If representation is the wrong default, something else must be doing the work.
That work is often gestured toward with words like function, fitness, importance, or relevance. But these terms are frequently left conceptually loose, or quietly collapsed into meaning.
This post introduces the distinction on which the entire series turns:
Value is not meaning.
Until this distinction is held firmly, animal behaviour will continue to be over‑intellectualised.
Why meaning keeps sneaking back in
The difficulty is understandable.
When an animal reliably does what works, it looks as though it understands what matters. We reach instinctively for the language of significance:
this matters more than that,
this is the right move,
this is relevant information.
In human life, such talk belongs squarely to meaning.
But biological systems do not traffic in meanings.
They traffic in viability.
What value is (and is not)
Value, in the biological sense, is brutally simple.
A state of affairs has value for an organism if it:
sustains coordination,
preserves integrity,
keeps future possibilities open,
or avoids catastrophic loss of viability.
Nothing about this requires:
interpretation,
symbolic content,
correctness conditions,
or understanding.
Value is enacted, not represented.
Why value feels like meaning
Value is easily mistaken for meaning because it is:
selective,
asymmetrical,
and consequential.
Some possibilities matter enormously; others not at all.
The danger lies in sliding from selectivity to significance.
Coordination without interpretation
Consider what it takes for an animal to move, feed, flee, or cooperate.
At every moment, countless degrees of freedom must be constrained:
muscles coordinated,
sensory perturbations absorbed,
timing aligned across scales.
This coordination is not guided by an internal assessment of meaning.
It is guided by the continuous differentiation between:
viable and non‑viable states,
stabilising and destabilising trajectories.
Value lives in this differentiation.
The environment does not mean — it bites
One reason meaning is so tempting is that environments appear to instruct behaviour.
But environments do not communicate.
They constrain.
Value is inscribed in the structure of possible outcomes, not in any message the environment sends.
Learning without meaning
Learning is often taken as proof of representation.
But learning need not involve the acquisition of meanings.
It can instead involve:
the reshaping of constraint landscapes,
the reweighting of viable trajectories,
the stabilisation of successful coordinations.
What changes is not what the animal knows, but what it can do.
Why this distinction matters
If value is collapsed into meaning:
animals are over‑cognitivised,
behaviour is misdescribed as decision,
coordination is mistaken for interpretation.
If value is kept distinct:
competence becomes intelligible without intellect,
flexibility without foresight,
novelty without creativity.
This distinction clears the ground for a more accurate account of behaviour.
What comes next
We are now in a position to reframe behaviour itself.
In the next post, we will abandon the idea that behaviour is executed or generated.
Instead, we will treat it as something else entirely:
the actualisation of viable possibilities under constraint.
That shift will allow us to see how animals do what they do — moment by moment — without plans, representations, or meanings.
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