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What if? (a thought experiment)

What if the higher level operations we associate with human beings weren't the highest that there could be?  What if there were an animal operation that were as different from our cognitive and appetitive activities as ours is from digestion?  That is, what if cognition and appetite were not the highest possible animal activities?

My conviction, of course, is that there's nothing higher than the two aforementioned operations, except for improved versions of sort of cognition and appetite presently found in humans.  But a materialist who sees cognition as a more complex version of a chemical process would have no reason in principle to deny that there could be something related to cognition as cognition is to taking in nourishment.  But what would that something be?

Nothing?

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