| Somewhat interesting: Bananas contain the ingredients necessary to produce dopamine. I can see how this all plays out as a way for some apes to get some bananas. Even social structures, fairness and other things (I love this video - two monkeys getting unequal pay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg ) can be explained by a dopamine system that just likes to give us bananas and sex. And it's incentivized to conserve energy because this is better for survival (also called lazy) - interesting is that humans have some tendency to do stuff that don't necessarily is conserving energy. Maybe this is what makes us successful: Sometimes we invest excessive energy to try new things which happens to let us survive better through innovation (which leads to genetics that encode this behavior). I like it, although it isn't necessarily what I call my meaning of life (I'm a dualist, because materialism is too damn dry). I like bananas, though (and yes, the role of bananas may be exaggerated here). Thought long about it. From a materialistic standpoint there are only quantitative differences between a organism which has a sensor, some type of memory and an actuator and human beings, although they sure look different. Still following the same principles. When I further simplify, we are all just energy (and matter, which is just a form of it) following some first principles hallucinating our consciousnesses trying to evade the eventual entropy that we'll reach nevertheless because this is how the universe works. - - - Cool fact is that animals are capable of rational thinking (crows drop nuts to break them approx. at the minimal height necessary to achieve that - optimal energy usage. I'm pretty sure they don't even realize that their brains calculate this based on their experience) and I'm sure that all people act rational w.r.t their training data (some outliers like traumatic events and other life circumstances that differ from the average just change some weights in a way that it looks irrational for outsiders). This is indeed difficult to defend because it depends on the semantics on the word "irrational" which is man-made after all. Interesting resources for this topic: a theory trying to explain human behavior and the emergence of consciousness using knowledge of psychology: https://unifiedtheoryofpsychology.files.wordpress.com/2011/1... (principles how the brain works) https://unifiedtheoryofpsychology.files.wordpress.com/2011/1... (why culture and religion emerges) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo (consciousness as a hallucination) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRVGA9zxXzk (a bird which can identify itself in a mirror, simple self-awareness - I like the fact that the brains of birds are more efficient because they are space-constrained to be able to fly better) (the brain as a neural net with meta-learning capabilities that tries to guess what happens next and what it should do next. Emotions and some pre-wiring based on genetics enables us that we don't start with a complete random brain structure because it gives us better surviving abilities if we're able to see and feel as soon as we get out of our mothers). |