Can a hardware and software metaphor explain it?
What is physically happening in our brain and body?
In: 21
Instinct, as I understand it, is how your unconscious nervous system (sympathetic nervous system) is wired via genetics and via learned behavior.
You have an entire system inside of you that has triggers. These triggers can be temperature, pressure, sound, visual, and even abstractly in the sense of mental trauma. Biologically speaking, your skin reacts to temperatures and there’s a range the sensory organs operate under. Within a certain threshold, warmth is pleasant. After a threshold, either another set of sensory systems activates, or the overload of temperature triggers pain and all of that activates your sympathetic nervous system which causes your heart to beat faster, adrenaline to be produced, muscles to contract and so forth.
To have an untaught instinct that fire bad is a biological thing that is inherent to all of us. It does not need to be taught. Our biology responds to it.
We can, however, overrule this instinct through conscious effort and positive association. If we wire ourselves to derive pleasure from fire and getting burned, then our sympathetic nervous system stops reacting in a flight or fight way.
We can override fear of heights, fear of food, fear of the dark and a myriad of other things.
We can also learn new ways to fear things. Trauma happens to us in ways not genitally predefined but become akin to fire and the like. Someone yelling at us will trigger a lot of the same reactions that a bear growling over us might and so instinct will think there’s a bear there and react accordingly.
Other animals have different biology with different sensors. They have different fears and different things they find pleasurable. Their instincts are different.
One might think, how does one know how to mate? To eat? To swim? How do animals know that? The word instinct gets thrown around a lot, but another system acts here called the parasympathetic system.
Same as your body reacts to pain, or temperature, or moisture, there’s responses to pleasure from aromas, visuals, textures and so on. When near a mate, an animal may feel pleasure from the pheramones it’s sensing, maybe that she bear looks real nice in that stream visually. One thing leads to another all because we’re going from one thing that “feels” right to another. All animals do this which usually leads to genitals rubbing on one another.
Why do bees pollinate plants? They gotta eat. The plant smells good or looks good, instinct kicks in because their nervous system responded in a positive way to these stimuli. Bee lands on plant. The plant itself survived through natural selection. The ones that look the way they do only look that way because the bees reacted to them more than other color configurations. The plant didn’t choose this, it’s just the genetic strain that got passed on the most.
Why do bees protect a hive? Probably feels right to them. There’s probably pleasure in swarming, maybe the noise, maybe the warmth, maybe the visuals of other bees, maybe the overload of chemicals they emit to one another, maybe their stingers itch in a good way, idk. They certainly don’t know why, it’s in their biology.
We function the same way. We’re animals too, but people like to pretend we’re not and they like to elevate humanity into its own category seperate from the rest of the planet.
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