Natural Selection Seems Insufficient

[The Grand Nudger]

That's where the trouble arises, I keep imploring you to consider whether it only seems clear to you.  Natural selection explains hunger as a homeostatic strategy with a larger range of survival benefits than simple cellular triggers.  That seems clear to me.

The question of "Explaining" hunger is not my primary emphasis.  The major thrust of my argument is that hunger is irrelevant/  useless for survival if we are inexorably locked into domino-like behavior that cannot freely opt to shift direction toward food when we feel hungry. If we have no free control over our trajectory, we will starve.

I didn't say they required a God. I said merely said that domino determinism won't suffice to explain the pursuit of food, clothing, safety, and shelter.

This entails at minimum a pansychism antithetical to a wholly reductionistic domino-effect determnism.  Let alone account for self-awareness.

Hunger does seem like a thing that "domino determinism" explains pretty well, though?  You feel it and you can't help but feel it.  It may not actually help you in a given instance, I walk to the fridge and there's food there...but we're not all so fortunate... but you'll feel it anyway.  Amusingly enough, you'll feel it even if you don't -need- food...and that's not a bug, it's a feature.  If our homestatic strategies were more efficient then we'd only eat when we needed to, like alot of life.  That depends on the regularity of feeding oppurtunities, though.  Hunger sends us off looking for food even when we don't need it, which makes it more robust as a strategy when there is food instability or bottlenecks.  Fat storage is a similar but unconscious strategy.  

So...do I think that for a creature like us living in a world like ours the animals who are more compelled to go in search of food when they need it and when they don't are likely to out-survive and out-reproduce others?  OFC I do.  Seems pretty reasonable, right? That's natural selection for you.

Notice how I didn't need gods or panpsychism to explain this, and that I did explain it (even if my explanation is wrong)? This is why I don't understand why you believe the things you say.

As for that last line..Ill note..as I have so often in our convo already..that even if we do have free control over our trajectory..we still starve. Another one of those things that fails to show any difference between a world one way or another.

...all of it swirling an obvious drain. You mistakenly believe that Other Items X are necessarily linked to either a theistic god or panpsychism, and it seems true and clear to you, but it just isn't. Insomuch as those Other Items X are not actually atheism, and regardless of how wrong you are about any given thing...the real takeaway, for me, is that you're aiming your rifle the wrong way. You have a problem with that other stuff, it's nothing to do with atheist reductionism.