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Useful from the point of view of helping an animal satisfy its needs, so allowed to survive by natural selection? Perhaps it's just a inevitable by-product of c
by incompatible 3y ago
Useful from the point of view of helping an animal satisfy its needs, so allowed to survive by natural selection? Perhaps it's just a inevitable by-product of certain types of thought.
- vintermann 3y agoThat's assuming an animal is a thing that wants things. Again, not unreasonable, but also not actually an empirical statement, when you look critically at it. You're just pushing the teleology up a level.
- incompatible 3y agoAt some level it's just trying to survive because trying to survive is what helped all its ancestors to actually survive. It doesn't even need to be expressed as a "want", since plants are doing the same thing without a nervous system, going through a sequence of actions programmed in DNA and expressed in a chain of extremely complex biochemical reactions.