Jeremiah

The humans that survived were those that had sex and reproduced.

Everything about humans is downstream of what helped with sex and reproduction.

But that doesn't mean that any particular thought that you think involves reproduction or sex.

If you're doing a math problem, you won't think, hmm, how can I have sex with the number three?

You're not even thinking, in order to reproduce, I need to survive.

To survive, I need money.

To get money, I need a good job.

And to get a good job, I need good grades.

And to get good grades, I need to get the answer to this math problem.

Therefore, the answer is 76.

You're just doing good, normal math.

The evolutionary process that designed the learning algorithms that power your brain was thinking about, all in quotes, survival and sex and reproduction, but you may never consider those things at all in the course of any given task.

CF, organisms are adaption executors, not fitness maximizers.

Link in post.

Which does a good job hammering in the point that we run algorithms designed by the evolutionary imperative to maximize survival and reproduction.

rather than considering survival and reproduction explicitly in our decisions.

When a monk decides to swear an oath of celibacy and never reproduce, he does so using a brain that was optimized to promote reproduction, just using it very far out of distribution, in an area where it no longer functions as intended.

One level lower down, your brain was shaped by next-sense-dartum prediction.

Partly you learned how to do addition because only the mechanism of addition correctly predicted the next word out of your teacher's mouth when she said 3 plus 3 is.

It's more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true.