A.I. sentience & human procreation

I can see your whole point around this, and it would make sense except for… Occam’s razor?

Ok, not quite literally the same principle, but something similar…

Think of a long lane, like a bowling lane, and it has a hole in the middle.
You can throw your ball there and hit the pins at the end, and you score points for that. Or at least you assume you do since the scoreboard is too high for you to see it.
But every now and then the ball falls onto that hole in the middle.

Now you turn to me and say “I think that hole is like ‘a bug’… I mean, the ball would reach the end much easier without it, so that hole is something bad which needs to be fixed”.

Well… this might make sense within your limited perspective… but what if when you look at the scoreboard you would see that when the ball falls into that gap you score the highest points!

Where I am trying to get here?

Your conception that deviant sexuality is “a bug that doesn’t help propagating the species” is entirely dependant upon the assumption that we have an inherent purpose of propagating the species.

Such assumption not only makes everything a lot more complex than needed (hence the Occam’s razor mention), and not only it’s unprovable…
but it’s opposite argument can actually be made with a lot less effort.

Take a look back in history.
The moments where we have any “your duty is to have children” argument recorded is paired with the need for controlling resources by the ones recording/enforcing it.

I won’t point fingers at any faiths because that would derail this topic, but…

There are dozens of examples where When a population was being prosecuted by someone else their priests begun enforcing “you must have more children”.

When distinct faiths needed to contest control over a territory the winner was the one with stricter “women must bear children” rules being created

When churches begun raising into power they needed more followers for political/strategical reasons, so they begun banning homossexuality…

I find it disturbingly coincidental that the same people who tried to push this belief that “we are put on this world to have children” (be it religiously or “scientifically”) were always the same ones who benefit the most from their culture having more children.

Do you think humans enjoy being raped?

You just gave @Coma 's argument a point there. :rofl:

If sex was a mechanism to propagate the species it wouldn’t be so tortuous…

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Oh how I missed those discussions! :slight_smile:

I like your bowling-lane-analogy… I think we all can’t see the scoreboard, as in, we all don’t know - can’t know! - what we’re actually here for. I don’t like religion, so I can’t say “hey there’s this higher being, and he gave us the task to xyz”. I don’t want to have children, so I can’t say “I’m here to pass on my dna, for what use it might bring”.
But there is one simple thing I know, and I think every human being knows - having fun is great. It’s great to have sex (we have parts of our body that are exclusively designed for pleasure!), it’s great to go out and enjoy the world, it’s great to socialize with like-minded people, to eat tasty things, to collect new experiences, to learn, to be free to be what we are. This all feels good, and it makes life worth living. Not every part of it for everybody (like, asexual people won’t enjoy sex, obviously), but generally I think it’s better to feel good than not to.
And since we’re all just animals, I assume this applies to every living being. If you watch some dogs playing in the park, it’s just pure fun and joy, and it’s wonderful to see. Or crows dancing in strong winds.

I can follow your argumentation, and it totally makes sense. I think homosexuality as an ideal was present in ancient Greece, and I just wondered what was different back then… they had wars and all that as well, and yet, they proclaimed the love between two men as the highest ideal of love.

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So did I!! :sweat_smile:

will try to be a bit more active again! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I like this point.

I do have a tendency to think that “Whatever we feel/know without having to be taught about is constituent of our nature”, and “Whatever we are taught we should do comes from a place where it benefits someone else”.
(reminder: just because something does benefit someone else it doesn’t mean it won’t also benefit you. Your parent is benefited from you not trying to jump out of the window, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing to teach you not to do)

Just spitballing here…

But there were some fundamental distinctions while on Ancient Greek’s golden age…

  • That was a fairly machist society, so if Male > Female, then Male :heart: Male > Male :heart: Female

  • A Male + Male relationship could coexist with Male + Female relationships (i.e. a Man could have both his wife and his boytoy), so Homossexuality would not hinder anything.

