The fact that we find it hard to imagine a genome coding for an abstract fear of death
The genome doesn’t code fear of death for humans, but it doesn’t need to. Humans learn the concept of death through cultural transmission, and it is immediately terrifying because our primary drive (the instrumental convergent drive) is empowerment, and death is the minimally empowered state.
Jacob, I’m having trouble reconciling your view of brains as ‘Universal Learning Machines’ (and almost everything being culturally transmitted), with the fact that millions of other animals species show exactly the kinds of domain-specific adaptive responses studied in evolutionary biology, animal behavior research, and evolutionary psychology.
Why would ‘fear of death’ be ‘culturally transmitted’ in humans, when thousands of other vertebrate species show many complex psychological and physiological adaptations to avoid accidents, starvation, parasitism, and predation that tends to result in death, including intense cortisol and adrenalin responses that are associated with fear of death?
When we talk about adaptations that embody a ‘fear of death’, we’re not talking about some conscious, culturally transmitted, conceptual understanding of death; we’re talking about the brain and body systems that actually help animals avoid death.
My essay on embodied values might be relevant on this point.
When we talk about adaptations that embody a ‘fear of death’, we’re not talking about some conscious, culturally transmitted, conceptual understanding of death;
That is in fact what I was talking about, because the abstract conscious culturally transmitted fear of death is vastly more general and effective once learned. Humans do seem to have innate fears of some leading causes of early death, such as heights, and indirect fear of many sources of contamination through disgust; there are probably a few other examples.
But in general humans have lost many innate skills and responses (which typically come from brainstem CPGs) in favor of the more complex learned variants (cortical) - we even must learn to walk. Human babies are notoriously lacking in fear of all the various ways the world can kill them and require extensive supervision.
The genome doesn’t code fear of death for humans, but it doesn’t need to. Humans learn the concept of death through cultural transmission, and it is immediately terrifying because our primary drive (the instrumental convergent drive) is empowerment, and death is the minimally empowered state.
Jacob, I’m having trouble reconciling your view of brains as ‘Universal Learning Machines’ (and almost everything being culturally transmitted), with the fact that millions of other animals species show exactly the kinds of domain-specific adaptive responses studied in evolutionary biology, animal behavior research, and evolutionary psychology.
Why would ‘fear of death’ be ‘culturally transmitted’ in humans, when thousands of other vertebrate species show many complex psychological and physiological adaptations to avoid accidents, starvation, parasitism, and predation that tends to result in death, including intense cortisol and adrenalin responses that are associated with fear of death?
When we talk about adaptations that embody a ‘fear of death’, we’re not talking about some conscious, culturally transmitted, conceptual understanding of death; we’re talking about the brain and body systems that actually help animals avoid death.
My essay on embodied values might be relevant on this point.
That is in fact what I was talking about, because the abstract conscious culturally transmitted fear of death is vastly more general and effective once learned. Humans do seem to have innate fears of some leading causes of early death, such as heights, and indirect fear of many sources of contamination through disgust; there are probably a few other examples.
But in general humans have lost many innate skills and responses (which typically come from brainstem CPGs) in favor of the more complex learned variants (cortical) - we even must learn to walk. Human babies are notoriously lacking in fear of all the various ways the world can kill them and require extensive supervision.