"You're Sugar Fire" (Thoughts?)

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[Ben.]

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"Polnareff, have you ever considered why humans wish to live? Humans live
hoping to conquer their anxieties and fear, and attain peace of mind..."


This is what caused this type of psychological function to dominate the
animal world. This sensation of pain when dying reliably compelled the
animals to work hard enough to survive before they actually died, where
the lack of pain did not compel animals to survive as they were indifferent
to the pain of dying. Those that survive due to this trait reproduce and pass
on their capacity to feel pain, while those that were indifferent to dying
didn't tend to remain alive enough to reproduce at the same rate.
The issue with thought is that he is unreliable. Sometimes he does good
work, sometimes he causes problems. He's traditionally too unreliable, and
it's for this reason he isn't trusted with power or authority. Thought has a
profound degree of freedom, and that is the issue. Thought has very few
constraints, where instinct is very constrained. If you put your hand near a
flame, it will always feel hot. That is a constrained system with very limited
outputs from a certain input, whereas if you try to think about flames, you
can think of a "flame" that feels wet, feels cold, feels sticky, all sorts of
things that are very contrary to the physical nature of flame.
If 100% of a population survives to reproduce, despite 10% of these animals
being naturally non-viable, this induces devolution, as you have essentially
applied negative selective pressure by ensuring things that would not
survive do survive, causing non-viable genetics to propagate that will
subsequently die out en masse if the negative selective pressure is removed.
Contemplating these things is incredibly depressing, and in order to not
succumb to this sort of depression and then become prone to suicide, one
needs to have a natural predisposition to actually avoid thinking about all of
these things. A person needs to be compelled to live through instinct and
beyond that, they must have the capacity to ignore and overpower any sort
of contemplation of one's own existence in such a frightening, dangerous,
and generally painful world.

You are Sugar Fire
This is a great question, but the fun part about the question is that it is
completely irrelevant. Your character answers it with the entirely subjective
response, dependent upon the status of an individual's hallucinatory
subjective experience while being alive. In reality that part is entirely
negligible. Being alive and "wanting to live" are two completely
independent things and "wanting”, being non-present in the majority of life,
as most life is not conscious, does not really provide any legitimizing value
when philosophizing about life.

This is the general purpose of the brain; to process information and make
decisions with respect to the environment. Any pain or discomfort people
feel is due to the instinctive discomfort felt when one is actually dying, or
otherwise perceives themselves to be dying, as this pain has naturally been
a reliable deterrent of death, thus potentiating survival of brained animals,
for hundreds of millions of years.

The lower the constraints for survival, the less evolution takes place. If the
standard for survival, the bare minimum to survive becomes lower than it
was beforehand, this causes devolution to take place. If you once needed a
score of 90% to pass the test of survival, but now need an 80%, then the
spread changes with respect to this. As 80–89% is no longer selected
against, it becomes equally as prevalent as 90-100%. In an even
distribution, this readily reduces the average natural viability of the animal
from 95% to 90%, which is devolution.

This is the reason why thought is so unreliable. Thought creates the
capacity to have bad ideas. One can say that instinct is a hard 0 on a number
line, very static, unchanging, but reliably and always zero. This instinct at
the rate of O provides static, stable, indefinite, survival in an animal.
It is much easier to succumb to these sorts of thoughts, to contemplate the
endless tragedy of your existence, than it is to somehow overpower the
contemplation of your reality with more thought. Many people don't have
this capacity even when their lives are pretty decent. They live decent lives,
but still become very upset about whatever modest tragedies or
shortcomings they may have. The general sadness, discontent, frustration,
or pain of their lives drives people to suicide even in today's world where
technology has made life thousands of times easier and more comfortable
than it was in natural Africa.

To answer questions about human life, one must understand that these
answers must be valid across the board. They must be true for animal like
such as humans and rats, but it must be true even for unconscious life like
fungus and bacteria. For this answer of “peace of mind" to be a valid
answer, it would need to hold true for all life, which it doesn't, as most life
doesn't tend to have a conscious mind.

To distinguish between a human and any other animal life is a terrible
fallacy that tends to cripple human society. Humans are animals. They may
be different in some ways, but this is squares and rectangles here. Squares
may be different in some ways, but they are not any less of rectangles than
any other rectangles. All squares are 100% rectangles, even if all rectangles
aren't 100% squares despite the many shared similarities. It's the failure to
understand human life with respect to the truths that are apparent in
animal life that causes people to make mistakes that have come to define
society.

