Are Myths Valuable?

[Anomalocaris]

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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.

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.

Yes, but reasoning is both a vastly faster acting type of cause-and-effect biological mechanism, and a vastly more versatile one allowing a vastly larger number of instantly (evolutionary time scale) available responses in dealing with many selection pressures.

Most animals capable of complex behavior are capable of learned conditional response, many derived response derived from learned response.  The animal’s behavior would be influenced by a combination of instinctive behavior and learned conditional response.  With development of reason, the animal’s behavior now tilt very heavily towards derived response deriving from learned response, over learned conditional response and instinctive behavior.