Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers.
well, being a consequentialist is a particular adaptation you can execute. “Consequentialist” is a subset of “Adaption Excecuter”
Humans certainly come much closer to pure consequentialism—of explicitly representing a goal and calculating optimal actions based upon the environment you observe to achieve that goal—than any other creature does.
I agree. My comment was meant as a clarification, not a correction, because the paragraph I quoted and the subsequent one could be misinterpreted to suggest that humans and animals use entirely different methods of cognition—”excecut[ing] certain adaptions without really understanding how or why they worked” versus an “explicit goal-driven propositional system with a dumb pattern recognition algorithm.” I expect we both agree that human cognition is a subsequent modification of animal cognition rather than a different system evolved in parallel.
I’m not sure I agree that humans are closer to pure consequentialism than animals; if anything, the imperfect match between prediction and decision faculties makes us less consequentialist. Eating or not eating one strip of bacon won’t have an appreciable impact on your social status! Rather, I would say that future-prediction allows us to have more complicated and (to us) interesting goals, and to form more complicated action paths.
well, being a consequentialist is a particular adaptation you can execute. “Consequentialist” is a subset of “Adaption Excecuter”
Humans certainly come much closer to pure consequentialism—of explicitly representing a goal and calculating optimal actions based upon the environment you observe to achieve that goal—than any other creature does.
I agree. My comment was meant as a clarification, not a correction, because the paragraph I quoted and the subsequent one could be misinterpreted to suggest that humans and animals use entirely different methods of cognition—”excecut[ing] certain adaptions without really understanding how or why they worked” versus an “explicit goal-driven propositional system with a dumb pattern recognition algorithm.” I expect we both agree that human cognition is a subsequent modification of animal cognition rather than a different system evolved in parallel.
I’m not sure I agree that humans are closer to pure consequentialism than animals; if anything, the imperfect match between prediction and decision faculties makes us less consequentialist. Eating or not eating one strip of bacon won’t have an appreciable impact on your social status! Rather, I would say that future-prediction allows us to have more complicated and (to us) interesting goals, and to form more complicated action paths.
agreed