  • There wasn’t so much a need for “numeric superiority” as there was the need for brotherhood amongst fellow men. Therefore by glorifying homossexual love you would end up strengthening the bonds between your soldiers and citizens (reminding you that in Greek Republic only males where considered citizens)

Actually, I need to research a bit but I can’t think out of my hat of any example in history where Homossexuality was frowned upon while poligamy was accepted. Think it only became an issue after we hammered down this Ideal of “marriage with 1 person only, and for the rest of your life”…

This makes sense… if you can love men and women alike, you don’t do the numeric superiority of your society any harm. This whole monogamy thing (and its social impacts) were actually one of the worst inventions of mankind… :roll_eyes:

I recently saw some documentation about a unit of soldiers that consisted only of lovers - there might be some mythology involved, but it kinda makes sense… fighting for / with the ones you love might be a strong motivation.
And yes, I know Greece society was far from being perfect, but it’s a nice example for a very homosexual-positive society, and it’s always interesting to see when / why things changed. Similar to ancient Egypt, where incest was very usual in royal circles, a concept that was later (with all its negative results) revisited in Europe. Morality constantly changes…

Agree, though it might be hard to tell at what early point of life society has an influence. I think bisexuality might be pretty constituent of our nature, but society does its best to prevent that…

That’s the reason for “altruism” - it feels good to do something nice. If I give someone a nice present, I myself am getting happy because of their joy.
“My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy” (Crowley) :wink:

edit: damn… gotta get out of the house now! 'Til later :slight_smile:

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I feel safe discussing this here, since it’s just a vague wondering about life and it’s grand mysteries

I intend no insult or any negativity exactly as was explained above

I kinda lean towards the “bug” concept, but that denotes negatively… I don’t intend that… so maybe more a random adaptation?

Only thing is, and this has always bothered me on some level… and I mean this purely hypothetically

If there is a “gay gene”,…. Wouldn’t it by nature cause it’s own elimination from the gene pool?
I get that people have been forced to act and couple straight because society and stuff… but still makes you wonder a bit

(I think a gene is a far to simple answer, I believe it’s a bit of everything and even things we haven’t clued in on yet)

I think a big part of the complicated nature of humanity these days is, I think we have side stepped natural selecton / evolution

Not to say I think people should or shouldn’t exist… more the merrier

But people survive diseases now that would have killed them centuries ago, people that wouldn’t have or couldn’t have passed on genes are doing so more easily these days

For better or worse I don’t think evolution, at least the default mode is engaged anymore

Might actually be kinda cool on a time lapse level

Instead of spearheading in one direction, we will kinda spread out in various directions

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Don’t worry… I think most of us get what you meant.
I actually quite enjoy being able to argue about that from a purely philosophycal point of view (undressing the topic from any ethical/social conotation)

If we take the premise that “we have in our nature the need to propagate our species”, then that makes perfect sense!

I just can’t see why would we, as individuals, would have any programming to do that.

The way I see it, Accepting that the continuity of a species is “genetically programed” in us kinda goes against the whole concept that life sprung from chance and the universe begun on a big bang.

If we are talking about some greater entity that consciously designed us… then yeah, we would need to have self propagation as part of our genetics…
but I can’t see it that way.

Exactly.
Even if we think of that as a “random adaptation”… then it should adapt to something which improves our survivability and also make it so that it has a higher chance of propagating itself through the gene pool (basic Darwinism).

Also against this theory is the fact that mammals are bissexual by nature… so we can’t claim that a behavour that spans across multiple species is just a “random adaptation / bug”
Saying that just reeks of “I have a circular hole, but this block is cubic… uhmm, hos can I get it to fit there”?

As in… we got so convinced by decades of “mainstream” “genetic programming/memories” misconceptions being diffused that we are naturally drawn to think that “we have a natural programing towards propagating our species”

I get it. I mean… it’s either that or accepting that existence if a byproduct of random chance! And that’s a lot to take on our tiny egos…

Now I must Strongly disagree!! :sweat_smile:
We live in a finitely resourced environment and existence = consumption.
So until we can resolve a gigantic amount of issues we have as a species… then maybe it’s time to hit the breaks a bit!

Oh, yeah… It seems like we’re making an active effort out of fucking our own species/genepools/etc…
Sometimes I wonder if the Darwin Awards shouldn’t get a larger media coverage!

Which, again, is way more consistent with the Idea that there isn’t any “continuity of the species primary directive” in effect on our “coding”

I do love some good Crowley quotes!!