Thought however has a profound range, from -10 to 10. You can have ideas
that profoundly empower your survival, but you can also have profoundly
terrible ideas that hurt yourself, your community, and your entire species,
which are all increasingly contrary to the meaning of biological existence
which is just to maximize the indefinite probability of the survival of your
species.

As we now know that evolution is a given here, that Africans have clearly
evolved the entire time they have existed in Africa, we know that their
alleged intelligence quotient is the product of evolution, rather than
evidence for the absence of evolution. Knowing that Africans evolved to
have lower IQs, this means that this was inherently beneficial to the
survival of the native Africans, either through natural benefit, due to the
fact that having a high IQ was harmful to the probability of their survival, or
both.

It is this freedom of thought, being able to function independent from
psychical input, rather than solely processing data from the input of the
physical world and reacting to it accordingly, that makes it so powerful, but
at the same time so dangerous.

To find the will to live, to continue to live in historical Africa, where being
alive is 1000x harder and more painful than it currently is, knowing that
even 0.1% of this pain is enough to drive many people to suicide, means
that a person needs an incredible capacity to essentially ignore the general
philosophical issues that one comes across when they think about their
existence. To think about your existence, your reality, what your life entails,
the endless struggle and endless pain of trying to survive as a fresh human
in Africa, is essentially a death sentence.

Since we can look at our roots, our ancestors in these single celled
organisms, we can see that the subjective experience clearly is not a
quintessential part of being alive; it's essentially just a side effect of being
alive.

Knowing this, all that must be explained is how or why a lack of IQ is
somehow beneficial, while IQ itself is harmful. This relates to my prior
point, of the human's capacity to think themselves to death".
You may gain the power to think, but the first thoughts would be “Why am I
suffering day in and day out, just to stay alive, why do I work constantly,
tirelessly, to ensure that I survive, only so that I might suffer for another
day?"

The conscious mind is basically your body's way of processing reality.
Reality creates the input, such as your hand touching something; this input
then gets processed by your mind to create the hallucinatory experiences of
sensation

Thought is somewhat similar to a mental illness, as it deviates from the
natural function of the brain. The brain was not designed to think. It was
just designed to process information and react accordingly, without
thinking about anything. The thought and intelligence that the human is
capable of have produced great results sometimes, but often times produce
very terrible results. This is why the comparison to mental illness is valid, as
conscious thought deviates from the norm within animal life, and while it
has the capacity to provide remarkable successes it can also produce
remarkable failures. This, in the sense that mentally ill people have often
been great artists or otherwise valuable members of society explicitly
because the deviations in their brain allows causes to think in different
ways that most people don't.

Thoughts can be accurate, in the same sense that hunger is accurate, if you
are (truly) hungry then this means one should eat. Thoughts can also be
very inaccurate, you can think things that are incredibly false, and to act
upon them would be to ensure one's own death. This is why thoughts are
not instinctively as palpable within the mind; the value of thoughts depends
entirely on the validity of those thoughts with respect to the physical world,
while instinct was historically entirely valid, or at least valid enough to
ensure indefinite survival of the species.

Africa is a very dangerous place; there are very many deadly endemic
diseases that still cause endless tragedy today. There are real predators that
will kill readily humans, and there is an endless range of parasites and other
lifeforms that also prey upon humans. This is a very, very hard place to exist
in. There are constant threats to your life, on land, in the water, and in the
air, and this makes your life hard.

This sensation was important because single celled life didn't really need to
make decision in order to survive. If you put a cell on a warm fertile petri
dish, it will grow and thrive. It does this because the mechanical actions
that dictate the actions of this cell are all that it needs to ensure that it, or
more so, its species, continues to survive. Something like a highway, where
you just go, that's the only action you need to go, just go forward and you
make progress. The actions of the organism are controlled by
biomechanical constraints, which dictate what it needs to do and when,
essentially keep the car on the road.

Granted, in our current society, we cannot rely upon our instinct as we don't
exist in nature. Instinct is what compels a dog to drink antifreeze, because
his mind believes that since antifreeze tastes sweet, it must be good food,
but in reality this is poison and kills the dog.

The capacity that thoughts have to kill you just as readily as they assist you
is seen in the world everywhere today. Many people have had a thought,
put faith in their thought, acted upon that thought, and then harmed
themselves or died on account of this. Think of the man who tried to speed
on his motorcycle, the person who thought that they could cross the train
tracks before the train got there.

