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I think this point about spiders would be more compelling if we actually saw that some spiders were lazy and some were not, and the lazy ones died and the non l

I think this point about spiders would be more compelling if we actually saw that some spiders were lazy and some were not, and the lazy ones died and the non lazy ones didn't. The fact is that spiders and birds and whatever animal just generally doesn't have the desire to "lay in bed under the blankets". If nature gave us the desire to do so, doesn't that mean it isn't wrong if we're using nature as a guide?

npunt 4y ago
This is a good point if you take the perspective that we are independent of our environment. Our desires and needs are natural, therefore we should follow them. However, if you consider that we co-evolved with our environment and all of its challenges and constraints, then our desires and how much we feel them are simply the result of optimizing our survival over hundreds and thousands of generations. E.g. the 'difficulty' of our environment is a 50. We have to have a desire of 51+ to survive: a will to live. The 'lazy' spiders all had <50 and no longer exist. Therefore, if we change environments to something much easier to live in, then our desires are kind of vestigial optimizations that may not provide the kind of guidance on the optimal way to survive in the new environment - they may take hundreds or thousands of generations to unwind. Modern civilization in particular has created such a massive shift in challenges and resource availability that it's not hard to find examples of this. E.g. we have a strong desire to rest even when we don't need it because we co-evolved in environments where rest was scarce (due to need to survive), so when we had the opportunity we took it. Same with food: food used to be scarce, so we needed a strong desire to get it, but now food is abundant and we still have that desire and wind up eating too much. In both circumstances, the environment was the pace-setter, but thats now changed, so we need to be our own pace-setter.

npunt 4y ago

This is a good point if you take the perspective that we are independent of our environment. Our desires and needs are natural, therefore we should follow them. However, if you consider that we co-evolved with our environment and all of its challenges and constraints, then our desires and how much we feel them are simply the result of optimizing our survival over hundreds and thousands of generations. E.g. the 'difficulty' of our environment is a 50. We have to have a desire of 51+ to survive: a will to live. The 'lazy' spiders all had <50 and no longer exist. Therefore, if we change environments to something much easier to live in, then our desires are kind of vestigial optimizations that may not provide the kind of guidance on the optimal way to survive in the new environment - they may take hundreds or thousands of generations to unwind. Modern civilization in particular has created such a massive shift in challenges and resource availability that it's not hard to find examples of this. E.g. we have a strong desire to rest even when we don't need it because we co-evolved in environments where rest was scarce (due to need to survive), so when we had the opportunity we took it. Same with food: food used to be scarce, so we needed a strong desire to get it, but now food is abundant and we still have that desire and wind up eating too much. In both circumstances, the environment was the pace-setter, but thats now changed, so we need to be our own pace-setter.