Trees also don’t have feelings or brains.

I get it - so we aren’t striving for utopia at all. We are instead inventing a hypothetical “perfect world” to which we can compare our own world, and thus improve our own world to make it “more perfect”. We aren’t trying to fix it, just make it less broken.

A question: can we chose to chose not to eat?

That is, are our decisions pertaining to our actions and behaviors resulting from our “self-determination”, not also arising from stimulation-response automata offering the illusion of consciousness where there is only a secondary system based in stimulation-response, not necessarily more complicated but just secondary and acting on the first?

Here’s something that’s always bothered me:

If we’ll never reach utopia, why bother striving towards it?