For the majority of the 1.9 million years of human history, humans were
essentially feral, as it wasn't until 10,000 years ago that humans began to
farm. This means that for 1.89 million years, the feral humans in Africa
benefited from a lack of intelligence quotient. Remember that intelligence,
meaning thought here, is often contrary to instinct. Thought is what often
compels people to act contrary to their instinct, with one of the most
ultimate forms of this action being suicide.

Even to deviate from instinctive, compulsive survival just enough to
contemplate one's own surroundings becomes incredibly dangerous in
Africa, just because it is so easy to become consumed by the tragedy that is
your existence. It is this reason that I would see having a predisposition to
thought, contemplation, or even a general understanding of a broader
scope of realty beyond the reality one's own current moment of physical
existence as a very double-edged sword in the wilds of Africa. That's why I
would argue having a lower degree of IQ is a result of evolution, as a lower
IQ, so long as it is not debilitating, should just be seen as a higher Instinct
Quotient, as the human mind is a balance of IQ and Instinct. To have a
higher IQ means a general dulling of human instinct due to the capacity to
question it, while having a higher Instinctive Quotient leads one to be
reluctant to think, just because thought is so incredibly threatening to the
proper function of instinct.

In this way, a cell is similar to a machine, it just functions, does it's work,
and it gets the job done. The most basic “meaning of life" as seen in these
creatures is just to go. That's it, one word, "go". Life, when seen as a
chemical process, is essentially the same concept as fire, the world is just
"on fire" with life.

This means we must largely rely upon thought to come to the correct
decision. Thought is the evolutionary capacity that got us into this situation,
but again, despite the yields it has provided such as being able to attain
profound unnatural advantages over other animal life, many people
struggle with thought.

This unreliability of thought is even more problematic when instincts
become adulterated by things such as substances, alcohol or drugs, that
cause people to actually feel sensational compulsion to act in a certain way,
rather than act solely with respect to sober thought, and this can be
disastrous when paired with the physical impairment induced by
substances, in instances such as drunk driving accidents. People have
impaired their instincts which would naturally check their thoughts, try to
see whether those thoughts are valid, and when the instinct fails to do this,
fails to keep thoughts in their place, people are even more prone to making
bad decisions.

Knowing that thought has the capacity to dull the human's instinct, to cause
them to be less affected or otherwise question their own natural instinct, it
makes sense that in Africa, being the natural habitat of humans, a person
being attuned to human instinct would be more beneficial to survival than a
predisposition to thought.

This really makes some philosophical concepts easier to understand, as
when looking for any meaning, one must understand that the meaning
must be found across all equivalents of life, and fire is one of the most
obvious ones when comparing even basic cellular respiration to
combustion, or further comparing the effect that both have on the chemical
or otherwise potential energy of the system.

The issue here is again that the brain was not designed for thought. It was
designed for instinct. It was designed to process information and then
compel you to act in a certain way that potentiates your survival. Sensations
such as hunger, thirst, pain, fear, etc. are examples of this input processing,
but also sensations such as emotions.

The human is an offshoot of the other great apes. These animals had lived
in Africa for many millions of years, surviving and thriving on account of
their instinct. Fresh humans were an offshoot of these animals, and in this
they still retained the instincts that were used from our genetic ancestors to
ensure their survival in their natural environment.

In closing, is it "peace of mind” we seek? No. We just seek to avoid the pain
of dying. That's all any animal does, we seek to avoid the pain of dying, by
any and all means, in the most reliable manner possible. Peace of mind is
essentially an absence of fear, and fear is the preemption of the pain of
dying. We all seek to attain this by any means necessary, and our actions are
all rooted entirely in this concept. Anything and everything we do, we do it
because we seek to avoid the pain of dying. This does not mean we will
avoid the pain, but any actions done by a person are done because they
firmly believe that their actions will in some way alleviate this pain or
otherwise prevent them from experiencing the pain of dying.
The issue here is that in a modern society, now dominated by thought-based
advancements, now a largely thought-dependent system as opposed to
instinct-dependent, emotions themselves can often have a very similar
effect as these substances. Emotions can cause you to feel sensations which
adulterate your thoughts and flaw your actions in a manner that is contrary
to the basic concept of life, which is again maximizing the probability of the
indefinite survival of your species.

