Actually wanting to die—as opposed to just executing a behavior which leads to your death—requires that you have the concept of your own death. Is there any evidence that any other species even has that concept?
The idea of personally dying—the knowledge of death, not just as a phenomenon occurring to those external beings that aren’t you, but as something that you, the subject of experience, can undergo—is one of hundreds of psychological and cognitive potentialities that apparently all came to the human race in a bundle, as a result of our extra intelligence or consciousness or whatever it is that made the difference. I strongly doubt that selection has had an opportunity to finetune the elements of that bundle, specifically so as to strengthen the conscious will to live or the ecstasy of being alive. There’s certainly been memetic selection within historical times, but these higher complexities of subjectivity are so many, so multigenic in their origin, and so ambiguous in their effects, that I just don’t see a sharp selective gradient.
I would similarly assert that it’s unlikely that there has been genetic selection driven by the advantage of having a consciously pro-natal attitude in the human race (except perhaps in historical time, as an adjunct to the much more obvious memetic selection in favor of reproduction; i.e. populations who are genetically more apt to host pro-natal memes should find their genes favored, though that might result from factors other than conscious life-affirmation). The superficial attractions which get young males and young females together, and the addictive pleasure of sex, look more like the work of selection. Those are traits where enhancement is clearly reproductively advantageous, and where it should be relatively easy for a mutation to affect their strength. Even if “degree of joy in life” were as easily re-set by simple mutation as those other traits, I don’t think there has been remotely comparable opportunity for selection to act upon it. It sounds like a trait that matters most under conditions of civilization and a society of highly self-aware individuals, for whom abstract reflections can affect whether they breed, and whether they live or die. If we imagine instead two groups of hominids, scarcely even at a hunter-gatherer stage, and imagine one group zesty and the other group glum, it’s not at all clear that zestiness beats glumness. The glum ones might be more thoughtful and thus better problem-solvers.
Actually wanting to die—as opposed to just executing a behavior which leads
to your death—requires that you have the concept of your own death. Is there
any evidence that any other species even has that concept?
That seems pretty obvious to me—animals are not stupid—but I don’t really know what type of evidence you would accept.
Anyway the premise seems wrong. By “wanting to die” all I meant was that the organsm engages in behaviour that leads to death. I wasn’t suggesting spiders and praying mantis exhibited very much abstract thought. A plant can “want to die”—in that sense of the word. However, it is non-biological idea—something we don’t expect to see much—and in fact don’t see much.
Actually wanting to die—as opposed to just executing a behavior which leads to your death—requires that you have the concept of your own death. Is there any evidence that any other species even has that concept?
The idea of personally dying—the knowledge of death, not just as a phenomenon occurring to those external beings that aren’t you, but as something that you, the subject of experience, can undergo—is one of hundreds of psychological and cognitive potentialities that apparently all came to the human race in a bundle, as a result of our extra intelligence or consciousness or whatever it is that made the difference. I strongly doubt that selection has had an opportunity to finetune the elements of that bundle, specifically so as to strengthen the conscious will to live or the ecstasy of being alive. There’s certainly been memetic selection within historical times, but these higher complexities of subjectivity are so many, so multigenic in their origin, and so ambiguous in their effects, that I just don’t see a sharp selective gradient.
I would similarly assert that it’s unlikely that there has been genetic selection driven by the advantage of having a consciously pro-natal attitude in the human race (except perhaps in historical time, as an adjunct to the much more obvious memetic selection in favor of reproduction; i.e. populations who are genetically more apt to host pro-natal memes should find their genes favored, though that might result from factors other than conscious life-affirmation). The superficial attractions which get young males and young females together, and the addictive pleasure of sex, look more like the work of selection. Those are traits where enhancement is clearly reproductively advantageous, and where it should be relatively easy for a mutation to affect their strength. Even if “degree of joy in life” were as easily re-set by simple mutation as those other traits, I don’t think there has been remotely comparable opportunity for selection to act upon it. It sounds like a trait that matters most under conditions of civilization and a society of highly self-aware individuals, for whom abstract reflections can affect whether they breed, and whether they live or die. If we imagine instead two groups of hominids, scarcely even at a hunter-gatherer stage, and imagine one group zesty and the other group glum, it’s not at all clear that zestiness beats glumness. The glum ones might be more thoughtful and thus better problem-solvers.
That seems pretty obvious to me—animals are not stupid—but I don’t really know what type of evidence you would accept.
http://www.inquisitr.com/44905/amazing-photo-of-a-chimpanzee-funeral/
Anyway the premise seems wrong. By “wanting to die” all I meant was that the organsm engages in behaviour that leads to death. I wasn’t suggesting spiders and praying mantis exhibited very much abstract thought. A plant can “want to die”—in that sense of the word. However, it is non-biological idea—something we don’t expect to see much—and in fact don’t see much.