animals to differentiate edible foods and venomous foods. If these animals did not develop this system, they would only have they homeostatic control system, which would elicit food consumption behavior regardless of the item, which ends up being counter-intuitive if the item provokes disgust or even worse-if it is poisonous. This is one of the main ways in which having the hedonic system provides the animal characteristics that increase its survival, making it more fit, over the ones that just have homeostatic control. According to Berridge, what most probably occurred over time was that this system increased fitness and thus was passed on by the process of selection and eventually it just became part of our current systems and now, has become a part of our emotional expressions as well.

5. Elaborate on Ernst Mayr’s statement based on what you learned in class.

Ernst Mayr underscores one of the main argumentative conflicts in current neuroscience: do animals have a certain degree of consciousness or are they purely mechanistic? In order to make sense of his argument this question draws upon several different concepts: vitalism, mechanism, linear causation and the calculation problem within traditional control systems. To start, vitalism is the concept that stems from the idea that all functions of living organisms are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical processes. On the other hand, mechanism is the theory all biological processes can be reduced to the fundamental physical and chemical mechanisms, and it relies on the concept of linear causation. Linear causation argues that the cause must precede the effects in time, which would mean for example that increasing acid would cause an increased scratching response. However, the contrary to this idea would be negative feedback within the control systems theory. Control systems use a perceptual signal as the input of the function, a reference signal as a fixed setpoint of acceptable values, and an error signal calculated by a comparator that is what helps determine the output. The process through which we determine the output is negative feedback loops, where the organism determines if the output was able to reduce the error signal and if it was not the organism is able to set forth a new output through hierarchical control systems. These concepts are essential for the understanding of Mayr’s claim.