How do we want things? There's probably some sort of neuroscientific "explanation" for it, in the sense that there is a granular model that fits the data around the phenomenon of wanting things.
The idea of goals on the other hand seems much more immediate, tangible. We don't need psychology or neuroscience for this, because goals follow logical structure. A goal can be thought of as a set of outcomes. So goals can be related to each other by implication, as in the fulfillment of one goal can imply the fulfillment of another. So you can think of goals being ordered by this relation, creating some kind of goal-ordering, with goals and sub-goals and sub-sub-goals.
Goals and wants are related in the sense that we can want a goal.
Can we say something else regarding goals and wants? I feel that the best, or "true" goal in a sense, should be one that guides us to optimize for... something. Prevents mistakes, shortsightedness? Gives us a sense of "global" purpose, rather than stumbling around, following our wants at the particular moment. There's a sense of "locality" in the latter. It's like solving an optimization problem by gradient descent, but the objective function isn't known, and somebody has to whisper you the gradients for wherever you are that point in time.
Conjecture. Regret-freeness model.
We seek to find a goal, or goals X such that fulfilling this X will provide us "exactly what we want", in the sense that we do not want any goal Y that contradicts X.
Re-orientation clause: If ever we do find ourselves wanting such a goal Y, we regard this as a sharp state-change, a significant re-orientation of wants.
It's not clear to me yet what picture I'm trying to paint here. The model isn't perfect, I think. The re-orientation clause seems to powerful, because you could invoke it quite liberally. And I need to work out whether time has got something to do with this. But if the model works, it should be pretty obvious when re-orientation invocations are "weird"... the model can always be fit, but there are some implicit rules on how to fit it, I think.
I have a feeling that neuroscience and psychology are going to be an inexorable part of the analysis. If not directly part of the theory, at least something to draw inspiration and perspective from.
I wrote earlier about how wants are essentially derived from basic human needs, even though they may be inaccurate, biased, unhealthy. Perhaps this gives us perspective; wants are a manifestation of a chemical algorithm that points our arrow to satisfy... well, some biological directive, in the immediate, but survival and reproduction I suppose, in the general.
The above makes me want to ascribe "want" a lot less philosophical import... it's no longer very abstract or mystical. It's more or less a biological algorithm. Goals, on the other hand, are purely analytical.
