Instinct: The One Word That Shouldn’t Exist If We’re “Just Atoms”
We are told we’re nothing but atoms, arranged by chance, obeying blind laws. Yet the same scientists who preach this casually use words like “instinct” and “reflex” to explain astonishing, unlearned animal behavior. A cat that eats grass when it feels sick is quietly telling us something our current models can’t handle: there is embedded intelligence in life that doesn’t fit “just atoms.”
The Materialist Claim vs. the Reality of Instinct
The hard line we’re sold goes like this:
- You are nothing but atoms and molecules,
- Organized in a temporary pattern,
- Obeying impersonal physical and chemical laws.
In that universe:
- There is no inner purpose,
- No inherent meaning,
- No intelligence beyond what can be reduced to equations.
Now bring in the word instinct.
Newborn babies turn to the breast and sucking. Spiders weaving perfect webs. Sea turtles head straight to the sea. Birds build correct nests on the first try. Your house cat, hand‑raised indoors, seeks grass when it feels ill.
None of that is random. None of it is vague. All of it is precise, repeatable, and species‑specific.
The Cat and the Grass: More Than a Story
Let’s look closely at the example that exposes this contradiction in everyday life: the feline that eats grass when it’s sick.
From lions and tigers to the smallest house cat:
- Felines are carnivores. They live for meat.
- Yet when they feel unwell, they seek out grass or specific plants and eat them.
- This often makes them vomit or acts as a laxative, helping clear hair, parasites, or irritants.
- Even a cat brought up indoors from kittenhood, with no wild training, will still try to find suitable grass when ill.
No mother cat is giving botany lessons. There is no “cat school” for herbalism. Yet the behavior appears, over and over, across individuals and species.
1) I feel a specific kind of unwell.
2) I should go find and eat this kind of plant.
Inside a strict atoms‑only model, where does that knowing live?
Why “It’s Just a Hard‑Wired Reflex” Makes No Sense
When pressed, many scientists retreat to a stock phrase:
But that doesn’t survive even basic scrutiny.
A true reflex is simple:
- Your knee jerks when the doctor taps the tendon.
- You pull your hand away from a hot stove.
- Your pupils constrict in bright light.
In these cases:
- One clear stimulus → one direct, immediate muscle response.
- No search, no choice, no sequence of steps.
Now compare that to the cat’s behavior:
- It feels ill. Not a single mechanical trigger, but a complex internal state.
- It distinguishes that feeling from hunger, thirst, or playfulness.
- It decides to move and actively seeks out vegetation.
- It selects specific plants (often grass, not plastic, not carpet, not any random object).
- It chews and swallows, sometimes repeatedly, and then stops when the effect (vomiting or relief) occurs.
This is not:
It is:
- Multi‑step,
- Goal‑directed,
- Context‑sensitive behavior.
Reflex is simply muscles reacting to a specific stimulus. Feeling ill, recognizing a certain kind of illness (not just random discomfort), leaving your resting place, and deciding to go find a specific plant to ingest shows something far more complex than a reflex. It behaves like embedded intelligence, not a wire being kicked.
The Cheat Code: “Instinct” as a Placeholder, Not an Explanation
In practice, when scientists meet behavior that is:
- Highly specific,
- Adaptive,
- Unlearned,
they reach for the word instinct.
Inside a strict atom‑only worldview, they are implicitly saying:
- All this extremely specific, adaptive behavior is hidden somewhere in the genes, the wiring, and the hormones.
- Even if we haven’t found the details yet.
But when you look at what instinct actually accomplishes — nest architecture, migration routes, self‑medication, complex mating dances — you start to see:
Two Explanations: Compression Fantasy or Field of Intelligence
If we follow instinct honestly, we hit a fork in the road.
Option 1: The Mechanical Compression Fantasy
In this view:
- Every instinct — every spider web, every migration route, every healing behavior — is rigidly encoded in DNA, brain wiring, and chemistry.
- Life is a gigantic, pre‑written software archive assembled by random mutation and selection.
- There is no intelligence, just extremely lucky compression of behaviors into molecules.
This demands:
- An almost absurd level of pre‑encoded, error‑free complexity,
- Plus a universe that just “happens” to support this everywhere, all the time.
Option 2: A Field of Intelligence That Bodies Tap Into
In this view:
- Instinct is how bodies plug into a shared field of knowledge — species‑level, planetary, or deeper.
- DNA and nervous systems are interfaces (antennas), not the whole library.
- The “knowing” lives in the field; the organism receives and expresses it in matter.
Then:
- A cat doesn’t have a full pharmacology textbook hidden in its molecules.
- It has the hardware to tune into “when I feel this way, seek that kind of plant,” guided by a deeper intelligence.
This second option matches everything else we’ve been exploring:
- DNA as an antenna, not just code,
- Intelligence at work before any brain exists,
- Consciousness not produced by matter, but expressed through it.
Instinct as Evidence of a Bigger Picture
When scientists insist:
they paint themselves into a corner. They must then pretend that:
- A cat self‑medicating,
- A bird navigating thousands of kilometers,
- A salmon returning to its river,
- A spider weaving a perfect web,
are all “just reflexes” or “just genetic programs” — even when those words clearly don’t fit.
If we refuse to see that bigger picture, our vision becomes flawed. We see:
- the neurons firing,
- the genes switching,
but we miss the most important fact:
Inside a strictly mechanical, atoms‑only universe, “instinct” has no real place. The moment we admit it as real, we have already acknowledged that there is something like intelligence woven into the fabric of life — whether we dare to name it or not.
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