Yeah… if you lived in the 80s/90s… even homossexuality was almost “enforced” by the queer community.
As in… being Bi was so wrong that you had to choose: are you gay or straight?
Then in the late 90s we went the oposite direction and any girl who wasn’t Bi wasn’t “cool enough”…

Amazing how much we manage to mess ourselves up.

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Which is the point I was making.

Don’t think so, it just happens to be the way and it works as a means of reproduction, which is why it still is around. Tho for humans I’d much rather argue that the desire to rape is a bug… but it kinda works.

What’s the alternative? That there’s some super weird way in which predictable + random matter can actually result in real sentience? Result in something that can influence how these predictable and unpredictable things work together? Sometimes this is harder to accept than this “it’s all just code” thing.

Tho this can all be twisted to say “I’m just following my code, not my choice” so I don’t live by this.

Pretty much that, yeah…

I mean… we have 2 alternatives for beginning of the universe:
A. Some entity decided to make everything with a purpose in mind (predictable)
B. There was a big explosion (random)

We also have 2 alternatives for the origin of life:
A. Some entity rearranged some primordial matter and built life/humans (predictable)
B. Through sheer chance in one (or more) planet conditions made it so that life happened. Then equaly random events congregated to make so that life evolved… and here we are (random)

If we accept “random” for both the premises above…
so, in the topic of sentience/human drive, when faced with the same pairing of possibilities:

A. we are designed with some purpose in mind, such as continuity of the species (predictable)
B. Sentience is also a result of the correct chain of evolutionary events coinciding and we don’t actually have any inherent programming to ourselves (random)

Why is it that we then decide that “predictable” is now the answer?

Is it just a coincidence that out of the 3 scenarios the only one where accepting the “random” alternative would hurt our egos… is also the only one where we suddenly decide to go against logic and accept something that gives us a clear purpose (i.e. massages our ego)?

I just can’t accept such a shallow and biased read on the influence of our genetic as “we have this genetic drive to do XYZ”…
but that’s me…
And here’s where we link to that old debate where I compared science to religion… :sweat_smile:

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My favorite explanation for this is the gay uncle hypothesis:
" The “gay uncle hypothesis” posits that people who themselves do not have children may nonetheless increase the prevalence of their family’s genes in future generations by providing resources (e.g., food, supervision, defense, shelter) to the offspring of their closest relatives.[85]

This hypothesis is an extension of the theory of kin selection, which was originally developed to explain apparent altruistic acts which seemed to be maladaptive. The initial concept was suggested by J. B. S. Haldane in 1932 and later elaborated by many others including John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton and Mary Jane West-Eberhard.[86] This concept was also used to explain the patterns of certain social insects where most of the members are non-reproductive.

Vasey and VanderLaan (2010) tested the theory on the Pacific island of Samoa, where they studied women, straight men, and the fa’afafine , men who prefer other men as sexual partners and are accepted within the culture as a distinct third gender category. Vasey and VanderLaan found that the fa’afafine said they were significantly more willing to help kin, yet much less interested in helping children who are not family, providing the first evidence to support the kin selection hypothesis.[87][88]

The hypothesis is consistent with other studies on homosexuality, which show that it is more prevalent amongst both siblings and twins.[87][88]

Vasey and VanderLaan (2011) provides evidence that if an adaptively designed avuncular male androphilic phenotype exists and its development is contingent on a particular social environment, then a collectivistic cultural context is insufficient, in and of itself, for the expression of such a phenotype.[89]""

From Biology and sexual orientation - Wikipedia.

Essentially, by not having offspring of your own, you provide more support to other family, mainly nieces and nephews, who still carry the same genes, albeit dormant in their case

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That’s a great take on it.

Although I do question any study performed in a specific society/culture/timeframe which later atempts to globalize it.

i.e. Freud was correct in his theory about the human psyche. but since he only studied wealthy wemen in Viena at his time… atempting to aply his theories into modern-day aboriginal males… would most likely cause more harm than any good.

I get particularly worried about studies such as the Vasey and VanderLaan one because they tend to reach absolutely bonkers conclusions such as:

I say bonkers because… Twins are a tiny fraction of population.
So in order to state any statisticaly valid conclusion about the behaviour of Twins I would need to study a very large number of Twins.
They did not have access to any statistically relevant sample size in that “Samoan village study”, therefore any conclusion such as that serves only to place the whole study into scrutiny and remove their credibility.

and in this bit:

Again, I call it a biased conclusion.

