You’re conflating ultimate causes and proximate causes. It’s just an extremely elementary mistake in understanding behavior. I didn’t call it Hegelian on the basis that you mentioning Hegel was evidence (though that did help me make the connection), I called it Hegelian because it has the same ethos of the end existing inside each step of the process, drawing the process along intrinsically, which you cannot claim this theory of “want” is not.
It’s no different than saying massive bodies want to be near each other (prioritized in terms of mass1 x mass2 / distance) because they keep exerting force that trends toward that outcome. It’s no different than saying that liquids “want” to hold together, they just don’t want it very strongly, or that rivers “want” to erode shorelines. With base organisms, it’s just input -> output, and the function processing them was created by selection pressures, but there is nothing distinguishing the actual actions on a proximate level from ones that are ultimately self-destructive, because the self-destruction only happens later and on that basis, with no further information being required, cannot be used for establishing what was going on inside the base organism at a proximate level to cause the output.
You’re conflating ultimate causes and proximate causes. It’s just an extremely elementary mistake in understanding behavior. I didn’t call it Hegelian on the basis that you mentioning Hegel was evidence (though that did help me make the connection), I called it Hegelian because it has the same ethos of the end existing inside each step of the process, drawing the process along intrinsically, which you cannot claim this theory of “want” is not.
It’s no different than saying massive bodies want to be near each other (prioritized in terms of mass1 x mass2 / distance) because they keep exerting force that trends toward that outcome. It’s no different than saying that liquids “want” to hold together, they just don’t want it very strongly, or that rivers “want” to erode shorelines. With base organisms, it’s just input -> output, and the function processing them was created by selection pressures, but there is nothing distinguishing the actual actions on a proximate level from ones that are ultimately self-destructive, because the self-destruction only happens later and on that basis, with no further information being required, cannot be used for establishing what was going on inside the base organism at a proximate level to cause the output.