A combination of all three options is true; I don’t know of a fourth. Grief is mostly a waste because there’s more of it than I’d like (option 1), but also helps to prevent future causes of grief (option 3) and possibly helps the griever cope (option 2).
I see grief as analogous to pain. It’s an evolved response. Its primary function is conditioning by negative reinforcement. To avoid grief, people try to prevent grief-causing situations, e.g. protecting their loved ones more. Just as with pain, we have to live with grief today but we may wish to self-modify to grieve less.
Because it’s an evolved mechanism, it tends to be entangled with other processes; thus it is claimed to have a secondary purpose—to help with “healthy psychological coping” of the grieving person in accepting reality. I’ve heard this claim but have not looked into its sources and don’t have a good estimation of how true or important this is.
I suffer from experiencing grief a lot more than I am willing to suffer in order to get these benefits. If it was just a matter of choice, I would choose to grieve a lot less or maybe not at all, in all situations. That would require a level of modification of my psychology that would also enable me to get the above benefits without grieving. In reality I don’t have that level of control.
However, we do have some control over how much we grieve. In particular, grieving for very distant people seems to be off-by-default in most people, and only activated by deliberate thinking about those distant people; i.e. this kind of grief may be avoided a lot of the time. It also happens to be the kind of grief where the above benefits are least (or nonexistent). So of course I focus my efforts and advise others to practice grieving less first of all in such circumstances.
Note: “grief” can be read broadly, as in “feeling sad through empathy with suffering distant others”.
Given this, I am very confused by what you think is special about the esoteric possibilities you discuss with alex_zag_al above.
That is, given my understanding of your position, it seems you should reject or endorse grieving over those doomed intergalactic explorers to basically the same degree that you would either reject or endorse grieving over a boat full of tourists who drown on their way to Greece. (I’m not really sure what degree that is… what I get from your explanation is that you endorse some amount of grief, but not as much of it as people actually demonstrate.)
Does it matter at all that they’re in a spaceship etc. etc. etc.? Or does that just happen to be the example under discussion?
It matters that I’m not going to interact with them again (or with their dead bodies). For people who are still entangled with me, like tourists in Greece, I allow more grief because in principle my grief (and by TDT-like reasoning, the grief of others) may help prevent other drowning accidents in the future. But you’re right that the actual grief I experience in practice for tourists drowning in Greece is for practical purposes zero.
The example of a spaceship is esoteric; I wasn’t the one who chose it, but I responded to people discussing exotic propositions like grieving for “acausal” people like those in other quantum branches. I can’t even afford to grieve for everyone who suffers on this Earth, in my own branch − 150,000 people die daily and I haven’t got that much grief to spend even if I tried to grieve as much as possible (which I don’t want to).
A combination of all three options is true; I don’t know of a fourth. Grief is mostly a waste because there’s more of it than I’d like (option 1), but also helps to prevent future causes of grief (option 3) and possibly helps the griever cope (option 2).
I see grief as analogous to pain. It’s an evolved response. Its primary function is conditioning by negative reinforcement. To avoid grief, people try to prevent grief-causing situations, e.g. protecting their loved ones more. Just as with pain, we have to live with grief today but we may wish to self-modify to grieve less.
Because it’s an evolved mechanism, it tends to be entangled with other processes; thus it is claimed to have a secondary purpose—to help with “healthy psychological coping” of the grieving person in accepting reality. I’ve heard this claim but have not looked into its sources and don’t have a good estimation of how true or important this is.
I suffer from experiencing grief a lot more than I am willing to suffer in order to get these benefits. If it was just a matter of choice, I would choose to grieve a lot less or maybe not at all, in all situations. That would require a level of modification of my psychology that would also enable me to get the above benefits without grieving. In reality I don’t have that level of control.
However, we do have some control over how much we grieve. In particular, grieving for very distant people seems to be off-by-default in most people, and only activated by deliberate thinking about those distant people; i.e. this kind of grief may be avoided a lot of the time. It also happens to be the kind of grief where the above benefits are least (or nonexistent). So of course I focus my efforts and advise others to practice grieving less first of all in such circumstances.
Note: “grief” can be read broadly, as in “feeling sad through empathy with suffering distant others”.
Given this, I am very confused by what you think is special about the esoteric possibilities you discuss with alex_zag_al above.
That is, given my understanding of your position, it seems you should reject or endorse grieving over those doomed intergalactic explorers to basically the same degree that you would either reject or endorse grieving over a boat full of tourists who drown on their way to Greece. (I’m not really sure what degree that is… what I get from your explanation is that you endorse some amount of grief, but not as much of it as people actually demonstrate.)
Does it matter at all that they’re in a spaceship etc. etc. etc.? Or does that just happen to be the example under discussion?
It matters that I’m not going to interact with them again (or with their dead bodies). For people who are still entangled with me, like tourists in Greece, I allow more grief because in principle my grief (and by TDT-like reasoning, the grief of others) may help prevent other drowning accidents in the future. But you’re right that the actual grief I experience in practice for tourists drowning in Greece is for practical purposes zero.
The example of a spaceship is esoteric; I wasn’t the one who chose it, but I responded to people discussing exotic propositions like grieving for “acausal” people like those in other quantum branches. I can’t even afford to grieve for everyone who suffers on this Earth, in my own branch − 150,000 people die daily and I haven’t got that much grief to spend even if I tried to grieve as much as possible (which I don’t want to).