Natural Selection Seems Insufficient

[Angrboda]

That’s a running theme in our convo.  You use words like “atheist reductionism” and “epiphenomena” incorrectly - this leads to misunderstandings on your part and miscommunications between parties….like falling dominoes.

It’s an attempt to correct your misunderstandings about natural selection that appear to be informing your view of its insufficiency.  For example, here you cite precisely those conditions that make hunger a more fit homeostatic strategy than a simpler chemical trigger as though they were problems.  Not only are these not problems in a world where conscious experience is “more” than electrochemical response…they are -particularly and exclusively effective- when it isn’t.  When it’s just dominoes.  

Still, you touch on something that’s equally real in the world.  Whether hunger is some other x or electrochemical reactions….and regardless of whether it is effective to some extent in the world, there are still many occasions where hunger does not lead to satiation.  So our agency….if we have agency…whatever its nature may be, is still limited.  It remains true that the universe is seemingly indifferent to hunger.  Which is to say that it’s not by our hungering that food manifests itself in the world.  It only compels us to make the attempt.

Hunger as blind casualty is exactly why hunger works in a biological understanding of homeostatic response.  You’re hungry even when you don’t need food, and this compels you to look for it before you need it, which is very useful when food out in the world can be spotty.  Can you understand why…in a world with souls or without them (why pretend we’re talking about anything else, amiright?)….natural selection is a very good explanation for why we hunger?  Or if you prefer, can you see how positing a world positively brimming with soul but without natural selection…there really isn’t any obvious reason for us to feel hunger?

Leading to another fun bit of exploration.  Sometimes…because these processes are meaningfully blind regardless of what we believe about the nature of consciousness….they backfire.  Do souls just want to be fat…or do we find ourselves adapted for resource scarce environments living in an obesegenic world?  How come our souls…if that’s how we’re doing our thinking….have so much trouble with that?  Why do souls find it so difficult to resist the compelling nature of this particular homeostatic strategy?  Why can’t we will ourselves to be skinny, why can’t we will ourselves to not feel hunger….and why, if it’s a soul doing all of this…can chemical appetite suppressants do for us what souls cannot?  What is glp1…doing to souls….and how?

"It only compels us to make the attempt."   I don't think you're getting the point. Your words seem to imply:
1. We feel hunger.
2. Based on that hunger, we change our present course of direction. We INITIATE an attempt to procure food.

Again, that's like the third domino in a rightward fall saying, "I think I'll go left" - and than manages to do it!

The truth is, dominos do not INITIATE anything. Blind causality forces them to fall in a particular direction, whether they like it or not.

A  deterministic Natural Selection is doomed to failure.  I see no remedy for this problem. If you can't acknowledge this problem, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

As opposed to "our hunger initiates a food seeking behavior?" What informs your preference for one over the other?

It sounds like you have a definition of initiate that requires that initiating an action requires incompatibilist free will, aka libertarian free will. There is no such implication in the word. That's a you problem. I scheduled a cron job to run some SMART tests on my NAS. At 12:00 A.M. this morning, my NAS initiated those tests. No free will required. It seems that a great deal of your beliefs and errors are self-caused by you assuming meanings or principles which weren't necessitated by anything other than your own predilections and mistakes. Instead of being open-minded enough to realize that there are perfectly acceptable choices that differ from yours, you have dug yourself in under the ostensible rule of my way or the highway. This is the closed-mindedness you are infected with.