Any living thing that learns (all mobile life forms) is a self-optimizing agent. For humans, this factor motivates much or maybe even most of what we do. We observe and copy what other people do, this gives us a huge advantage, a short-cut to shared knowledge. We constantly evaluate and learn from our experiences. If you stop and ask what motivates our choices in life, you can see self-optimization lurking. If we plan ahead (which we constantly do) we improve our performance. So you find yourself daydreaming about making dinner, having a conversation, taking a trip. Brain research has found that to the brain there is not a lot of difference between doing something and thinking about doing something. Musicians can improve their technique by mentally practising.
In some situations, thinking about the future and not the present can cost you your life, but in most situations, planning for the future optimizes more, the present is short, the future long. So in the soup of human motivations, we may find that this is a biggie. A fun further question is always, why? Why is life self-optimizing? We can surmise that if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
