A Taxonomy of Things That Shouldn’t Exist, Addendum: Motive and Conation for the Incomprehensible

A Paraontic Supplement to the Shared Environment Taxonomy

REFINED WORKING EDITION

This supplement examines how directedness, reward, function, and apparent purpose organize anomalous behavior. It retains the twenty forms as a functional map and separates two questions that the earlier framework allowed to blur: does an operation converge on an outcome, and does anyone represent or desire that outcome? It also distinguishes pleasure as an end from pleasure that reinforces the pursuit of another end.

The operation may retain its direction after the actor, appetite, command, and beneficiary have all disappeared.

Scope of the Shared Environment

Contents ↑

This study does not classify its subjects as myth, fiction, real, religious, or otherwise. For the purposes of this inquiry, we examine them as existing together within one shared environment: an environment of bodies, minds, places, signals, institutions, relations, and recurring processes. The aim is to understand how these forms act, interact, and alter the conditions of experience, so that we can better inhabit worlds in which such encounters may occur. This shared frame is a method of comparison, not a verdict on any subject’s status. Sources and traditions remain identifiable; their provenance does not determine their place in an order of reality.

COMPANION TEXTS

A Taxonomy of Things That Shouldn’t Exist — Working Public Edition and Research Expanded Edition

Companion framework also developed under the title How to Classify What Should Not Exist Expanded Twenty Dossier Edition

Decision and Scope

Contents ↑

The motive system is an analytic layer that crosses every macroclass and dossier. It is more substantial than an appendix of labels, but it does not replace the taxonomy. The parent framework identifies operative forms through mechanism, field conditions, vector, replication, persistence, and closure. This supplement asks how directedness is organized within those forms: what appears to be sought, where the direction resides, what reinforces it, who benefits, and whether a bearer of motive can be established at all.

All twenty forms and five macroclasses remain intact. Motive is neither a sixth macroclass nor a twenty-first entity type. Auditory intrusion, gestational capture, systemic autonomy, cognition loss, and recurrence can each serve very different ends, or occur without an attributable motive. Classifying by apparent goal alone would obscure these differences in mechanism.

THE STRUCTURAL DECISION

Use the Motivic Profile as a module that applies across the taxonomy. Revise Agency to measure operational responsiveness, and add Conative Mode to record the organization of directedness. Keep both separate from claims about personhood. The entity-boundary rule permits a stable telic vector—a persistent direction toward an outcome—to be classified even when no coherent entity has been established. These changes are incorporated in the companion revised taxonomy.

Why Motive Requires Separate Classification

Contents ↑

Descriptions of anomalous encounters often place incomprehensibility, feeding, and evil alongside one another as if they answered the same question. Each belongs to a different register. Incomprehensibility concerns access to an explanation. Feeding concerns acquisition and transfer. Evil evaluates consequences and relations, often from the position of those harmed. Treating these as equivalent motives confuses what a form does, why it does it, what rewards it, and how its acts are judged.

The distinction matters when an operation is both effective and pleasurable. Competence describes performance; enjoyment describes experience. Evolutionary selection can couple an operation relevant to fitness with a rewarding response, linking a lineage-level advantage to an organism-level inducement. The organism need not understand the adaptive relation. A process shaped by selection may be experienced as desire, without selection itself issuing an instruction or possessing an intention.

Pleasure may be the reason an organism repeats a task without being the task the organism is performing.

Where this coupling is supported, the relation forms a loop: adaptive function shapes reward architecture; reward encourages repetition and practice; practice can increase competence; competence can produce more of the result associated with fitness. Pleasure can therefore occupy three different positions. It may be the primary object, reinforcement attached to another object, or an incidental accompaniment that neither explains nor governs the behavior.

Terms and Levels

Contents ↑

These levels sometimes align, but none determines the others automatically. A predator may experience hunger as drive, use feeding as its method, obtain satiety as reward, gain survival as a proximate benefit, and contribute to reproduction as an ultimate function. A bureaucracy may preserve a rule without appetite or pleasure. A sadist may find another’s suffering directly gratifying. A field may repeatedly produce directed outcomes without establishing a subject to whom motive can be attributed.

Revisions to the Parent Taxonomy

Contents ↑

Agency

The earlier Agency axis moved from A0 process-like through A1 reactive and A2 goal-directed to A3 strategic or recursively adaptive. The phrase goal-directed allowed convergence of outcomes to stand in for evidence of agency. Biological regulation, optimization systems, selection processes, attractors, and distributed institutions can all preserve a direction without representing a goal. The revised axis describes responsiveness under changing conditions; it leaves the ownership and organization of direction to Conative Mode.

REVISED AGENCY DEFINITIONS

Agency measures what an operation can do when conditions vary. Conative Mode records how directedness, if present, organizes that capacity. The two may diverge: an A0 process can have a strong teleonomic direction; an A3 operation can display unstable or counterfeit motives; and a highly competent form can execute a delegated mandate without choosing its end.

Conative Mode

Conative Mode is categorical, not a ladder of metaphysical advancement. Several modes may apply at different scales: an organism can have a drive-bound proximate orientation, an intentional local plan, and a teleonomic function at the lineage level. Record the scale with the code. CN0 also requires a plain-language qualification: insufficient evidence of direction is different from positive grounds for finding no stable direction.

Entity Boundary

ENTITY BOUNDARY RULE

A stable direction of effects does not by itself establish an entity. Some fields preserve a telic vector while every apparent carrier, mechanism, and local beneficiary changes. Such a configuration can be analyzed conatively without being assigned a coherent locus of agency.

The Motivic Profile

Contents ↑

Complete the primary functional classification before adding the Motivic Profile. The profile supplements the dossier by separating attribution, orientation, reinforcement, and benefit. A concise entry may record only claim-status, bearer, motive family, reward mode, and ultimate function. Use the expanded profile when ambiguity about motive materially changes how the encounter or field can be understood. In this supplement, paraontic inquiry attends to the limits at which the identity, continuity, or boundaries of a form cease to hold securely.

Motive Families

Contents ↑

Motive families describe proximate orientation and are nonexclusive. A form may preserve itself in order to reproduce, gather knowledge in order to dominate, or pursue suffering because it is pleasurable. A mixed profile should state these governing relations rather than accumulate labels. When no agent-like bearer is established, use the families to describe conative orientation and identify that status explicitly. OBJ marks objectless pressure; it does not establish a motive in the stricter sense defined above.

Overlapping families require a stated distinction. AVR describes movement away from an unwanted state; HED describes pursuit of a gratifying experience, which may include relief. Aversive relief can reinforce either orientation. Record what is sought or avoided at the motive level and what reinforces repetition at the reward level, rather than treating the presence of relief as sufficient to select one family.

Reward and Reinforcement

Contents ↑

Classify reward separately from motive. The same reward may reinforce different ends, and the same end may be sustained by different rewards. Hedonic experience is especially important because it may be the object sought or the reinforcement that makes another object compelling. Incidental pleasure belongs in the account of effects unless it is shown to organize or reinforce behavior.

Read these tests together with the bearer, method, and satisfaction condition. A thought experiment identifies what would discriminate between profiles; it does not supply the missing observation. In particular, removing pleasure may stop both pleasure-seeking and behavior that depends on pleasurable reinforcement. Continued pursuit without pleasure is informative, but cessation alone does not distinguish the two.

The Feeding Test

Reserve feeding for an economy of transfer. Something lost by the target must be acquired in a way that sustains, repairs, enlarges, embodies, reproduces, or regulates the form. Injury alone does not establish this relation. Pleasure taken in injury may establish a hedonic reward without establishing nourishment or acquisition.

1. Identify what the target loses and whether the form actually acquires it.

2. Determine whether the acquisition sustains, repairs, enlarges, embodies, regulates, or reproduces the form.

3. Separate the resource from any pleasure produced during acquisition.

4. Ask whether suffering is necessary material, an instrumental technique, a preferred aesthetic, or collateral damage.

5. Permit mixed cases, but state which economy is primary and what observation would change that judgment.

Ambiguous and Cosmic Motive

Contents ↑

Unknown motive is an analytical finding, not a motive family. An encounter at an unfamiliar or cosmic scale may resist explanation for several distinct reasons: evidence may be missing, an agent may conceal its end, values may be difficult to translate, or the question may assume a subject that has not been established. Naming the mode of opacity preserves these differences without requiring ambiguity to disappear.

