Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

Joscha: That’s not a very good argument.
Instead, humans do possess a demand for homeostasis and for acquisition to maintain homeostasis (all behavior is reducible to acquisition), a history (memory) of doing so, a continuous stream of predictions from those memories to seek opportunities to acquire, a stack of possible goals given those opportunities, and a continuous recursive relentless process of self review to improve homeostasis, acquisition (including status), and memory. So the analogy of neurons (or ‘little animals’) might hold a grain of truth in describing the cellular network of incentives to learn, but that network is regulated prior to that network by the homeostasis-maintaining hierarchy – and is obsessively self-aware.

Reply addressees: @Plinz