is why the book’s arguments operate at the want layer: it is the floor where every living thing is present.

The biological substrate: homeostasis and interoception

Before the philosophical argument begins, wanting has a biological mechanism. Homeostatic regulation — the body’s constant correction of deviations from viable set-points — is the first form of wanting. Interoception, the sensing of internal body states, is the channel through which regulatory signals reach something like experience: hunger, pain, fatigue, desire. The concept of allostasis extends this beyond fixed set-points to anticipatory, predictive regulation — the body does not just react, it prepares.

This is not merely background biology; it is the grounding claim. If wanting is the floor, homeostatic regulation is what the floor is made of. The wanting creature is not a neutral processor that also happens to have motivational states layered on top; the motivational system is the processing system. Damasio’s somatic marker research makes the practical upshot clear: deliberation without bodily feeling is impaired, not liberated. The felt signal is structurally necessary, not optional noise.

Want as the lowest common denominator of life (Ch. 1)

The baseline claim: wanting is observable from the outside (a paramecium turns toward food) and from the inside (check where attention is leaning right now, before any deliberation). This gives the concept cross-scale reach — it applies to microbes, mammals, and humans on a continuum without flattening any of them.

The argument against starting with thought (the Cartesian tradition): thought presupposes a thinker already oriented toward something. That prior orientation is want. Refusing this forces you to invent unmotivated “pure reason” to do the work wanting was already doing.

Want as the engine of difference (Ch. 2)

When beings want from different positions or want the same things from different angles, variation arises. Direction is, by construction, a difference from “everything else.” This grounds three downstream phenomena:

Individuality: who you are next is shaped by what you wanted last (path-dependence). Identity is not a fixed essence but the residue of accumulated directional wanting.
Conflict: conflict is not introduced by ethics as a later mistake; it is built into the geometry of multiple wills sharing a finite world.
Subjectivity: not a metaphysical extra but the unavoidable consequence of being a wanting creature located somewhere specific.

Want as the ground of love, growth, and meaning (Ch. 3)

Chapter 3 shows that three concepts usually given separate treatment — love, growth, and meaning — are the same structure seen from different angles:

Love is mutual orientation: two or more wills lining up enough that each becomes part of the other’s good. Not a feeling one has but a mode of relating one enacts together.
Growth is expanded capacity to want, perceive, and act — not becoming bigger but becoming able to handle more structured difference.
Meaning is durable alignment between what you will, what the world allows, and what you are becoming. Purpose is not handed down; it is a stable pattern of wanting that survives contact with reality.

The implication: emptiness is usually misaligned wanting, not mere absence of pleasure. You got what you thought you wanted and found, too late, that the aim was wrong.

Love as shared homeostasis

The overall.md source provides the theoretical grounding for the book’s treatment of love. Attachment research treats adult intimacy as continuous with the motivational system of infant attachment — the same regulation machinery, running at a more complex scale. Social baseline theory (James Coan) goes further: close others literally reduce energetic and neural costs through load sharing and risk distribution. Proximity to trusted others is the default state the nervous system expects; isolation is the costly deviation, not the neutral baseline. This is why loneliness has measurable physiological effects and why love is not decorative sentiment. In the book’s framework, love is a living arrangement in which separate regulatory systems — separate homeostatic loops — become partially co-regulating. Two people in a stable relationship share load the way a rope distributes weight between two climbers.

Self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan) specifies what wanting needs to remain aligned: relationships that support autonomy, competence, and relatedness rather than merely demanding closeness. Controlling relationships that satisfy the “closeness” surface but undermine the person’s sense of self-direction are not love in the book’s sense — they are regulatory capture.

Why human will is not reducible to animal drive (Becker)

The framework so far traces want from bacteria to humans along a continuum. But UNNATURAL is explicitly about a rupture within that continuum, and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973) names it precisely.

Becker’s argument: every other animal lives and acts without carrying the foreknowledge of its own death. Its motivational system is, in the relevant sense, closed — instinct fills the gap between stimulus and response. Humans have broken that closure. The capacity for anticipatory modelling that makes us effective also makes us the only animal that must act in full awareness that all its wanting is bounded by non-existence. This is not merely an additional fear layered onto the same wanting-structure. It changes the structure. When every specific want must be held inside a mortal horizon, the instinctive sufficiency of wanting-toward-a-thing is no longer available. We must instead construct what is worth wanting — must frame, justify, and invest wants with a significance they do not supply by themselves.

