It's just abstracting away those details. Utility theory allows you to ground your problem in biology by specifying biologically plausible preferences. But if that's not important for your problem, you don't have to.
Well utility theory goes through the trouble to derive utility functions from ordinal preferences. But I'm not sure I get your point with this comparison
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Both are supposed to represent how valuable different outcomes are to a decision maker. If that representation is accurate, maximization/minimization is implied from the decision maker's perspective.
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Of course no real life agent has a single consistent set of preferences, or can literally optimize (which takes boundless resources), etc. So even if you get that function right, it may not be useful to describe their behavior. But it can often be a good approximation.
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