Natural Selection Seems Insufficient

[The Grand Nudger]

"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!

Or like the conceptual dominoes in a feedback loop that then become some input at a prior action point in a given system. There’s not much else to say here except that is literally how almost every piece of simple automation you use in your everyday life works…and also how the biological structures involved in this behavioral response of ours look to be organized.

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.

- and yet the thermostat works, the toilet works. If that’s all that our far more complicated brains (or souls) could do…it’s fairly easy to see how why and that natural selection could use that. People with better feedback loops in their souls would outperform people with poorer ones, or without them…assuming this soul stuff is a heritable trait… we would expect there to be more people with ability or behavior in a breeding population over time. That’s it, that’s all, it’s not super fancy. It doesn’t need gods or souls to work…but it would also work if there were gods or souls.

I want to point out again, that the content of your objection…that hunger is irrelevant to all this, actually fits the god breathed non natural selecting world -much- better. In a world without gods shaped by natural selection hunger exists because feedback loops are effective regardless of whether the car has a driver. In a world created by a god with no natural selection….hunger does what….exactly? How? Why? Guy was sitting g up there bored on a Tuesday and thought @imma make these poor fuckers feel hunger for the lulz”…..?

If we’re at an impasse, so be it, we could move on to the other examples….but I fear this will just keep happening…because the things you picked….of all the truly difficult to understand things about consciousness….are the truly easy set of biological imperatives.