Since the early days when he tried to construct the hidden story of his own birth, his mind had perhaps never been so active in weaving probabilities about any private affair as it had now begun to be about Gwendolen's marriage.

• Seems like this is both a description of bayesian inference but also indicates that reasoning (or at least inductive reasoning, system 1 reasoning?) has a social basis.

• All animals aim for a net energy surplus
  • Technically this is all life, not just animalia; Hägglund argues this in This Life.

  For anything to be at stake in maintaining a life, it must be running the risk of death. Moreover, it is only through the activity of self-maintenance that there can be any time to live in the first place. The self-maintenance of a living being necessarily generates more lifetime than it needs to “spend” on keeping itself alive, which is why there is at least a minimal surplus of time for every living being. Even a simple plant does not have to expend all its time on securing the nourishment required for its survival. This surplus of time is even more evident in the lives of animals that have the capacity to engage in activities of self-enjoyment that are distinct from the activity of self-preservation—e.g., the singing of birds, the purring of cats, the playful interaction of dogs. Through such forms of self-enjoyment, many kinds of animals have a capacity to enjoy their surplus time as a form of “free” time. Yet, insofar as they cannot understand their time as free time—insofar as they cannot ask themselves what they ought to do with their time—even animals with highly refined capacities for self-enjoyment remain within the bounds of what I call “natural” freedom. In contrast, what I call spiritual freedom requires that the agent in question can ask herself how she should spend her time and be responsive to the risk that she is wasting her life. Without the relation to such a risk, we would not be able to lead a spiritual life, since we could never engage the question of what we ought to do with our time and what matters to us.

  • But let's expand this a bit with some points from SFI's Origins of Life course 16/4f8b:
    • Uses of energy:
      • The obvious one is for development/growth.
      • Maintenance and energy acquisition (a ton is used to acquire more energy).
      • Reproduction: seeking mates, trees producing seeds/fruit.
    • Methods of capture:
      • Active capture: carnivory (humans hunting).
      • Grazing: ungulates (humans growing grain).
      • Sit and wait: coral, algae (humans trapping?).
    • Side note: Agriculture starts early. Mitochondria? Coral farms algae, ants farm aphids, etc..
    • Metabolic rate depends on body temperature and affects all physiology. The bigger you are, the warmer you are. The warmer you are, the more food you need. The more food you need, the fewer of you there are. Number of heartbeats are roughly equal across mammals (but humans are an exception I think, both to current population and to number of heartbeats).
    • I'm pretty sure this is super important: