Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Plan
- 2 Principles of Feedback Control
- 3 Discrepancy-Reducing Feedback Processes in Behavior
- 4 Discrepancy-Enlarging Loops, and Three Further Issues
- 5 Goals and Behavior
- 6 Goals, Hierarchicality, and Behavior: Further Issues
- 7 Public and Private Aspects of the Self
- 8 Control Processes and Affect
- 9 Affect: Issues and Comparisons
- 10 Expectancies and Disengagement
- 11 Disengagement: Issues and Comparisons
- 12 Applications to Problems in Living
- 13 Hierarchicality and Problems in Living
- 14 Chaos and Dynamic Systems
- 15 Catastrophe Theory
- 16 Further Applications to Problems in Living
- 17 Is Behavior Controlled or Does It Emerge?
- 18 Goal Engagement, Life, and Death
- References
- Name Index
- Subject Index
18 - Goal Engagement, Life, and Death
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Plan
- 2 Principles of Feedback Control
- 3 Discrepancy-Reducing Feedback Processes in Behavior
- 4 Discrepancy-Enlarging Loops, and Three Further Issues
- 5 Goals and Behavior
- 6 Goals, Hierarchicality, and Behavior: Further Issues
- 7 Public and Private Aspects of the Self
- 8 Control Processes and Affect
- 9 Affect: Issues and Comparisons
- 10 Expectancies and Disengagement
- 11 Disengagement: Issues and Comparisons
- 12 Applications to Problems in Living
- 13 Hierarchicality and Problems in Living
- 14 Chaos and Dynamic Systems
- 15 Catastrophe Theory
- 16 Further Applications to Problems in Living
- 17 Is Behavior Controlled or Does It Emerge?
- 18 Goal Engagement, Life, and Death
- References
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
Hope makes us live.
(Haitian proverb)It is wonderful to have a plan. A plan can make the whole future rosy. … To have a plan is like having a little canoe and even the fiercest rapids can be negotiated.
(Stephen Dobyns, The Wrestler's Cruel Study)He is not busy being born is busy dying.
(Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma [I'm Only Bleeding])This book has focused on a particular way of thinking about how people live their lives. Although a few complexities came up along the way, the underlying idea is pretty simple: People live life by identifying goals and moving toward them, and by identifying anti-goals and staying away from them. Some goals reflect biological programming; others stem from conscious weighing of alternatives; others arise from dreams and fantasies and even from a self-organizing process of bootstrapping. Whatever their origins, these values are the constellations people use to guide their journey through life.
In this closing chapter we extend this way of thinking a step further, with the assertion that goal engagement is a necessity of life. There must be goals, striving toward one end or another, for life to continue. Without goal engagement, life ceases. As has been true more than once in this book, this assertion follows a path blazed by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960).
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- Chapter
- Information
- On the Self-Regulation of Behavior , pp. 346 - 364Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998