Now, I’m not saying everyone intelligent wants to kill themselves. If one is enjoying life, why kill oneself?
And you don’t need to be super intelligent to realize you’re in a lot of pain and want out.
However, the reason humans perform suicide as opposed to, say, rabbits, quail, or whatnot, is we have evolved to the point where we are intelligent enough to perceive our own eventual mortality, as well as to make probability-based estimates about our likely future. These estimates may be wrong and frequently are, but there are what humans use to make future-based predictions of all kinds.
Jobs, mates, education, join the army or not, or anything else really. Suicide just falls in this group.
In fact, I’ll go further and say that I believe religious thinking (believing in a grand purpose, believing in life after death) is largely an evolved psychological mechanism, selected for by evolution (i.e., natural selection — you can look up the definition of this term yourself if you’re not sure how it works according to the theory of evolution) to keep us motivated to strive in a difficult world, and to keep us producing new children.
I mean, if there is a great purpose to life, and if they’re going to live forever after they die, as are we, then trying to keep living despite pain and a certain percentage-possibility of horrors, and to keep bringing children into a world like this makes sense.
If that were true.
Well, maybe it is true but I kind of doubt it.
Now there is love in this world, there is pleasure, there are people willing to do dangerous things to help us, there is much kindness and laughs, and many good and enjoyable things.
But suicide is not necessarily irrational because it’s not like the above paragraph is all of life.
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Suicide is a function of intelligence.
Now, I’m not saying everyone intelligent wants to kill themselves. If one is enjoying life, why kill oneself?
And you don’t need to be super intelligent to realize you’re in a lot of pain and want out.
However, the reason humans perform suicide as opposed to, say, rabbits, quail, or whatnot, is we have evolved to the point where we are intelligent enough to perceive our own eventual mortality, as well as to make probability-based estimates about our likely future. These estimates may be wrong and frequently are, but there are what humans use to make future-based predictions of all kinds.
Jobs, mates, education, join the army or not, or anything else really. Suicide just falls in this group.
In fact, I’ll go further and say that I believe religious thinking (believing in a grand purpose, believing in life after death) is largely an evolved psychological mechanism, selected for by evolution (i.e., natural selection — you can look up the definition of this term yourself if you’re not sure how it works according to the theory of evolution) to keep us motivated to strive in a difficult world, and to keep us producing new children.
I mean, if there is a great purpose to life, and if they’re going to live forever after they die, as are we, then trying to keep living despite pain and a certain percentage-possibility of horrors, and to keep bringing children into a world like this makes sense.
If that were true.
Well, maybe it is true but I kind of doubt it.
Now there is love in this world, there is pleasure, there are people willing to do dangerous things to help us, there is much kindness and laughs, and many good and enjoyable things.
But suicide is not necessarily irrational because it’s not like the above paragraph is all of life.
Not bad Some Random Man i like it
I’m going to correct a typo in the above and turn it into a main post.