Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Sun Nov 03, 2019 4:43 am
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2019 9:19 pm
The OP is partly correct. The 'fear' if anything, is about ANY suffering. We don't 'know' death from being within it except as second-hand experience of losing those we knew personally who have died. The 'fear' is not necessarily of death but of suffering. This is what the suicidal person is opting to rid themselves of ....their suffering.
Note my edited argument;
P1 To ensure one survive with the will-to-live one has avoid death.
P2 To avoid death, one has to fear death [subliminally or consciously].
C3 Therefore to survive with the will-to-live, one has to fear death [subliminally or consciously].
- P1. To survive with the will-to-live, one has to fear death [subliminally or consciously]. C3 above
P2. To fear and avoid death, all human are programmed with pain circuits.
P3. The pain circuits generate a feeling of sufferings.
From the above, to fear and avoid death preceded sufferings.
So fear is of death, that give rise to sufferings.
To avoid sufferings, the theists cling to a God [illusory] who promises escape from permanent death to eternal life.
This promise of eternal life immediately relieves them of sufferings [Angst].
A person who committed suicide did not do it due to sufferings but rather his will-to-live was weakened due to mental issues with the neural circuit. Thus the person has lost his will-to-live and to counter the sufferings like the majority.
All human actions are reducible to 3 basic grounds in the following order and priority;
- 1. Subliminal fear of death in the subconscious mind - note, not conscious mind.
2. The drive to procreate and produce the next generation
3. The drive for morality and wisdom [philosophy-proper].
Check whether any of your other proposals can bypass the above?
We do not automatically 'fear'. Take a newborn,...say of any species....and they will NOT affiliate fear with their prey because they have to learn what it means by how it makes them FEEL while being alive. They learn sensations indirectly by a 'program' that assigns an environmental factor. Thus, a newborn duck, will only have a default mechanism that attends towards anything that moves initially. This window of development closes after a time and aligns them to whatever they followed as a 'feeling' of comfort unless and until they encounter competing learned values that confuse them. Pain, for instance, might begin only as a reaction without valuation. A flip of the coin could define what 'feels' good as 'bad' and vice versa. If the development period closes with an assignment that doesn't "fit" to the environment, ....like a duckling that might follow some cub lion before the lion learns it is food, could assign the cub as its 'mother'. If the cub later brings the duck home, its family will most likely address the issue by killing the duckling. The duckling (and maybe the cub too) wouldn't know anything was 'unfit' about their affiliation but would learn. Unfortunately for the duckling, it might already know pain and would thus not approve of what occurs as it is being killed; but so may the cub 'feel' sad as its own members initially tear his pet apart. That cub might then relearn the value of ducklings as food and find more comfort in it than the pain of feeling its loss of a toy. If not, that cub too might not survive for refusing to eat by a faulty assignment.
We LEARN emotive factors but have an evolved functon that assigns them based upon living. The 'fears' associated are not about death but about the particular emotive factors of discomfort.
We also don't CHOOSE to live. Rather, we fear the unknown or uncertainty. One who is 'mentally ill' may opt to kill themselves AGAINST their default to live. But 'will-power' is not appropriately something we selected prior to being alive (as far as we could tell). So it is fear of suffering rooted in many factors that include "uncertainty" about how to act that makes one potentially kill themselves. There is also likely a loss of ANY will that most animals can have that contributes but would be more rare. The psychopath might be one who lacks empathy for nor against a will of some sort that, like one born with leprocy, may not 'feel' and thus could harm themselves or others without having evaluation of the meaning of some acts.
Fear of death is an evolved factor that lacks certainty since you'd have to actually die to KNOW with certainty whether it will be favorable or not. The religious ideals are likely the fact that we get assigned 'feelings' at all. How can we have pleasure or pain, happiness or sadness, or any binary evaluation without some UNCERTAIN factor about life that confuses us? Fear of what the 'fear' is itself is a kind of feedback problem that occurs that confuses us, just as infinity does should you attempt to think you should reach some satisfactory end to the task of counting to it does. I still remember my first thoughts of this when I was a kid attempting to count sheep ....something that didn't work for me then.
I like Dan Dennett's interpretation on this similar point. He writes that religion is about an error in thinking that you need faith in 'faith' itself. This to him is the major problem and something that I agree with. [I think it was his "Breaking the Spell" book that focused on this point.] We are begged to be 'positive' about life regardless of the actual realities. We are told by successive people that we lack success because we don't believe in something strong enough. Disney movies even do this to the worst degree, even where it may not directly seem 'religious' by even non-religious people. I too have experienced this presumptious irrational belief.
Religion evolves due to the conflicts of resolving certain paradoxes. The happy-successful people who might be what they are merely due to luck alone could lack a foundational justification for why they should not give up what they have to others they see suffering. As such, the crisis may be overcome if they simply assert that they got what they wanted for wanting it bad enough.!!??? This irrational thinking is a coincidence afterthefact. But it turns into a religious conviction if you require some means to justify your fortune in defiance of others failures.
Likewise, if you suffer by default regardless of how hard you try, this can be due to sincere bias against you by the environment. (think if you were born with Elephantitus for instance.) Others around you might entice you to not give up hope. This 'hoping' cannot be maintained in light of a lot of continued failure without some hope in the act of hoping itself.
The feedback mechanisms that confuse us but sustain us wihout closure is on its own a survival mechanism to which religious ideologies can help to empower us in some way. They are actually derivable from reality but devolve into an irrationality that becomes 'religion' when it becomes a system of thoughts that get passed on in time. The origins of the collection of complex ideas and thoughts that form some particular religion likely came from many secular realities that have been lost due to changes in the way we no longer live or speak with words of changed meanings.
An 'ark' of the 'covenant' most likely was a devolution of this reality for instance: Stones collected from Akenaten's relocated city that had public obelisks that presented laws of public conduct (commandments) that were 'saved' by the destruction of his removed city in the dessert. It was likely transported originally on a boat from the Nile through canals to the last known resting vestige of its dying empire at Jerusalem (Je-ra-salem) [? "I see salvation" or a place where "One sees salvation"]. The temple holy of holies would have been good to hide it from the people as it would prove that the true origins of Judaism as being of the Egyptian Sun-king who was thought of as an arch anti-hero in its day.
That is just an example of how a possible reality would devolve into myth.....itself not something later followers would like to discover as 'true'. But in its elementary source, I think it is the contradictions of everyday realtiy that lead to religion. Fear of death would be a more complex justification derivable by fear of reality......a fear of LIFE, ....not actually death.
