Silivros

You can find any number of books on the physiological processes of the brain, but learning how it functions logically, you might have to scrounge around a bit. Evolve your Brain, J. Dispenza and Genie in your Genes, Dawson Church, might get you thinking. You mentioned not being interested in the chemistry, but also being interested in hormones, hormones are all about chemistry. It is rather an important part of brain function, one that would be worth becoming acquainted with. All cognitive processes involve or produce chemical reactions. If you were to examine any thought in the brain you would find chemistry. The electrical impulses in the brain are all chemical based, and every thought you have produces an accompanying chemical/hormonal/emotional reaction within the body. When inquiring about how logic works in the brain you would need to understand how the brain operates, both from the intellectual side and emotional side of the brain, and what importance does this have with the experiential aspects of life. Conscious processes are another thing altogether, separate from cognitive thought, but vitally important as conscious perception initiates cognitive function.

LOL it's not. Though he was fortunate that he shot himself in such a thin area; the round didn't have much of an opportunty to expand.

Are we assuming that natural selection applies similarly to every species or to every member of a species? I won't go with the extremes of sky diving etc., but the human species will make choices that run contrary to natural selection as it is generally applied. Abstinence and altruism are two examples that do not follow the standard criteria of natural selection. Species that run on the chemical processes of instinctual and emotional needs are in line with natural selection. Most of the animal kingdom and many members of the human species operate on these instinctual or emotional chemical processes, but there are those within the human population that make choices that are not controlled by the chemical reactions of emotional wants or desires. From my perspective, this is not to say that evolution has a chink in its armor, rather I believe that we need to reevaluate how we determine evolutionary processes in the human species. Awareness of choice and its resulting actions are a behavior and every behavior has a chemical component that impacts the body down to the cellular level. Often when we demand proof of the evolutionary process we tend to look for the large change, the physical morphology; but forget to look at what actually begins the process, and that would be a behavioral change. Chemical impact from behavioral changes begins the processes of change in genetic expression, how long this takes to eventually create a change which we can actually measure and record, who’s to say, although we can draw some comparisons from recent adaptations in species such as Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and the common louse that have shown the ability to adapt to environmental stressors. The relevance in this comparison is that these species life cycles are millions/billions, etc. of times quicker than the human species, therefore if we can garner anything from this comparison it would be in possibly understanding how long a noticeable change might occur in not only the human species, but also other longer life cycled species.

When the OP mentions instinct, that is a chemical response to an environmental imput, and the chemical responses of the emotions we associate with love are able to be recorded, but what of the initiator of love? What begins the emotional reactions? Is this only instinct? Is their a component outside of the physical neuro-chemical processes of cognition that initiates the neuro pathways that begin the chemical reactions?