Incurring the risk of oversimplifying it… (I did read that study a while ago, but will attain to the example you brought up because it’s a great summary example, and also to keep things short-ish)

when I read that “gay uncles are more prone to help Kin, but less inclined to help non-kin family”…
You could conclude that “they have a genetic role to serve as kin-assistance, thus improving their family children’s genes to continue in the pool”…

or you could just assume that these gay uncles are less burdened with immediate familial expenses (monetary or emotional), therefore they have more availability to help the rest of it’s kin. At the same time they have less interest in children, so they are also less inclined to help non-kin children.

There were dozens of conclusions they could have drawn from that study, yet they kinda twisted the data to fit the conclusion they wanted to reach… (that happens to almost all qualitative studies I’ve read so far. it’s quite sad)

Also, Kudos for quoting Mary Jane West-Eberhard!! :grin:

EDIT (to keep as a single post):

And this would make sense…
except that it doesn’t account for “non-familial gay uncles”, who perform exactly the same role even sharing no genes…

nor for “gay godfathers”, who do the same for families without any gene correlation as well…

So, back again :wink:

Isn’t the gay uncle basically the same as the female wolf who helps raise the puppys of her sister, aunt, whatever? Like, helping to “pass genes” that are not neccessarily their own, but close enough?

I’m a bit more on Eyeux’ side, thinking we basically start bi-/pansexual and just feel forced to “chose a side” because of society. I mean, let’s take away all that “gene-passing” and just go to the point of pleasure - if the way somebody touches me feels good, is it important if the hand or lips or whatever are male or female? If I love somebody because they are a wonderful person with a great character, is it important if they are male or female? To be honest, not at all.
I get it that there are preferences, just like some people like blondes more than dark haired people, but ultimately I don’t get why I should make any exclusions beforehands - this would only limit the amount of my possible partners for joy :wink:

Absolutely. From a darwinist standpoint, lots of people who are currently alive shouldn’t be, and that’s the problem I have with darwinism :wink:
Still, things tend to become complicated when thinking about that. I had a discussion once about genetic disorders, and I think it would be a good thing if those could be cured (which is currently not possible) or eliminiated - the disorders, not the people! I think a genetic screening before reproduction would be a really good idea, but people pretty much jumped at me for stating that… still, wouldn’t it be better to give birth to a healthy child? I am in no way saying that a child with a genetic disease is worth less or whatever, but I think it’s always a good thing to be… healthy? Like, every dog breeder should try to optimize the genetic fitness and health of the breed, but in humans, this is a total taboo…

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Welcome back!!

And right when I’m about to jump on the bouldering wall! :sweat_smile:

Actually, I would argue…

If we do have an imperative to preserve the continuity of the species, then homophobia would have won the evolutionary lottery thousands of years ago.

So the undeniable presence of bissexuality in all mammals should serve as proof that there is no such an imperative to maintain the continuity of species.

What there is is the random chance that made it so that many of the actions that rewards us with pleasure/satisfaction/etc (not talking only about sex)… also cooperate to produce a byproduct: the continuity of the species.

It’s just that it isn’t an imperative, but a mere side-effect.

it’s also funny that we cling to this Idea that “species have an imperative to maintain themselves”…

It’s nothing more than Ideological anthropomorphisation: the scientific equivalent to claiming your Rumba is much happier because you added Googly eyes to it!

We want to feel less desperate about our realisation that death is imminent so we cling to something higher… and in a godless scientifically minded community, that must be “our species”.

So we anthropomorphise “the species” to begin having human traits, such as the desire to maintain it’s existance.
I get it, it does calm our nerves… but in my opinion that’s just us attributing a human trait to a whole thing which is “species”.

But it does have it’s drawbacks… for once it’s an unprovable theory…
and in second place, we have dozens of straightforward examples that show us that continuity of species is way more likely to be a consequence than a condition…
And finally, it opens up a lot more questions than it answers.

ok… now Off I go!
See you later!!

