According to Dan Dennett, humans don’t like honey because it is sweet, honey is sweet because humans like it…
The honey comment took me a minute to think on so I fully understood it, but once I did, things made a lot of sense. I am not a die-hard evolutionist (not even a mild one, really) but what he is saying is quite fascinating.
Imagine if things like honey and apples weren’t actually sweet, but rather our sensation of sweet is, like Dennett says, a ‘high energy detector’.
It certainly puts some interesting thoughts out there about human perception and what is actually real. It also makes me wonder about people who don’t like chocolate or other sweet things.
