“That set up has the benefit, among other things, of making the question you raise a clearly scientifically tractable issue. There should be no difference in how we go about trying to answer the question "what is iron" or "what is gorilla" or "what is the rate of sea level rise" and how we go about answering the question "what is hunger."
Starve/feed an animal and watch what hormones are released and what axons fire.. A predictive model of detailed physiology that also predicts feeding/rest behavior and that maintains energy balance and generalizes across the species explains hunger. Other outgoing connections from the hypothalamus to other areas are strings worth pulling, but if activity in those parts of the brain aren’t predictive of feeding behavior they are a result of hunger and not hunger itself. Marcus
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