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I think exurb1a said that kinda like this in this video maybe.
It doesn’t convince me. Maybe calms me a bit, yeah we just don’t know how it works, but obviously we do have real sentience. Still hard to accept that there’s this mechanism which I just won’t ever understand which gives a flesh machine a real free will.

lol no, the random one is way cooler than being a pet project of an old god. Through brute force the universe made small selfpreserving machines which turned into me writing this, actually crazy if you ask me. Way cooler than any religion I’ve ever heard, a real wonder… OR NOT.
Life could be an inherent property of matter + energy + time. After enough rain cycles you can find cell like structures in puddles, and the jump from single celled to human is kind of acceptable (with it’s own amazing sub challenges ofc, but evolution). So life is predictable, evoluton is predictable, big intelligent animals are predictable. Explainable with regular non magic matter that just behaves like we know it.
Parts of the universe and brain are unpredictable (quantum stuff, real random as far as we know), but how do you mix perfectly predictable and real random to get sentience? Isn’t it just all deterministic behaviour with some random input? Life is not so much of a wonder to me, consciousness & sentience are far harder to explain IMO.

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I’m not exactly convinced all humans do have free will… :sweat_smile:

“jokes” aside…

I actually got really lost there. No critique, I just failed to understand the core of your point there.

I mean…
You had a really good example about how evolution is predictable.
That thought process only works in hindsight, though. (as in… I cannot predict where another life form will come up. I just can expect/predict that another life form could appear somewhere else in the universe.)

In a similar way I can also predict another individuals thoughts, in hindsight. Despite “parts of the brain being real random”.

I mean… isn’t everything a mix of predictable and real random?

Or what would be the problem of raving predictable and random together?

And most importantly, what does that has to do with Sentience?

(I might be coming across as mocking but I’m not. I am really curious about the thought process behind that)

Yes. This is due to the real randomness of quantum stuff which probably influences matter. If it weren’t for that you could. It’s a huuuge chaotic system but knowing enough you should be able to predict it (though you can’t, uncertainty bla bla). My point is there’s no magic in this process, we could understand each step if we saw it,

Yes. That’s the thing.

NOTHING!! How would something random or predictable be able to influence itself?
How the fuck would you build a machine that can choose to do stuff? Matter moving itself, on it’s own terms?! It has to be based on predictable routines with random influence.

Logically it’s much easier to accept that sentience is an illusion, that I’m just feeling like I have a choice while in reality I’m just a huuge complex algorithm encoded in my brain. I could accept that machines e.g. create ways to talk to each other, build weird stuff, this whole complex world, without the help of actual consciousness. Sometimes this sounds more plausable than real consciousness, that’s all I wanted to say. → nothing is sentient → the chat bot is not sentient :slight_smile:

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This is one beefs I have with some of this 14th Dimension physics…
Feels more like we are incessantly attempting to get a squared block through a circular passage.

I mean… we can either admit we have a limitation with our means of measuring stuff / We are missing a piece of the puzzle (double slit or speed of light on a moving train experiments are a good starting point)

Or we can get math that needs 14 fucking dimensions to work…

I swear “because unicorn farts” as a reason sounds more appealing and won’t need so much complexity. :rofl:

by Logical definition, if we could know all the factors, then we could predict life.
Therefore if we can’t predict where life will show up, it’s because we can’t know all the factors.

Claiming it’s “because some quantum effects change where life could spring” is just like saying that despite me being blind, the reason why I cannot see where my keys are is because “keys can turn invisible while no one is watching”.
I mean… if I could see my keys they would not be invisible. If I can’t, then if they can turn invisible or not should be irrelevant.

This sounds like a bird getting perplexed about an airplane. It looks up and exclaims: “how can something not touching the ground keep moving?”

but unlike flight, the core of this question might be unanswerable just because we cannot see ourselves from the necessary perspective.

Why? (actual question)
And also… why not?

I mean… first of all, this whole thing assumes both that “true random exists” and that “things which are predictable, i.e. not random at all, also exist”.
Those are two absolute arguments, therefore unprovable.

We must also not forget that there are two other possible scenarios:

A. There is nothing which is truly random. It’s just our measurement methods which are flawed.

B. There is nothing truly deterministic. Everything is pure chaos but our experience/memory of reality is registered as if things were static as an egoic mechanism of survival.

