I think you're overselling your argument a bit—the existence of one mechanistic explanation for a process doesn't 'crowd out' other descriptions. Descriptions

I think you're overselling your argument a bit—the existence of one mechanistic explanation for a process doesn't 'crowd out' other descriptions. Descriptions can be dual—saying foxes are "meant" to hunt hares, or predators are "meant" to hunt prey, can just be a compact way of describing their long, mutual historical co-evolution. Certainly, if you remove all prey from an environment, the foxes would die. What could be more meaningful (to the fox) than survival? For example: Mental thought is just a dumb statistical phenomenon that is a product of competing neural synapse electrochemical potentials, neurotransmitter levels, and ultimately subject to the dumb, unthinking hand of physical law at the subatomic level. Anything that changes the movement of particles and energy in your brain changes the neural outputs, and that's the end of the story. Brains don't think, minds do not regard themselves, piles of dumb atoms to do not feel pain, love, or happiness. It just so happens that brains that create output patterns that, when input into other brains, cause mutual feedback loops of interaction. Creatures that mutually interact are often more likely in the long run to have healthy offspring, and thus over time we would expect to see more brains like this. The critical mistake is people adding "meaning" and "thoughts" to a blind dumb statistical process akin to Russian roulette.