Fresh humans had a 100% valid, tried and true, very refined set of instincts
that were designed to potentiate their survival in their native habitat within
Africa. These humans did not need to think to survive, because their
instincts were valid, designed for their situation, and they could rely upon
their instincts to survive.

Molecules rich
in chemical energy
Emotions are far more powerful than thoughts; you often feel emotions
through your entire body while clearly most people don't feel thoughts
throughout their body. This is because emotions are essentially the social
instinct of an animal, the process which compels the animal to act in certain
way when presented with other animals of the same species, and this allows
for social groups to form. These social groups tend to make the animals
more successful, as they can collectively benefit from one another. Think of
one man fighting a war, vs 100 men fighting together. The 100 men are a
far more formidable force than the single man.
Molecules poor
in chemical energy
Heat
Combustion
Carbon dioxide
Gasoline
Keting
of movement
Oxygen
Water
Energy conversion in a car
These instincts were 100% valid and optimized for their environment over
millions of years of evolution, and this means that to deviate from these
instincts is very risky. Natural instincts are basically like hitting the bullseye
so long as you are in your natural environment. They will essentially always
provide you with the internal compulsion to undertake the actions you need
to do in order to survive. It is very hard to improve upon something that is
functionally near-perfect.
Hest
This flawed nature of human thought, especially with respect to the
adulteration of thought, is readily visible in the sheer capacity that the
human mind has to "think themselves to death” that is visible in other
areas. Instances such as transgenderism, where the people think, truly
believe that they are making a good decision, but the rates of suicide of
these people indicate that this course of action may not have actually been a
reasonable solution to their feelings, despite their own belief in it, and it
may not have even helped at all.
Cellular
respiration
Carbon dioxide
Sugar

The issue is that people often convolute their emotions with thought. Their
emotions compel them to believe something, to act in a certain way, when
in reality this is problematic. These emotions were not designed to function
in this unnatural environment of civilization, and this means they will
produce often faulty results when they attempt to process the information
in society.
ATP
Energy for
co work
Water
Oxygen
Energy conversion in a cell
Things such as depression or more so the synthetic depression induced by
decadence where people think, try truly believe that despite having very
decent lives, a decent quality of life, that they are very sad, have terrible
lives, and want to kill themselves.
If you wanted a true "meaning of life", knowing that we are essentially a
parallel of fire, the only meaning of life, the only reason life exists, is to
reduce potential energy, chemical or otherwise, just because that chemical
energy is itching to be reduced. The existence of that potential energy is at
odds with entropy, so entropy does it's dandiest to see that this potential
energy gets reduced.
This situation is something like trying to read Spanish, when a person only
reads English. Sure, some words are cognates, but there are also false
cognates. Emotions will get the cognates correct, causing emotions to
compel the person to make the correct decision, but they also assert the
wrong definition of false cognates as if these were accurate.

Think of it like a roll of the dice: 1-4 is a loss, 5 is to win your money back, 6
is to win double your bet. Nature is not a fun place to gamble in. The act of
thinking is a six-sided dice, the higher number the better. Every thought is a
roll of the dice. Knowing that instinct here, in the natural environment it
was designed for, would essentially be a 5, a winning roll, every time,
attempting to use thought as a means to deviate from instinct in order to
gain benefit is incredibly risky. You have a 66% chance of making a decision
that is worse than instinct, a 16% chance of making a decision equally as
valid as one's instinct, and a 16% chance of making a decision that is more
so beneficial than one's instinctive behavior.

(Synthetic depression in this sense is a result of psychological relativism
with respect to baseline quality of life, where people perceive an 8/10 life as
a-10, just because they only have experienced the range of 8 to 10. Their
mental state is a result of comparison to their previous states, rather than
rational judgement. They are feeling the worst they have ever felt, they
believe this is terrible, despite the worst they've ever felt being an 8/10.
This is due to expectations.

Emotions would allegorically see something like carpeta, which means
folder in Spanish, and then assert that this means carpet, which it doesn't.
The problem is that people act as if the folders in question are actually
carpet, and they cover their floors with them, just because instinct blinds
them to their folly. Animal instinct is so powerful and so sure of its accuracy,
so sure that it must be followed for fear of death, that people don't put any
thought into actually understanding what they're doing.
Back onto the main point, the general concepts defining biological life. As
stated before, single-celled lifeforms are essentially rather simple machines,
at least when compared to large lifeforms. The issue with larger life is that
things become more complex. The larger the animal, the more complex of
an environment it will live in. Think of it like Lego pieces, you can build a
much more elaborate structure with 10,000 pieces than you can with 50.
The enlarged scope of the problem, the problem of "going", of ensuring that
life continues to "go", creates added complexity, and added complexity
means that simple mechanical actions often will not suffice.
In a game of life or death, as that's what life is in this situation, that means
to gamble with thought is to undertake a gamble that you will lose 66% of
the time, and only benefit from 16% of the time. This is one of the reasons
why a predisposition to thought, as opposed to reliance on instinct, would
not be selected in favor of.

