How does instinct work?

How does one live? Why do we eat, drink, sleep and stay warm? We kind of just do…

I don’t think there’s a gene in there that’s called “The gene for knowing how to pee in a yard” – more or less, our brains are constantly sending, receiving and processing information (little kitties brains are too). The receptors in your cats bladder sent the “time to go pee” message to his/her brain, your cat’s brain then said “Hmm…where to do this…”, then either received sensory optic data or just drew from memory that a nice open yard would be a reasonably ideal place to unload at. Then, viola! Pee. It all happens in less than a second.

I think Neurology has a better shot at explaining this action than the study of the animal’s instinctive nature – unless you’re asking why your kitty did this in the yard and not on your bed… even then I’d still go with just Neurology.

What I really wonder is how birds just know to create nests, or how they know to travel south for the winter. How feline animals instinctively know how to hunt (they all get low, in the same precise position before striking prey), etc. all sounds like more instinctual stuff to me.

The more we discover about DNA, the more we understand that junk DNA (pseudogenes) are not so junky after all. I suppose that instinct is a result from the program of ncRNA (non coding). Wes Warren of St. Louis University Genome Sequencing Center has discovered ncRNA to be the controller of the brain for songs of finches.

Purely supposition on my part, but it is the desire to sing, which engages the ncRNA to put brain neurons into action, thereby engaging the body to function accordingly to express the original desire.

I believe it begins with desire. And the research of Warren suggests that desire is not a function of brain activity, rather it is something else altogether undetermined that moves the ncRNA into action first.

So… I can easily suppose that your cats desire to relieve pressure in the bowl is similarly engaged. Or that @Disc2021‘s desire to satisfy the pangs of hunger, sleep and coldness are also engaged in this manner.

The question is… What is desire?

I propose that desire is a non physical agent, never to be demonstrated by the empirical sciences. Promoting a non physical agent at play in all of this gives us cause to consider that living beings are more than mere flesh and blood, or the programs that run the hardware. There is a good argument to suggest a desire element controlling it all externally.

How the mind works is a great mystery. Scientists are learning more about it all the time, but it will be a long time before there is a complete working model. Much of what we do occurs below the level of consciousness. Have you ever tried to remember a name and have it pop into your head when you were thinking of something else? In learning a sport or in learning how to drive, at the beginning what we do takes a conscious effort, but later much of it becomes automatic. We are not driven by instinct as much as other animals, but it still plays a role with humans.

I believe it’s a combination of genetics and environment and how the two combine within our learning and development. In response to your example about the bird. it’s genes are such that it will grow wings be able to digest worms etc. but it’s environment will ultimately teach it to fly or allow it to be cultivated depending on what type of bird it is of course. Genetics and Environment are inextricably linked though to produce outcomes and behaviour. Looking at feral children can bring great insights to this area of thinking.

In turn, instincts are part of our subconscious learned behaviour and we should listen to instincts more often I think. Great book about instincts in humans… BLINK by Malcolm Gladwell.

I’ll agree on neurology. The way the brain functions is different for all animals as they need to do different things. Now bird have become geniuses because flying is really hard. It allows birds to do tons of shit they don’t really need to, like talk. Now cats were domesticated at least 9500 years ago according to wikipedia. Ever since then the cats that don’t pee on the hand that feeds have been surviving best. And for even longer than that cats have picked homes, rather than wandering like dogs. So it’s been in their best interest to stay away from fecal matter.

That’s also why shit stinks, literally.

Aside from emotions instinct is just a part of the brain which evolution has shaped to a specific function. It’s exactly the same as why you’re able to see more than just static when in reality light is far too much information for the animal mind to handle. And this last bit might be speculation but I think instinct and conciousness as we have it are in complete contradiction to eachother. Which is why babies are such babies.

Did you ever feel an almost instant like or dislike for someone that you meet? That’s your dinosaur brain at work.

Was it your instinct to watch your cat take a shit? I watched my dog take a crap the other day to see if it was healthy or not, she had diarrhea, so I got to watch what she’s been eating. What is instinct? To react without thinking? If that’s the case then my instincts have been getting me into trouble lately. Ahh, unlearned behavior, so it is in our DNA, or if you believe in a spirit world, they place we are before we’re born, what we take from that world could become instinctual. I know, that’s crazy talk. Your cat didnt crap from instinct, he felt the turtles head peaking out and needed to drop a deuce. Is beating up a prostitute instinctual?

I forgot to mention…The part that was intrigueing was not the defocation. It was the knowledge to cover up the defocation.

Just as evolution can create beautiful, complex structures, it can create beautiful, complex behaviors. This is an interesting paper on how, using a computer simulation, complex behaviors could evolve from simpler ones. Real behaviors probably evolved in similar ways.