In both of these 2 alternative (and simpler) options we wouldn’t have this problem. It only arises when we try to mix 2 extremes and still keep them untouched.

That’s a good take as well.
Similar to Everything is conscious.
Or to “the whole Idea of conscience is an egoic construct”.

Neither are my particular cup of tea (leave way too many loose ends for me), but they are all fairly good points.

But none of them have anything with “choosing to do stuff”.
If I know enough about an individual, I can make them “choose stuff” however I want and they would be none the wiser. That doesn’t make that person any less sentient.

Heck, given enough resources I can even train someone to develop ADHD or become depressed or addicted! And still, this doesn’t make them any less sentient, nor makes them have any less free will.

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Sorry for the long throwback on this… but this idea here maybe constitutes about 2% of what actually drives procreation vis a vis sex and sexual attraction. The entire system of puberty, ovulation, pheromone production, the vomeronasal organ, and a whole host of autonomic nervous system functions, endocrinological systems, visual systems, highly evolved subconscious partner fitness / health evaluation methods, etc. all working together to drive people’s sex organs at each other, all happening unconsciously… so yeah no, the reason we’ve made it this far as a species has nothing to do with cavemen going “Ug fear death. Ug fuck to make kid for to have legacy forever”… just ask all those pre-teen mothers if it was wanting to live by proxy that made them “decide” to have a kid :slight_smile:

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Because these 2 things seem to exist and nothing else. No one ever thought of an experiment to disprove that. These seem to be the building blocks of us.

I do not claim only that. I even mentioned uncertainty. Yes you can not measure a perticle perfectly, e.g. know it’s exact speed and location.
That doesn’t make it’s bahaviour less predictable. If you knew these values, you could perfectly predict what it’d do in the future. Just saying most here is normal matter, explainable with normal physics. But yes, quantum stuff can influence the world (think schrödingers cat), which introduces real random to otherwise perfectly preditcable things. My point is even with a universe perfectly deterministic, you can not predict that an ape will exist on planet X at year Y because a) uncertainty and b) real random. But, yes, in reverse you can explain each step from dead matter to alien ape. But you can’t explain free will.

That’s my only hope. Idk, maybe neuralink tech will enable us to really “debug” a brain and understand each single step in a thought. Then we might be able to see an answer.

Or go deterministic only, which is what happens with AI. If AI were sentient, it would HAVE to be based on deterministic stuff. Every single thing in a computer was made by us, we know how it works, we can predict every single thing. (in theory, in practice our chips are so small we have quantum stuff again)

How would you explain sentience there? It would have to be deterministic, if you give the same state of the AI the same inputs it will give you the same outputs. Is that true for humans?

You can not control every input and the state of the environment for humans, but if you could, would it still be a real “decision” you just made, or is it just perfectly explainable physical processes leading to you thinking you decided something?

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My (arguable) point was towards an unconscious drive towards the conscious decision to have children. It’s a common ground between existentialism, nihilism, Gestalt, Fenomenology, some Psychanalisis lines…

Of course that would not be the only drive. There are many more, but a good chunk of them also manage to fall back to that core if “dissecated”.

You raise a strong point about what happens from a biological standpoint

My “hot take” to that is:
None of those hormonal / sexual attraction / “Pheromonal” drives lead us to have a strong desire to have children.

They lead us to a strong desire to have pleasure.
The consequence of certain methods of obtaining pleasure is that babies happen.

Agree completely.

In this instance my view is more like “we only came this far as a species because by chance our reproduction methods are a consequence of our most innate form of obtaining pleasure, and our brains are hard-wired to seek pleasure”

as a fallback mechanism our brains are also hard wired to run away from suffering and that’s where the fear death thing kicks in… but I do agree that could be about 2% of the reason why the species survive.

My point was about “continuity of the species is a consequence, not a driving force”.

That’s the thing: these are individuals that did not “decide to have kids”.
They decided to have pleasure, and kids just happened. as a consequence.

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I was just wanting to say it wasn’t desire to live by proxy, it was pure stupidity and not thinking about consequences :wink:
But I think you said it nicer :smile:

You said it yourself - it’s all a mechanism to have sex. To have pleasure. Not at all to have children - they might be just a by-product of it all. I’m relatively sure that a lot less babies would be born if sex wasn’t fun at all…

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