Motive Without Entity

Contents ↑

PROVISIONAL LIMIT CONFIGURATION

CONATIVE ATTRACTOR

ARCHETYPAL MOTIF

THE WANT WITHOUT A WANTER

A Conative Attractor is a tendency at the level of the field whose only conserved feature is directedness. Changing agents, hosts, institutions, signals, bodies, or mechanisms are recruited toward an end or recurring pressure, while no stable bearer of motive can be established. The term describes the persistence of an organization that resembles motive after its presumed owner has disappeared or failed to emerge. It is a limit configuration available across the twenty forms, not an additional entity type.

Wanting occurs locally, but no enduring owner of the direction can be identified.

The strongest case combines low ontological invariance with high telic invariance: bodies, messages, explanations, beneficiaries, and methods change while the direction of convergence persists. In objectless conation, even the object fails to stabilize. Contact nevertheless produces a recurring pressure to act, repeat, open, answer, transmit, or continue. Here the conserved feature is the pressure toward continuation, rather than a determinate destination.

Diagnostic Criteria

• Directional invariance. Distinct manifestations bend events toward the same state or operation.
• Locus substitution. No carrier remains necessary; agents and media can be exchanged without closing the pattern.
• Bearer discontinuity. Participants do not share an identity, plan, memory, or accountable mandate sufficient to explain the convergence.
• Mechanism pluralism. The direction can survive changes in the means by which it is enacted.
• Beneficiary failure. No stable recipient of gain, pleasure, nourishment, authority, or completion can be established.
• Prospective discrimination. The classification predicts a direction of further manifestation and can be weakened by contrary outcomes.

Nearest Neighbors

The paired names below connect the supplement’s archetypal labels to the numbered forms in the companion taxonomy. They identify the same analytical neighborhoods, not additional entries.

Taxonomic Boundary

Several events arriving at the same conclusion are insufficient to establish a Conative Attractor. Ordinary causal processes, shared incentives, transmitted instructions, social imitation, biological selection, the arrangement of an account, and retrospective pattern completion remain possible explanations. The proposed direction must discriminate among future or counterfactual manifestations. A reading that can accommodate every outcome after the fact has not shown what the classification can predict or exclude.

Worked Profiles

Contents ↑

Chime

The encounter presented in Chime strongly fits the Auditory-Noetic Intruder, here also described by the archetypal label Voice Without a Mouth. F2 signal ambiguity dominates; F5 consensus instability remains residual. Do not inherit F3 from the generic dossier without evidence that attention clarifies, amplifies, or extends the signal. Possible spread belongs provisionally under Replication. The closing relation among the doorbell, empty hallway, and late-arriving score gives the presentation a pattern of agency-shaped sound without a stable source. That formal arrangement supports an interpretation of the encounter; it does not independently demonstrate a mind operating within it.

One radical possibility is that the chime carries imperative force without a stable speaker, content, or goal. A new site begins acting under pressure, but no enduring communicator has been established. If contagion is present, what reproduces may be directedness itself, rather than a stable substance or phrase. This remains a provisional interpretation alongside the CN0 alternative.

The Autopsy by Michael Shea

In the interpretation developed here, the alien in Michael Shea’s The Autopsy has an epistemic proximate motive: it gathers data. Pleasure associated with successful gathering reinforces that work. The proposed connection to the species’ adaptive history belongs to the level of ultimate function and remains an inference within this profile. Being competent at an operation, enjoying it, and contributing to a lineage-level advantage are distinct claims.

The counterfactual test separates these claims. If pleasure disappeared while useful data remained valuable and gathering continued, that would support epistemic primacy with hedonic reinforcement. A preference for pleasurable but uninformative stimulation over informative contact would support hedonic primacy. Conversely, cessation after pleasure was removed would not by itself settle the matter: reinforcement can be necessary to sustain a nonhedonic task. An adaptive account would explain how reward promotes repetition, refinement, and competence without requiring the organism to represent the lineage-level result.

Sadistic Enjoyment

Sadistic enjoyment is a hedonic motive when another’s suffering is the direct object or indispensable source of gratification. Sadistic identifies the route and object of pleasure; hedonic identifies the governing orientation. The affected subject functions as a source of pleasure. A feeding classification requires the additional transfer relation: something lost through suffering must also sustain, enlarge, repair, embody, regulate, or reproduce the form.

