georgeheath
Iron
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2025
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The fact we so often get sad (or even suicidal) over comparisons between ourselves and others becomes absurd when we broaden that comparison, to not just all humans in the present or across history, but also other species.
The wild is brutal, especially for smaller organisms, who spend their entire lives under the constant threat of ending up as a meal and pile of feces on the ground, if not keeling over from starvation, thirst, disease, parasites, injury, etc etc first. Even the most simple social relations tend to be absent. Just to name a few, older and larger offspring will often eat their smaller siblings, and parents will eat or blatantly neglect children with physical or cognitive deficits. Also, as much as we complain about hypergamy, monogamy on its own is already exceedingly rare. This means that most individuals never experience reproduction, which I should add is itself the natural peak of experience, but can be easily matched us and even surpassed by us now because of technology (i.e. drugs).
While there's much more that could be said here (and on comparisons between regions and time period), It doesn't even matter anyways, because the actions sadness or fear or anger here motivate don't get you what you want (which is why you do things in the first place). Yes, killing yourself will get rid of negative experience, but this also comes at the cost of positive experience. Note that death is not sleep or a black screen, it's the absence of experience, so it's not like you're going to be experiencing relief. Suicide is a fundamentally flawed strategy in this situation, for many reasons, but primarily due to the fact that this negative experience arises from your thoughts. Meaning the sensory and emotional experience you're having (which is motivating suicide) is composed of past experience which has been re-constructed in the present. This matters, because memory retrieval is unlike other physical effects, in the sense that it follows a simple pattern, meaning it can be easily predicted and manipulated. Now, there's a lot of angles we can get at for specific strategies here, but the general idea is that we're trying to weaken the association between the negative emotions and comparisons which precede it. Which requires us to introduce competition, i.e. associate positive emotion to counter (ideally fade the association of) the negative already in place. I really cba to go deeper into the how here (feel free to inquire though, I'd be happy to elab), although I did want to point out that this idea isn't by any means controversial or rocket science-- this is really how decision-making works, at least a rudimentary level.
Consider how if I snuck up behind you and stabbed you with a needle, you'd instinctively jolt away in fear. Yet, somehow you can sit still for an injection at the doctor's office. It's not like the pain ever disappears in the second situation-- it's always present, just in competition with this extra layer of positive emotion introduced by the presence of memory that predicts the injection will cure/prevent disease. If you thought for whatever reason that the injection would cause disease, then you'd avoid it, just like you did originally. This should make a lot of sense, since if memory is a replica of past experience, then it should contain the same kind of stuff that motivated action back then.
The wild is brutal, especially for smaller organisms, who spend their entire lives under the constant threat of ending up as a meal and pile of feces on the ground, if not keeling over from starvation, thirst, disease, parasites, injury, etc etc first. Even the most simple social relations tend to be absent. Just to name a few, older and larger offspring will often eat their smaller siblings, and parents will eat or blatantly neglect children with physical or cognitive deficits. Also, as much as we complain about hypergamy, monogamy on its own is already exceedingly rare. This means that most individuals never experience reproduction, which I should add is itself the natural peak of experience, but can be easily matched us and even surpassed by us now because of technology (i.e. drugs).
While there's much more that could be said here (and on comparisons between regions and time period), It doesn't even matter anyways, because the actions sadness or fear or anger here motivate don't get you what you want (which is why you do things in the first place). Yes, killing yourself will get rid of negative experience, but this also comes at the cost of positive experience. Note that death is not sleep or a black screen, it's the absence of experience, so it's not like you're going to be experiencing relief. Suicide is a fundamentally flawed strategy in this situation, for many reasons, but primarily due to the fact that this negative experience arises from your thoughts. Meaning the sensory and emotional experience you're having (which is motivating suicide) is composed of past experience which has been re-constructed in the present. This matters, because memory retrieval is unlike other physical effects, in the sense that it follows a simple pattern, meaning it can be easily predicted and manipulated. Now, there's a lot of angles we can get at for specific strategies here, but the general idea is that we're trying to weaken the association between the negative emotions and comparisons which precede it. Which requires us to introduce competition, i.e. associate positive emotion to counter (ideally fade the association of) the negative already in place. I really cba to go deeper into the how here (feel free to inquire though, I'd be happy to elab), although I did want to point out that this idea isn't by any means controversial or rocket science-- this is really how decision-making works, at least a rudimentary level.
Consider how if I snuck up behind you and stabbed you with a needle, you'd instinctively jolt away in fear. Yet, somehow you can sit still for an injection at the doctor's office. It's not like the pain ever disappears in the second situation-- it's always present, just in competition with this extra layer of positive emotion introduced by the presence of memory that predicts the injection will cure/prevent disease. If you thought for whatever reason that the injection would cause disease, then you'd avoid it, just like you did originally. This should make a lot of sense, since if memory is a replica of past experience, then it should contain the same kind of stuff that motivated action back then.
