#existential suffering

[partasah]

[alunah-lalunah]

Hurray, We Know We're Going To Die

What people won in the course of evolution is the distinction between simply having experiences and being able to represent those experiences to oneself. A mouse can be afraid. A human can be afraid and also think, "I am afraid," wonder why they are afraid, imagine future fear, compare today's fear with yesterday's, and write a book about fear. That second layer is what psychologists often call metacognition or reflective awareness. It allows us to make ourselves objects of our own thought.

Do animals know that they are going to die? Two truths, they know and we simply do not know that. Many animals appear to possess at least some degree of self-monitoring. Great apes, dolphins, elephants, corvids, and some other species show evidence of recognizing themselves, monitoring their own uncertainty, planning ahead, and even modifying their behavior based on what they appear to know or not know. None of this proves that they possess human-like self-consciousness, but it also prevents us from drawing a sharp line between humans and everything else.

A dog certainly does not formulate the proposition, "I am currently experiencing hunger," in language. But whether there is a primitive awareness of bodily states is another matter. Modern neuroscience suggests that many mammals possess interoception, which is the nervous system's monitoring of the body's internal condition. Hunger, thirst, pain, and fatigue are not merely automatic reactions. They are represented in the brain to guide behavior. The real difference is probably not between awareness and no awareness, but between simple bodily awareness and highly abstract self-reflection.

Humans appear unique, or nearly unique, in their ability to construct an extended narrative about their future death. We do not merely avoid danger. We can imagine ourselves decades from now, imagine our own absence, anticipate grief, build religions, write wills, construct philosophies, and experience existential anxiety long before death is near. That ability is intimately connected with language, episodic memory, and imagination. These cognitive capacities allow us to simulate futures that never happen as well as the one that eventually will. And as usual in evolution, we don't know until the end whether it's a blessing or a curse.

Do animals know that they are fearful? There are probably several levels here. An ant may simply execute defensive programs. A mouse may experience fear as an integrated emotional state. A chimpanzee may perhaps recognize its own emotional state to some degree. A human can recognize fear, name it, analyze it, suppress it, romanticize it, or become anxious about becoming anxious. Rather than a binary distinction, evolution seems to have produced increasing layers of self-modeling.

Reflective consciousness is less a mysterious a god-given property than a new computational ability. Evolution did not suddenly create consciousness out of nothing. It appears to have gradually increased the nervous system's ability to model both the external world and itself. Humans possess an unusually sophisticated self-model that includes autobiographical memory, symbolic language, and the capacity to imagine hypothetical futures. Those abilities dramatically increase our capacity for planning and cooperation, but they also make existential suffering possible. The same mechanism that lets us write symphonies, invent science, and understand evolution also lets us anticipate loss, regret the past, worry about tomorrow, and contemplate our own extinction. Reflection is both our greatest adaptation and one of our greatest sources of suffering.

To sum up, animals mostly experience the world. Humans experience the world and build models of their experiencing. Those models become stories, identities, moral systems, philosophies, and fears. The self is not just hungry. It can think, "Why am I always hungry? What does this say about me? Will I always be like this?" That recursive loop is where much of specifically human psychology begins. The suffering and the achievement are the same mechanism. The mind that can understand its own existence is also the mind that cannot entirely escape knowing that its existence will end.

[nikolasongsa]

Exactly the same happens with existential pain. It produces abysmally different minds, let’s say, the life of someone who had a mother like the one in the film Joker compared to the happy mode in which a good portion of Americans currently live. Like colour-blind people, there is no way to make anyone who has not gone through it big time to see the full range of the colours of existential suffering.

C. T

[xxredridinghoodxx]

Sometimes it's the living that's killing you. And some people will never understand or be able to accept that.

[advayavada]

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[advayavada]

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[advayavada]

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