When your expectations are not met, you become upset, when your
expectations are met, you are contented, when your expectations are
surpassed, then you become happy. People's expectations for life in the
West are so high that they readily become upset when those expectations
are not met, despite having an objectively and rationally high quality of life.
The issue is not that these people have bad lives, it's that their basis for
comparison and their expectations are calibrated in such a way that makes
them prone to being upset despite having little rational reason to be upset.)
This is an allegory, so it may seem weird, but a real example is old/sick
people. Mathematics and economics dictate that these people should be
euthanized; any person should be euthanized when it costs more money to
sustain them, to keep them alive, than they produce in the process of being
alive. The only reason anything should be invested in is when that money is
going to eventually turn a profit. This applies to any sort of business as
much as it does people, but emotions cause people to see themselves as
something different than a business or any other economic investment,
despite functioning in an identical manner and existing as the biological
parallel to any non-biological economic investment.

Think of making a machine that solely weaves cloth, a simple action, readily
done and these machines are commonplace today. Making an machine that
weaves cloth and sews it into different types of clothes such as shirts, pants,
socks, or jackets becomes a much more complicated task, so making a
machine to do these things becomes more difficult and complicated with
respect to the scope of the task being undertaken. This is why the more
complicated tasks of making actual clothes from cloth tends to be heavily
assisted by people, because making a machine to do all of the work becomes
more complex and more difficult proportional to the task that the machine
is tasked with

This was opposed to other parts of the world, where natural human instinct
would generally not be as valid. The human mind was not designed to
function instinctively outside of Africa, and the further you get from these
areas, the poorer the instinctive roll is. In an unnatural environment,
human instinct would yield a 2 or a 3 across the board, it's close, but it is not
enough to survive if 5 is the bar, and this is why people in these areas were
forced to rely upon thought to ensure their survival. This would explain the
reliance and emphasis placed upon thought in these parts of the world as
opposed to Africa, as even though thinking still only gives a 16% chance of
survival, instinct gives a 0% chance in these situations.
Range of Physically Experienced Qualities of Life
- Standard baseline quality
of life person expects to
experience
(basis of comparison)
Objective Quality
of Life
5
10
10
-10
0
5
Emotions cause people to be afraid of murder because to tolerate murder
means to tolerate the possibility of one's own murder, and this incites the
fear of death in the human, which functions as the pain of dying when the
pain has yet to be felt. Fear is feeling/anticipating the pain of dying
preemptively in order to avoid it. Their actions, failing to euthanize, are
contrary to very simple mathematical calculations, but despite this, they
still follow their instinct such as emotions rather than defend objectively
accurate decisions.
Experienced
Subjective
Quality of Life
Clearly this does not mean Africans did not think or were not intelligent, it
just means ensuring survival through thought as opposed to instinct was
generally not beneficial to them due to existing in the natural human
habitat. Advancement in instincts relevant to hunting or gathering,
advancements in physical hardiness, would be selected in favor of much
more readily than thought, just because thought tends to fail, while better
instincts just succeed even better and compete more readily than the
already successful natural instincts.

The subjective perception of the experience, how the person feels when
they have the corresponding quality of life
The added complexity of larger life is what brought brain function into
existence. You need to have a much more elaborate system of constraints,
one that has far more capacity to do different actions at different times,
than a single-celled organism that can basically thrive just by doing the
same thing indefinitely. Instead of just stepping on the gas, like single-celled
organisms, larger organisms have to make turns, avoid obstacles, and other
sorts of things that require a varied input beyond going. The added
complexity of a larger system that one exists in implicates the fact that this
larger creature must make more so complex decisions due to the added
complexity of their environment.
Painted this French girl myself...
Would you defend emotions when science contradicts them? If proven
science says "humans are animals" and this causes you to feel upset or
threatened, would you then condemn science, proven fact, and assert that
your emotions are more so valid of a source of truth than impartial and
objective analysis? Many people do. When their emotions compel them to
condemn an objectively legitimate action, they trust their emotions far
more readily than objective legitimacy, and this is because the nature of the
brain.

