People like being alive. They show this by their actions. Very few people kill themselves.
This reminds me of a couple of comments I made on another post. I think the most appropriate quote from my comments is this:
I don’t think I agree that suicide is a sufficient proxy for whether an entity enjoys life more than it dislikes life because I can imagine too many plausible, yet currently unknown mechanisms wherein there are mitigating factors. For example:
I imagine that there are mental processes and instincts in most evolved entities that adds a significant extra prohibition against making the active choice to end their own life and thus that mental ability has a much smaller role in suicide “decisions”.
In the world where there is no built-in prohibition against ending your own life, if the “enjoys life” indicator is at level 10 and the “hates life” indicator is at level 11, then suicide is on the table.
In, what I think is probably our world, when the “enjoys life” indicator is at level 10 the “hates life” indicator has to be at level 50.
What’s more, it seems plausible to me that the value of this own-life-valuing indicator addon varies from species to species and individual to individual.
Yes, I wouldn’t say suicide is the be-all and end-all indicator, though it is quite suggestive. I’d also lay weight on simple common sense and intuition here. Most people today like life. If you read about ordinary people from 200 years ago or before, it doesn’t seem like unremitting misery. (Piers Plowman, the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare, the peasants in the Georgics or in medieval Books of Hours, the ordinary people in the Old and New Testaments. Maybe these were just elites idealizing peasants? Hmm… up to a point.) Reporters and anthropologists who live with peasants and the poor today similarly paint a picture with light as well as shade.
This reminds me of a couple of comments I made on another post. I think the most appropriate quote from my comments is this:
Yes, I wouldn’t say suicide is the be-all and end-all indicator, though it is quite suggestive. I’d also lay weight on simple common sense and intuition here. Most people today like life. If you read about ordinary people from 200 years ago or before, it doesn’t seem like unremitting misery. (Piers Plowman, the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare, the peasants in the Georgics or in medieval Books of Hours, the ordinary people in the Old and New Testaments. Maybe these were just elites idealizing peasants? Hmm… up to a point.) Reporters and anthropologists who live with peasants and the poor today similarly paint a picture with light as well as shade.