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 these 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.
11 comments
I couldn’t have said it better myself..
What you said is true. We are smart enough to understand that we will die some day anyway, and we are smart enough to look at the patterns in our life and make estimates that things probably won’t get any better. But you do have to remember, they are only estimates. There is a lot of debate about how much you should believe in what your brain tells you. In terms of expectations, yes we are programmed to believe certain things will happen again if they happened the last 5 times you tried. If all your relationships ended in pain, you might not want to date again. In friendships always fall apart, you may not trust friends anymore. If jobs never work out, you may never want to work again.
But some say we are flawed the way we look at expectations. It’s like flipping a coin. You could flip it 5 times and get heads every time. Does that mean you are likely to get the same thing on the 6th time? Our brains might tell us that, but the reality is that flip number 6 will be a 50/50 chance of heads or tales, as were the other 5 flips. Our minds like to pick out patterns and start to assume we can figure it out. But it doesn’t work that way.
Yes we know the patterns of our lives. But they are not rock solid. Can you absolutely guarantee that in two weeks you won’t meet the love of your life, or make a new great friend, or have some other success in life? Trust me, I know when life is rough, it’s very easy to say “no, I doubt that will happen, why would it”. But just because you feel that way doesn’t make it true. Just like with the coin toss, every day is really a 50/50, even if the last few years of your life have always been downhill, you might assume it will continue, but each and every day is a chance for something else.
If you take away the intelligence that we humans think we have, and just talk about “intelligent life” in general, aka anything that makes an effort to survive, in that case, suicide is always wrong and unnatural. It is the opposite of intelligence for any living thing to decide to kill itself rather than make an effort to find food, shelter, and a mate.
I do get what you’re saying and most times I feel the same way. But sometimes we should try to remind ourselves that we really can’t predict the future. Life isn’t as simple as a coin toss. There are much more than 2 possibilities that might happen if we choose to stay alive one more day.
Even if you lived for 70 years and every single day sucked, could you truly say you had enough information to decide that the next day was going to be terrible, and the next day, and the next day, and just kill yourself? Truth is you could kill yourself at that point, and the next day maybe something amazing was meant to happen to you. When we’re depressed we tend to be negative and say “yeah right”, but if you take emotion out of it and just look at it as a math problem involving probability, it really is true. The past doesn’t matter. Every day is a new day. We might think we are smart enough to say nothing good will ever happen to us. There are many stories of successful people who say there was a period in time when they were living in their car and ready to give up. There are people who HAVE tried suicide, and they survived, and then their life got better and they are so happy that they didn’t succeed at killing themselves.
I’m a really negative person and even I think it’s BS to try to believe in this sometimes. But I try.
We think too much, other animals do not..and there are animals that do kill theirselves
No.
This just presupposes that survival is good. That just because it’s a mathematical fact that things which perpetuate, do, that this becomes a moral imperative. It may be a mathematical one, but there is no sound ethical reason for it.
Particularly if it inevitably, now or down the road, leads to all the suffering and horror experienced in the world, including living beings being aware of and unable to stop their own deaths, and that of everyone they will ever know and love.
Yes.
Which is also to say that staying alive can prove to be a grievous mistake, even if one wants to do so.
Further, humans as a group tend to overestimate not underestimate likely future outcomes. This is known as The Optimism Bias.
Suicide is *usually* an answer to a self-created problem. Which is to say, a problem of expectations and distorted perception. It’s not always that way, though.
Ummm, bullshit?
No one creates the problems of being born, of their genetics, of their upbringing, of their society, of the people in their society as individuals, etc., or even what they’re taught OR EVEN random events that happen.
All of this is driven by the laws of physics, including the operation of their brains.
But even if I buy your thesis that the mind somehow, magically, ignoring all the advances of neuroscience which show otheriwse, operates above all this and therefore problems are “self-created”, why, pray tell, should a person adjust their expectations and perceptions to this crappy situation?
I do not like the world. I reject it.
Because then if you choose and adjust, the crappy situation will feel less crappy and maybe improve because of a different perspective and a different way of handling things.
But we all know it often doesn’t work that cleanly
I do not want to choose and adjust. Tonight was a case in point. It was unacceptable to me and I won’t live in a world where that’s how it is.
I don’t have to. I never asked to be here. I sure as hell have the right to leave.
I see points in all of these comments you know the gray areas, I would just like to add sometimes we do things on purpose because we believe there we be no turning back and it will force ourselves to commit suicide. i know i’m one of those idiots.
I hear ya, Some Random Man, I’m also sick of people saying that suicide is never the answer. Everyone has to come up with their own answers, and therefor a “one size fits all” mentality regarding death is inherently fallacious. Ants also do everything they can to avoid death, but does that mean their lives are meaningful? Some would say yes, but then they would have to admit they likely snuff out meaningful life on a daily basis by simply walking down the street. In the end, there is no way to quantify the value of life. It has varying degrees of subjective importance depending on who you ask.
I’m with you, I’m also sick of people who regurgitate idealistic idioms because that’s the limit of their understanding.