On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 11:17 PM, Terren Suydam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm not saying play isn't adaptive. I'm saying that kittens play not > because they're optimizing their fitness, but because they're intrinsically > motivated to (it feels good). The reason it feels good has nothing to do > with the kitten, but with the evolutionary process that "designed" that > adaption. > > It may seem like a minor distinction, but it helps to understand why, > for example, people have sex with birth control. We don't have sex to > maximize our genetic fitness, but because it feels good (or a thousand > other reasons). We are adaption executers, not fitness optimizers. >
The word "because" was misplaced. Cats hunt mice because they were designed to, and they were designed to, because it's adaptive. Saying that a particular cat instance hunts because it feels good is not very explanatory, like saying that it hunts because such is its nature or because the laws of physics drive the cat physical configuration through the hunting dynamics. Evolutionary design, on the other hand, is the point of explanation for the complex adaptation, the simple regularity in the Nature that causally produced the phenomenon we are explaining. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