This is why the book is called UNNATURAL rather than simply Wanting. Human will is the same phenomenon as animal drive at the biological level (homeostasis, interoception, the regulatory signal), but it is not the same act. It takes place under conditions no animal drive faces: the knowledge of death. Becker’s term for the response is the immortality project — any system of belief, achievement, or participation in something larger than the self that makes a person feel their existence will outlast their physical death. The immortality project is not a pathology; it is the near-universal consequence of wanting while mortal. What the book traces as the MMM loop run at civilisational scale tends, under mortality pressure, toward these overreaching projects: not just acting and learning but reaching for permanence.

Want in tension with intersubjectivity (Ch. 4)

Chapter 4 introduces the complication: pure wanting gives you subjectivity but not a world. The world emerges from the friction of many wantings grinding against the same constraints. Stable objects, facts, and norms are residues of this convergence. This is a crucial qualification: want is the floor, but it does not, by itself, produce truth or shared reality. It requires the collision with other wantings and with constraint.

Want as the engine of the MMM loop (Act 3)

In Act 3 the concept returns in a different register. The MMM loop requires want as its engine: without orientation (wanting the model to be better, wanting to act from it), the loop has no reason to turn. Chapter 13’s claim that “what gets noticed gets real” is a consequence of wanting — you notice what you lean toward. The loop stalls when wanting loses its line of sight to anything the creature actually cares about (burnout, as described in chapter 11, is wanting that has lost its bearing).

Key claims

The stack is layered: thought sits on feelings, feelings sit on want. The book’s arguments operate at the want layer because that is the one shared by every living thing. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
Feelings are the intermediate layer — the somatic/affective signal shared with animals. Damasio’s work shows deliberation breaks down when this layer is damaged, even with reasoning intact. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
Want is present even without a nervous system — chemotaxis in a bacterium is wanting in its minimal form, an asymmetry between toward and away. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
Want precedes thought; thought rides on want, not the reverse. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
Will is not conscious choice; it is the whole motivated layer, most of which is never aware. — Source: /src/content/chapters/01-before-thought-there-is-want.md
Individuality, path-dependence, and conflict are free structural consequences of multiple wills. — Source: /src/content/chapters/02-will-creates-difference.md
Love, growth, and meaning are three aspects of what oriented wanting looks like when aligned, expanded, and sustained. — Source: /src/content/chapters/03-love-growth-and-meaning.md
Emptiness is typically misaligned willing, not absence of pleasure. — Source: /src/content/chapters/03-love-growth-and-meaning.md
Shared reality is not the absence of difference but the residue of many wantings grinding against the same constraints. — Source: /src/content/chapters/04-from-subjectivity-to-objectivity.md
Homeostatic regulation and interoceptive feeling are the biological substrate of wanting; the felt signal precedes the deliberative response. — Source: /dump/overall.md
Social baseline theory: close others reduce energetic and neural costs through load sharing; isolation is the costly deviation, not the neutral state. — Source: /dump/overall.md
Self-determination theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the central conditions for healthy, self-endorsed action; controlling relationships that undermine autonomy are regulatory capture, not love. — Source: /dump/overall.md

Connections

[[Volo Ergo Sum]] — the named concept; full conceptual entry
[[Act 1 — Volo Ergo Sum]] — the act that develops want systematically
[[The Three Blades]] — the cuts a wanting creature makes to become operative
[[The MMM Loop]] — want is the engine; the loop is how wanting creatures grow
[[Objectivity]] — intersubjectivity is the bridge between individual wanting and shared reality
[[Growth and Learning]] — growth is, at base, expanded capacity to want and perceive
[[Meaning: Coherence, Purpose, Significance]] — meaning research maps the structure of aligned wanting onto three measurable dimensions; the immortality project is wanting at its most significance-saturated
[[The Denial of Death (Becker)]] — Becker supplies the account of why human will is not reducible to animal drive: it is wanting under the knowledge of death
[[Intellectual Lineage]] — Damasio, social baseline theory, and SDT are the empirical scaffolds for Act 1’s claims about wanting

Open questions

Why anything wants at all is explicitly left open throughout the book. The fact is treated as observable; the metaphysical ground is not provided.
The relationship between wanting and consciousness (is all wanting somehow experienced?) is flagged but not resolved.
Whether “will” at the cellular level is meaningfully the same kind of thing as “will” at the human level is assumed but not argued.
Whether death-anxiety is the primary cause of specifically human wanting-structures, or one important factor among several, is not resolved. Becker’s case is powerful but competing accounts (SDT, attachment, social baseline) are not obviously derivative of mortality.

Last updated: 2026-04-16 | Sources: 6 (Ch. 1–4, /dump/overall.md, Becker 1973) + Act 3 — three-floor stack section added 2026-04-16