Ants of the Attini family grow Basidiomycota fungi that process leaves they cut. The ants in turn feed on the protein-rich “ant kohlrabi” that grows on the fungi. Ants do not just use means, but engage in a whole “craft,” a kind of “agriculture.” However, the ants’ activities remain within the limits set by their genetic program. Their behavior changes only as their instincts evolve, and it cannot change through the inheritance of learning-based practices. Human behavior can change through practice: learning creates understanding, understanding creates choice. Unlike ants, humans imagine things before they act: “new technologies are constructed mentally before they are constructed physically” (Arthur 2011, p. 23).
Animals do not have ends or means, but they do have wants or needs. Need is the focus of a living being on something that does not exist. “In its primary biological forms, need is a state of the organism expressing its objective want for a complement that lies outside itself” (Leontiev 1971). Terence Deacon introduced the concept of “entention,” which can be considered a kind of generalization of the concept of “need.” Entention combines direction and lack, it is “a fundamental relationship to something absent” (Deacon 2013, p. 27). The object to which the need is directed is the motive.
“…Motives must be distinguished from conscious goals and intentions; motives ‘stand behind goals’ and stimulate the achievement of goals. If goals are not directly given in the situation, motives encourage goal formation. However, they do not generate goals, just as needs do not generate their objects” (Leontiev 1971).
Emotions are internal signals that reflect the relationship between motives and activities caused by motives. Alexey Leontiev reduced emotions to a reflection of meaning: “Emotional processes include a broad class of processes of internal regulation of activities. They perform this function by reflecting the meaning of the objects and situations that affect the subject, their significance for his life” (Leontiev 1971). It seems to us that this is not quite correct historically, because if meanings preceded emotions, then monkeys would be like robots, and we would now need to look not for a bridge from emotions to meanings, but for a bridge from meanings to emotions. In fact, meanings arose from emotions. Emotions still are a large part of the content of meanings, if only because they reflect processes in the body. “Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behavior patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.” (Denton et al. 2009). Meaning is a symbolization and mediation of emotions.
In humans, emotions, as one of the origins of meaning have gone beyond the instinctive response to signals: in the long evolutionary process of mediation, the emotional content of meanings has been partly rationalized so that meanings and emotions form a unity. Humans do not have meaningless emotions: they explain emotions in order to understand them. Meaning, in turn, has a certain emotional significance. This significance comes to the fore in values as meanings ordered by preference: Milton Rokeach called values “cognitive representations and transformations of needs” (Rokeach 1973, p. 20).
