If you reach into someone's mind, you can feel emotions.

I had a pretty nice debate with you today, Mrs. Wollersheim. You're a good person to bounce ideas off of and to talk to about interesting little nuggets I find lying around.
For all of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, we talked about motivation today in AP Psych. There are two (main) types of motivation - intrinsic and extrinsic. Basically, they break down into "doing it just for doing it" and "doing it to receive a tangible reward".
My argument was that the line between intrinsic and extrinsic is not clear-cut and defined. There's a lot of blur. My main point is while you can't exactly touch emotions, they are tangible, because they manifest themselves in physical ways - after all, aren't they just mostly mechanisms and chemicals?.
If a murder takes pleasure in killing someone, they may do it because they extrinsically get to witness their victim dying by their own hands, but I think they also do it because seeing that makes them feel good. But the "good feelings" are tangible - they feel the happiness inside of them, the "happiness" maybe even ... makes itself noticeable physically (you know exactly where this is headed, right?).
If you reach into someone's body and grab a fistfull of something and yank it out, you'll most likely get guts (or blood vessels, etc). Physical physical things. If you reach into their brain, you'll get neurons and gray matter and gunk. But if you reach into their mind (which in itself isn't strictly a tangible thing, now is it?), you'll pull out thoughts and feelings and emotions and maybe even personality traits.
As far as we know, emotions and thoughts don't exist on a physical plane the same way, say, we do (excluding the biological processes that make them, which means they're tangible, I'd say!), but I don't think that they don't serve as a source for motivation. Double negatives, baby!
What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that feelings can absolutely be extrinsic motivation. Maybe I like reading because I get benefits, rewards for doing it - an increased vocabulary, a growing ability to understand what I am made to read. I don't think we necessarily have to be aware of our motivation, however.
(Three.)