Being the mechanical arational process that she is (natural selection), Mother Nature instills in all her creatures a sense of their own importance (or of the importance of their needs) that is rationally inordinate (the maximum amount possible). And, over the course of many millenia, as the members of a species reach a certain stage in their rational/ cultural/ linguistic development, they increasingly come to question this inordinancy (feelings of worthlessness) and increasingly come to require reasons (justification) for maintaining it (needs for love, purpose, meaning, moral integrity, religion, achievement, status, etc.). Viewed from this perspective, feelings of worthlessness are not so much an adaptation as a byproduct of the evolution of rationality -- part of the price we humans have had to pay for having become a tad too rational/ objective for our own good or, in terms of the theory of natural selection, part of the cost of doing business that Mother Nature "tolerates" as a necessary premium for having a rational species to do her bidding. Implications ensue.
Papers
presented before
the International Society for Theoretical Psychology,
the International Society for Human Ethology and
the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences
Schematic
Conversations
The Evolutionary Function of Self-Esteem
My Derivation of a Moral 'Ought' from an Epistemic 'Is'
Conversation with Herb Gintis on Gene Selfishness, Gene Culture Co-Evolution, etc.
The Meaning of 'Ought'
My Critique of Behaviorism
Hofstatder's Godel Argument (That Minds Are Different from Machines)
My Critique of Dennett's Heterophenomenology
My "food fight" with the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (1981-2)>