Are Myths Valuable?

[DLJ]

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There are certainly degrees of reasoning abilities, which make the question more difficult to address.  "Using thinking tools rather than instincts" works for me, though I refer to thinking tools as the symbolic processing of information.
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Just checking... did you mean "symbolic processing of information" or processing of symbolic information? Given that symbols are an input to the process and aren't stored anywhere in the system.

the mind is material process.

Thus "biological determinism" includes the evolution of thinking tools.

This is where I disagree.  The mind is a virtual process.  That's why I prefer to call it symbolic processing.

I don't think evolution is determined, because it depends on the accumulation of chance, rather than determined, mutations.  That allows life to come up with adaptations which are not strictly determined, like information processing.  Reasoning is a brilliant shortcut which obviates any need for much more complex cause-and-effect biological mechanisms.

And is not 'reasoning' also a cause-and-effect biological mechanism? Trigger - algorithm - action.