I sympathize. I write mostly to find out if I can support what I think.

Curiosity would confer no selective advantage if truth were not a conscious value. I would not call an unconscious machine "curious." Maybe that's just semantics, but in the current context, "curiosity" means the desire to know some true thing. I don't see how curiosity without truth as its goal is even a thing.

The the term "endpoint of a hypertrophied behavioral trait" is opaque, to me anyway. Can you expand on what that means and why we care?.