List of Axioms

When discussing a topic as broad as human behaviour, it helps to make any philosophical/scientific assumptions explicit so that any reader can see if he or she has some fundamental difference of position to that of the author. I therefore give the following list of assumptions as axioms, which I take for granted elsewhere on the site (justifications/discussions are in the links [coming soon]):

1. The universe is deterministic. If precisely the same starting conditions are set up twice, precisely the same result will occur each time. Every process can therefore be described as mechanical, including consciousness.
2. Natural selection is the only known process in the universe capable of building complex adaptations.
3. "The ultimate goal that the mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies of the genes that created it." (Steven Pinker)
4. It's legitimate to hypothesize about function in plain language or any computer language, even though functions are actually implemented in neurons, synapses etc in the brain. Functional hypotheses are at a layer of abstraction above implementation and can therefore be implementation-agnostic.