/philosophy/ - Philosophy

The acknowledgement of death the way nature intended.

Fear of bodily harm? Harms leads to death. Fear of being forgotten? Death.

Fear is an tangential awareness of the Nil.

where is this from? the gif I mean

>>6387

The main source of fear is lack of control. We only have fear of death and bodily harm because we cannot completely prevent it

>>6398

It's from a movie called "Penda's Fen". It's weird and boring but I quite enjoy it for some reason. You can find the whole thing on youtube.

>>6383

Everything that constitutes a human has arisen as the result of evolution, which runs by the principle of natural selection. Accordingly, everything that a human possesses is for the purpose of increasing the probability that genes are propagated into the next generation. Human hands evolved for tool use, gathering food, defense etc which increases the chance of genetic perpetuation. Fear is a physiological programming into humans which is designed to prompt humans into action via releasing cortisol etc to oppose circumstances that would decrease the chance of that individual’s genes being propagated. People foremost fear death because obviously if you die there’s no way for your genes to be transferred. In this way, people fear a myriad of causes of death, and react most heavily to the ones that would be the greatest threats back when humans were living in the jungle. That’s why people have such intense phobias of spiders and snakes, and why people mythologically represented the greatest threat to them as a dragon, because it’s essentially an airborne snake with the ability to produce fire, which was also a threat back in the jungle days. People also fear that which historically would have decreases the chance of sexual selection. Loss of status is feared by humans because the human sexual selection mechanism evolved so that females select to mate with males at the apex of dominance hierarchies (because this results generally in natural selection of those most proficiently adapted to the environment, and thus benefits the species as a whole [this is also why females are programmed to choose chads]), so dropping places in a dominance hierarchy decreases the chance for natural selection. If you literally pull up any list of the most common phobias, they’re exactly rank ordered in terms of that which decreases chance of natural selection as the top. In summary, fear is a physiological response evolved in human which reacts to threats to natural selection, with the aim of prompting the individual into an amygdalic ‘fight or flight’ response - either destroy the threat or get the hell away to preserve your genes.

>>6620

I would say that your definition of a human’s biological makeup is too myopic. With our current knowledge of evolution, it is apparent that everything about every organic being, all actions, desires and urges (conscious or subconscious) have been programmed into the creature

via the principle of natural selection, so that traits which favour the survival of a species are passed down through the generations. This doesn’t simply mean the obvious biological urges - procreation, eating etc. It means the absolute totality of the being ultimately works to increase the probability of the survival of the species long-term, in the environment in which it evolved.

So essentially humans are born with an idiosycratic programming of different motivations, which, when summed across the species as a whole, benefit the continued propagation of that species. This means that a human motivation may only benefit the continued existence of a single human in a very specific scenario at one point or another. But because it was ultimately a positive, it remained in the gene pool. So at all other times where this motivation emerged, it seems useless or counterintuitive. But there’s only one reason why it’s there in the first place: it increases the probability of the propagation of the species. I call these motivations that emerge in a counterintuitive fashion imprecise motivations.

I think what I’m saying will make alot more sense with some examples. Let’s take a suicidal person (I can relate). When someone jumps off a bridge, we wonder how humans can be driven by the will to continue existing. However, let’s think about the motivations that drove the person to do this. Often the person has depression, a form of psychological pain which is a physiological response to perception of being on a lower strata in a dominance hierarchy (which means decreased probability of gene selection). This physiological system which causes depression evolved as a stimulus to prompt an individual to seek a way out of this potentially lethal situation (because they want to feel content/serotonin again). So the person seeks a way out of their pain. If the pain of the depression (which, as I just explained, is supposed to assist in perpetuation of life) is greater than or equal to the immediate will to avoid physical harm (immediate fear, also designed more obviously for the perpetuation of life), then that person will commit suicide. So even though they were prompted by a physiological system that was supposed to assist in the perpetuation of their life, it ended up with them killing themselves. This is what I mean by the imprecise nature of biological system. Another few million years of evolution and suicidal depression would be eliminated from the gene pool and people wouldn’t kill themselves for that reason. And thus the species advances. I like to think of biological systems like applications on a computer. In this analogy, the will to continued existence of the species is the quality of the user’s experience on the computer. In theory, every application on the computer is designed to improve the user’s experience. But every so often a system update occurs right when you’re beating the boss in a game and completely fucks you over. This is how biological systems all developed to prolong the life of the species at times end up cutting it short. I call this the imprecision principle.

I would also like to mention that not all parts of the brain are at all acting in unison at any given point. The frontal lobe of a nihilist may say ‘nothing I do matters, I don’t care if Iive or die’ (intelligence was also evolved to propagate life, and thus this is another emergence of the imprecision principle) but his more primal cognitive areas, which are far older and more advanced, still force him to get out of bed in the morning, eat, urinate, not cross the street without looking both ways etc. In this way, his more conscious cognition is overpowered by autonomous areas, which bypasses even his realization.

Fear comes from our lack of adaptability and understanding something similar.

eg. 1. We can fear trying new foods. You were raised to only eat western food you might feel fear to try food that doesn't look/smell like what you've adapted and understood.

2. You see a figure that is similar to a human but has an extended horror jawline, or like your pic. It's similar to humans what we're adapted and understanding of, yet from the differences it is hard to know for certain (doubt/fear)

3. Death, I say we fear death more in the western society because of the idea of keeping your physical body when you travel to the after life. What people fear is how there body is transported there and weather it is of their own volition.

Fear is about losing something you want to keep or gaining something you don’t.