This series has argued for a reframing of animal behaviour.
A different ontological starting point.
In this final post, I want to be explicit about what follows from that shift — and what emphatically does not.
What this changes for biology
First, it changes where explanation should be sought.
Behaviour need not be explained by:
inner representations,
stored plans,
symbolic models of the world.
Instead, explanation can remain at the level of:
value systems,
organism–environment coupling,
constraint dynamics,
actualisation of possibility.
This does not impoverish biological explanation.
It simplifies it.
What this changes for cognition studies
Cognition is often treated as the default explanatory layer.
This series suggests that much of what is called cognition in animals is better understood as:
coordinated responsiveness,
learned constraint shaping,
stabilised patterns of viable action.
This does not deny cognition.
It localises it.
Meaningful cognition becomes a specific phenomenon, not a universal assumption.
What this changes for AI
The temptation here is immediate and dangerous.
If animals exhibit competence without meaning, perhaps machines can too — or already do.
There is something right in this thought.
And something deeply wrong.
The legitimate lesson for AI
The legitimate lesson is that effective behaviour does not require representation.
Systems can:
adapt,
coordinate,
explore,
and stabilise success
without understanding what they are doing.
This supports non-representational approaches in robotics and machine learning.
The firm brake
But here is the brake.
Value in biological systems is not arbitrary.
It is:
embodied,
historically sedimented,
inseparable from survival and viability.
Artificial systems do not have this kind of value structure.
They inherit goals.
They do not live them.
To slide from animal competence to machine meaning is a category error.
What this does not change about humans
Nothing in this series diminishes human meaning-making.
On the contrary.
By refusing to project meaning everywhere, we preserve its specificity.
Human symbolic coordination remains:
exceptional,
fragile,
and historically contingent.
It is not the baseline of life.
It is a remarkable deviation.
The ethical non-conclusion
This framework does not tell us how to treat animals.
It does not deliver moral prescriptions.
Confusing explanation with ethics is another form of projection.
Understanding competence without meaning neither licenses exploitation nor mandates sentimentality.
Those questions lie elsewhere.
What remains mysterious
One thing should now be clear.
Animal behaviour is no longer mysterious because it lacks minds like ours.
It is mysterious because life organises possibility in ways we are only beginning to understand.
That mystery does not require meaning to sustain it.
Closing the arc
Animals survive through competence.
That competence is:
complex,
contingent,
flexible,
and relentlessly situated.
It does not depend on representation.
It does not depend on creativity.
And it does not depend on meaning.
Once we accept that, we can finally stop asking animals to be like us — and start understanding them on their own terms.
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