About
The author, the book, what it claims and does not claim, and where it can be challenged.
Yule Guttenbeil
I'm Yule Guttenbeil, the person who formulated the AIM Motivation Framework ("AIM Framework") and creator of aimtheory.org.
The purpose of this website and the AIM Framework is to explain how recent neuroscientific discoveries shed light on where our motivations come from in the brain. These discoveries make it easier to understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and how society is arranged as a whole. The flow-on effects from how we understand our own motivations extend to how we think about most of the human behavioural sciences.
I'm a technology lawyer with a bachelor's degree in commerce majoring in management. Management is the study of how to align the motivations of the members of an organisation with the goals of that organisation. It adopts frameworks from many fields of the humanities that study motivation, many of which when examined closely and compared with each other can't be reconciled. I'm also a software developer, award winning AI ethicist and consultant, and musician.
While it might seem unusual for a lawyer to develop a framework of human motivation, my professional background, particularly in writing and analysing contracts, has given me a unique ability when assessing the literature I've read across the human behavioural sciences (psychology, economics, philosophy, neuroscience, etc.). Writing contracts is like building a machine: every definition and term in a contract operates like a cog that must fit precisely with the others, or the machine breaks down.
In behavioural science, I believe we've been dealing with a definitional error that causes a kind of "code drift", in how we define wants, needs, and preferences. The AIM Framework provides refined definitions that align more accurately with how our motivations work neurologically and play out in behaviour, allowing the reduction of friction in human interactions.
Contracts exist to manage rivalry; they make implicit expectations explicit and help prevent conflict by clearly defining boundaries and roles. Without them, confusion and disputes arise because competing motivations remain unarticulated. In that sense, (despite the popular imagining) lawyers help grease the wheels of human relationships.
In that light, I invite you to explore the resources I have made available on this website which are based on my own research. This is a living project, so the structure and information on this site will be updated as the theory, hypothesis and findings develop over time.
The AIM Motivation Framework is a synthetic theory. It provides a basis for hypothesising predictions and tightly boundered tests in order to validate its premise. I am not a professional psychologist, economist, philosopher or neuro-scientist. Though I have read broadly across those fields. Therefore, I am seeking assistance from experts in each of those fields to help me validate the theory, because if what the AIM Framework suggests is correct, it may provide a scientific basis for restructuring human societies, economies and governmental structures to enable human flourishing – by removing memetic noise and distortion from areas where it should not override the intrinsic motivations of every individual.
How It All Started
One of my strongest early memories is believing I was an alien. I was no older than 4. I felt that my father didn't understand me and that I couldn't understand him. I couldn't relate to him or effectively communicate the importance of my wants and needs to him. That feeling persisted in various forms throughout my life and ultimately led me to therapy in 2010.
It was here that I told my therapist that I didn't know whether I wanted things for myself because I genuinely wanted them, or because my dad wanted them for me. The therapist responded, "Well, then that's where your work is — finding that out." The AIM Framework represents the culmination of that work. It appears to me that in answering that question for myself, I may have inadvertently answered the same question for everyone's self.
The book
A Unifying General Theory of Human Motivation: Appetites, Intrinsic Motivation and Mimetic Desire
The framework itself is Chapter 4 and Appendix A, taken together. Chapter 4 states the axioms and the architecture. Appendix A is the mathematics of that system. The rest of the treatise explains what the framework is and how it plays out.
Twenty chapters and further appendices follow that pair. They explain the framework and show how it plays out, so that each step can be checked and each prediction tested. In active revision; the chat is always answering from the current text.
Part I: Diagnosis
- Introduction
- Definitions and Glossary
- System Scope and OCEP
- The Axiomatic and Architectural Foundation of AIM
- Why Motivation Requires Disaggregation
- Appetites
- Intrinsic Motivation
- Mimetic Desire
- Neural Integration and Source Opacity
- The Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis
- Confabulation, Projection and the Scapegoat Mechanism
- Money, Debt and the Architecture of Mimetic Extraction
- Bayesian Belief Dynamics
- Quantum Epistemology
Part II: Response
- The Bayesian Self-Model
- Conflict and Justice
- Violence as Architectural Output
- The Knowledge Patch
- The Dissolution of Individualism and the Derivation of Relationalism
- The Governance Architecture
The other appendices propose a validation roadmap and follow the architecture into particular cases, including artificial intelligence.
What AIM claims, and does not
Claims
- Human motivation decomposes into three neurologically distinct sources: Appetites (A), Intrinsic Motivation (I), and Mimetic Desire (M).
- A and I report deficits; M reports Salience. The three converge through Common-Currency Integration in the Decision Hub, which produces a single decision signal.
- The architecture does not stop at the boundary of the individual. It is one coupled system, the same loops at every scale, with no new primitives beyond the first.
- After integration, which source produced which part of the signal is lost (Source Opacity). A Salience signal is therefore felt as a deficit.
- The brain compensates by generating sincere but often inaccurate narratives about why it chose (Confabulation).
- The three sources satiate differently. A and I close when repaired; M has no terminal value and so no natural stopping point.
- These features, with the preconscious transmission of M, produce predictable patterns of individual dysfunction and collective crisis.
- Thin normative concepts (freedom, fairness, justice, coercion, consent, harm, dignity, well-being) can be derived from the architecture without importing moral premises.
- Institutions can be evaluated by how well they secure basic needs, protect the space in which I operates, and manage the M dynamics that lead to crisis.
Does not claim
- That only three categories can ever exist. Three is the most parsimonious decomposition consistent with current evidence; a fourth would require revision.
- That AIM is already validated. It is a coherent synthesis that generates testable predictions and awaits peer-reviewed validation. A validation roadmap is in the appendices.
- That AIM explains all of cognition, emotion or behaviour. It is a theory of motivation: how wanting arises, forms beliefs, and drives action.
- That AIM replaces other frameworks. Self-Determination Theory, behavioural economics, mimetic theory and drive theories remain valuable; AIM integrates and clarifies them.
- That applying it is simple. Identifying the dominant source and designing an intervention takes skill and judgement. The framework supplies diagnostics, not automatic answers.
- That AIM-aligned interventions always succeed. Correct diagnosis does not guarantee effective treatment.
From the Treatise, Chapter 1, Section 1.4.
How to challenge it
The framework is stated axiomatically to maximise the number of ways it can be shown wrong, and to make each cheap to test. Most of its components are inherited from established literatures; one is mathematically entailed; the contestable part reduces to two assertions:
- That A, I and M are the correct decomposition, exactly these three and not two or four. Defended by the bidirectional consilience argument in Chapter 4 and the Fourth-Source Objection analysis there. A critic proposing a fourth source must identify its distinct neural substrate, its satiation dynamics, and behavioural signatures that cannot be decomposed into A, I or M.
- That M operates through the specific mechanisms claimed: preconscious social observation circuits, Object Parasitism, and non-satiation.
Everything downstream, from Source Opacity to the scapegoat mechanism to the Knowledge Patch, is derived from those two plus the inherited architecture. Each derivation is stated so the step can be checked. Rejecting a derivation means identifying the step that fails; rejecting an inherited premise means engaging the literature it comes from; a replacement theory must account for the same record with equal or greater parsimony.
Get in touch
Peer review, falsification attempts, research collaboration and corrections are all welcome. For questions about the theory itself, the chat will usually be faster and more precise than I can be by email.