I do not mean the word “wanting” itself, since a word can refer to many things, or a spectrum of qualities that may or may not be seen a connected thing or not.
If we try to identify a more clear thing, if possible, I mean if there is a momentary, temporal mental state that can be considered everyday, common “wanting”, like when you want to eat something, want a certain object, to buy or to have given to you, for example.
Clearly, wanting usually requires some mental or logical thinking component, where you are able to discern, or know, in your mind, there there is some desirable state of affairs in the future. It may be the case that even tiny organisms such as bacteria or small bugs can feel a similar feeling (a sensation, bodily, emotional, maybe cognitive), but maybe we can consider that a bit closer to a physiological sensation (sort of like discomfort, due to lack of a nutrient, or some other element requiring regulation in order to have homeostasis) - like a feeling of physical weakness and “hunger”, that impels them to find food.
While humans do certainly have that, we, and presumably more, other intelligent animals / beings / organisms, tend to think more conceptually / representationally, and it seems in the human case that feeling of wanting would almost always be paired with and or initiated with some thought of what’s missing; to be sought; etc. (Maybe doing some kind of lexical analysis, factor analysis, on a variety of synonyms of “want” can help us notice different emotional components or related ones - seeking, striving, intending, acting, missing, appreciating, liking and disliking, and so on.)
What prompts and frames the question more clearly is, I was thinking about a modern ideographic language, or ideo-representational. For some sensory or experiential modalities, it is easy to try to represent a class by a prototypical, highly abstracted and/or ideal form - like a drawing / line outline of a book, for the visual field / spatial dimension of consciousness / experience. Even other modalities are at least hypothetically easy, if not (currently) practice - hypothetically, you could do the same thing for smells, sounds, tastes, etc, where you choose a representative of that modality itself, to relay a concept - like, if you could transmit a spicy, tingling sensation to someone’s tongue, temporarily (maybe through some electrical pad people wear on their tongues, to use this multi-sensory / multi-modal language of direct depiction or representation), to “state” the concept of “spicy”, as you were telling something making use of that concept.
But it is very hard to think of a genuinely good “ideo” (like, idea, but a canonical representation; an “ideum” or “ide” or something, I prefer “ideo”) for very hard-to-pin states of mind, which of course I believe is what philosophers have been noticing since forever, how hard it can be to adequately define, characterize, understand, characterize, or even merely identify or describe, trying to even know what is even there to be named, to what extent the things we have names for even are a thing.
It is easy to refer to states of mind through related situations, a selected situation or context from which it is inferred, sort of synecdoche, or a metaphor; but even if those are communicative, they aren’t “definitive” or canonical, which is what I want to know about.
I can think of two ways to try to represent states of mind, such as want, more directly, transparently, one-to-one depictively -
- In the age of neuroscience, we can soon actually just know the brain networks that produce a certain feeling, and we can just send a picture of that brain structure or region, to refer to exactly that, the conscious feeling of that brain network / that that network is responsible for creating, and creates.
That may be the only truly objective way to depict this. But short of that, I am trying to think of an alternative way a language could express the idea of wanting something. In many ways - I believe even in linguistics it is found that some languages really do this - to want is often what is called a “mood” or a modality, rather than a more “normal” “verb”.
So, in an ideo-mimetic language (sort of like sign language, but even further beyond what it does), unless there was a technology to transmit / transport feelings, states of mind from person to person (which is an interesting idea for the future - electrical stimulation in the brain to temporarily give someone a mental state or feeling you yourself are having or have had - ) - it is actually better to not depict “wanting” at all, since it’s not much of a “positive” thing; maybe more of an implicit dynamic between other “positive” things or forms that can be asserted.
I think some languages do have a grammatical structure in which things can be sort of implied without actually any word or a hugely significant grammatical feature. I think in Spanish and Swedish, by saying something like “That she had only written.”, implies wanting, hoping, or wishing; the same may be true for questions in some cases, in some languages; and I think maybe some commands in German may have a very similar form to declaratives, or something.
So if it is not intrinsically meaningful to try to seek any canonical form or representation of a feeling or state of mind, because the plane in which feelings arise is not structurally isomorphic to the visual plane; it isn’t mappable; exactly like trying to draw the smell of honey. Drawing some honey doesn’t count. You can’t draw a smell. It’s actually a really interesting thing to think about.
It sort of means that humans may have a surprising number of sensory-experiential “modalities”, like, whatever the fundamental metaphysical-ontological parameters of our very existence or consciousness are, which I believe many philosophers have tried to make a system or build a theory for (colors, sizes, textures, shapes, number, distance, and so on), the important thing about the lowest-level ones is that there is no meaningful correspondence between them. They are irreducible, but that specifically means they can’t be reformulated in terms of something else. They are almost like, anti-analogistic, impervious to analogism. I feel like in the space of all concepts, you have all these things that are kind of mutually constituting, relating to, defining each other, but there are clearly these weird points in the concept space that maybe, if we think of it as a graph or sort of like category theory, they maybe be initial, or terminal, objects, like, you can definitely refer to them, and use them, in the system, but they have the odd property of having no internal constitution or form, unlike the other elements - maybe something like that.
And in a way, any time we manipulate one of those experiential, “primary” (maybe) modalities, like drawing a picture, we are basically just “drawing” - intentionally creating sounds is drawing in sound; reforming sound to have similar form, to other sounds, possibly. But there are some modalities we can’t draw in, or if we can, due to imagination, we can’t transmit them.
So to depict wanting, maybe you could imply it via its logical conditions - if maybe you decided it is basically what happens - the implied state, or resulting feeling - if, perhaps - you lack something
- and/or, maybe, that the thing somehow is good, provides homeostasis, or just stasis, a lack of a need to act, anymore - and so on. It might depend on what factors you think are relevant, by your analysis, but for example, instead of saying you want food, you could say something like (pictorially) I am hungry; I don’t have food; food gives me relaxation; food gives me happiness. If you try to break down “mental states” into components - only if you feel they really are valid, real components of that thing - reformulate “want” into specific aspects or parts, like, human intentions and/or feelings and/or sensations and/or envisaged future states - you would also have the freedom in how you communicate to leave out any of those “logical”, non-attitudinal assertions if you think it would be inferred from context; taking us back to the idea of a grammatical structure like “That he had brought some eggs.” (to express counterfactual desire for an alternative, past state, event or affair).
That could be an interesting way to approach that. Or maybe you could use EKG readings so that people could learn to see different like, diagrams, waves, sort of, for various emotions, with subtle changes in size, parameters, etc, to express the nuances of each emotion as it happens.
