What is motivation and how does it work? Where do goals come from and how do they vary within and between species and individuals? Why do we prefer some things over others? MEDO is a theoretical framework for understanding these questions in abstract terms, as well as for generating and evaluating specific hypotheses that seek to explain goal-oriented behavior. MEDO views preferences as selective processes influencing the likelihood of particular outcomes, which are more or less consistent with the dynamics underlying those influences. With respect to biological organisms, these patterns must compete and cooperate in shaping system evolution. To the extent that shaping processes are themselves altered by experience, this enables feedback relationships where histories of reward and punishment can impact future motivation. In this way, various biases can undergo either amplification or attenuation, potentially resulting in enduring preferences and orientations. MEDO is unique in that it specifically models all shaping dynamics in terms of natural selection operating on multiple levels--genetic, neural, and cultural--and even considers aspects of development to themselves be evolutionary processes. Thus, MEDO reflects a kind of generalized Darwinism, in that it assumes that natural selection provides a common principle for understanding the emergence of complexity within all dynamical systems in which replication, variation, and selection occur. However, MEDO combines this evolutionary perspective with economic decision theory, which describes both the preferences underlying individual choices, as well as the preferences underlying choices made by engineers in designing optimized systems. In this way, MEDO uses economic decision theory to explain goal-oriented behaviors as well as the interacting evolutionary optimization processes from which they emerge.
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