Generic Feeding Predator

A feeding predator may be appetitive in its drive, metabolic in its economy, homeostatic in its reward, preservative in its immediate benefit, and reproductive in its ultimate function. Pleasure may reinforce feeding without becoming the primary object. The target’s office is food or resource; hatred, punishment, and enjoyment require separate evidence.

Demonic Evil

Evil remains a moral judgment until the evidence supports a more discriminating account of motive. Deliberate suffering may serve hedonic, sovereign, juridical, incorporative, reproductive, expressive, ludic, or negational ends; it may also be instrumental to another end. Some destructive operations are compulsive or bound to a mandate and may benefit no one. Ask what suffering produces, for whom, and under what condition the operation would be satisfied or completed before assigning appetite, pleasure, or malice.

Classification Procedure

Contents ↑

1. Classify the operative form under the existing taxonomy before assigning motive.

2. Record motive claim-status. Separate entity testimony, observed behavior, witness attribution, structural inference, and the formal organization of the source account.

3. Assign Conative Mode at each relevant scale. Do not force organism, species, system, and field into one bearer.

4. Name the proximate motive family and intentional object, including objectless or unavailable where warranted.

5. Identify the instrumental method without mistaking it for motive. Feeding, torture, observation, conversion, and repetition describe operations before they explain reasons.

6. Classify reward architecture. Determine whether pleasure is primary, reinforcing, incidental, or absent.

7. State the economy and beneficiary. Permit no-beneficiary and unclear-beneficiary results.

8. Name an ultimate function only when the source account, observed pattern, or structural relation supports the longer-scale claim. Identify inference as inference.

9. Assign target office and satisfaction condition.

10. Specify the opacity mode and preserve alternate explanations.

11. Run counterfactual tests. Ask what would happen if pleasure, nourishment, information, authority, or the present carrier were removed.

12. State what observation would weaken, revise, or defeat the Motivic Profile.

Compact Profile Template

Integration Language for the Parent Taxonomy

Contents ↑

Addition to How to Read an Entry

The optional Motivic Profile distinguishes structural function, telos, motive, reward, and ultimate function. It records who or what appears to bear a direction, what evidence supports that attribution, and whether outcomes may be organized without a motive-bearing entity. The same operative form can serve different ends, while similar ends can recruit different forms; motive therefore supplements the primary classification.

Replacement for the Agency Definition

AGENCY measures operational responsiveness: A0 process-like; A1 reactive; A2 selectively adaptive across changing conditions; A3 strategic or recursively adaptive. Agency level does not by itself establish consciousness, intention, moral responsibility, or motive ownership.

New Diagnostic Axis

CONATIVE MODE records the organization of directedness: undetermined, teleonomic, drive-bound, intentional, delegated, distributed, orphaned, or reflexive. Multiple modes may apply at different scales.

Addition to Field Before Entity

A field may display stable direction without stabilizing an actor. When outcomes converge but locus, carrier, mandate, and beneficiary do not, classification should preserve the conative pattern while withholding entity-status. Directedness is evidence about the field, not automatic proof of a director.

Provisional Conclusions

Contents ↑

The motive problem calls for a local methodological revision while preserving all twenty dossiers. The earlier Agency axis combined responsiveness with an implication of goal ownership. Separating Agency from Conative Mode makes the forms more precise, especially Somatic Bloom, Autonomous Incomplete System, Recurrence Engine, Captive Paradise, Totalizing Archivist, and Auditory-Noetic Intruder.

Hedonics does not belong in only one column. Pleasure can be the motive, reinforcement for another motive, or an incidental effect. The alien in The Autopsy is therefore not adequately classified as hedonic solely because data gathering is gratifying. In the proposed reading, its proximate motive is epistemic, its reward architecture hedonic, and its ultimate function adaptive at the species scale. Each attribution carries its own evidential burden.

Directedness may remain classifiable when the entity concept fails. A Conative Attractor names the possibility that direction itself is the stable feature of an encounter, without inferring a hidden person from coordinated effects. The shared-environment framework must be able to describe that possibility while keeping a vector, a will, and a bearer of will analytically distinct.

A field may retain a direction even when no one within it represents the destination.