An African resistant to a certain endemic disease such as malaria would be
far more prone to proliferation than one prone to using thoughts above
instinct. Instinct was inherently successful while thought tends to not be
successful. If a predisposition to thought would have actually been
beneficial to the natives in Africa, then it would be as prevalent as things
like the traits for sickle-cell, which is 10-30% in the places where Malaria is
most prevalent such as the rainforest.
This necessity to make different actions at different times means that you
need some form of sensory hardware that takes input from the surrounding
environment then processes that information appropriately. You need to
take data from the world around you and then react to this information
accordingly, and this requires a certain deal of computation. One must take
in 5 variables, A,B,C, D and then produce differing outputs based upon the
input you are presented with. This was the original purpose of the brain,
not to think, but just to process information and react accordingly. You
needed more mental/computational power to do this, so the brain grew in
size. Brainless things just tend to function on logic closer to "If I can go, I
go."

The point being that thought literally gives people the capacity to end their
own lives, and this is entirely contrary to the concept of being alive. The
purpose of being an organism is to survive, then reproduce. When your own
thought compels you to exist contrary to the baseline foundation of
biological organism, it's clear that this is a very difficult trait to control.
Animal suicides are very rare, usually induced either by altruism, such as an
animal sacrificing its life to save its community. The other noted instances
seem to be due to the pressure from unnatural environments in human
society.

The emotions are a form of instinct, and even though a higher order instinct
than pain/hunger/thirst/fear, they are still more attuned to the original
purpose of the brain than thought. Brains were largely never used for
thought over the 500 million years they existed, and this is why these
emotions and sensations, quasi-hallucinations, are so much more powerful
than thought. These sensations are what ensured hundreds of millions of
years of our ancestors survived. This is why acting contrary to emotions
seems crazy, just because our brains, and thus bodies, are designed to act
upon instinct such as emotion rather than act with respect to thought.

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themselves-but-it-is-not-suicide

The trait for sickle-cell disease became so prevalent in Africa, because even
thought people who have the disease are crippled, those who are carriers of
the trait but don't have the disease become resistant to malaria. Even
though the double-recessive people would have died readily, those who
were only carriers, 50% of the children produced, would have a much
greater chance at survival due to having a greater capacity to withstand
malaria, one of the major predators of the human race throughout history.
The process of providing a measurable advantage is what allows traits to
become standardized, and this is the only reason why a trait, or a lack of a
trait, would become definitive within any species.
Many things have brains, even earthworms, but we don't tend to argue
these things think. Instead these brains just process a variable amount of
input in order to produce different reaction relative to the input from the
physical world that is received, and this is generally referred to as instinct,
rather than thought.

The capacity that thought has to induce one's own premature and
unnatural death is the reason that I make the following argument about the
African people.
Primal instinctive sensations such as pain and hunger are the King here, and
these will always overpower emotions. Emotions however are still instinct,
and essentially are like the queen, and they rule with authority unless the
King overrules them, and this is the family has ruled for generations.
Forgive me for acknowledging that race exists, but this is my rebuttal to the
common argument related to the statistic that Africans on average have a
measurably lower IQ than other people in the world. Maps of IQ tend to
depict Africa as having a lower IQ than most everyone else.
Beyond the advantage of being attuned to natural instinct in one's natural
environment, the other reason I argue that this is an evolutionary trait
being prevalent in the African people is the human's capacity to think
themselves to death. Thought leads to introspection, it leads to thinking
about one's life and one's existence. If one were to use thought, as opposed
to instinct, to dictate one's actions, then all actions are subject to this vector
of perpetuating one's own existence, including the simple action of being
alive.

This is why, in a sense, the statement is sort of accurate. It's not that
anything wishes to live; a worm has no real concept of "wanting to live", but
the earthworm still lives. The worm still makes actions that reliably increase
the probability of its own survival. It does so, not for "want", but simply to
avoid the pain of dying.

That's really all that thought, pain, sensation, and their evolutionary
progeny of emotion exist to do. They exist to remind you of the pain of
dying. All life continues to live, to work hard every day to survive, all just to
avoid the pain of dying. Most creatures lack any real capacity for desire, but
they all instinctively seek to avoid this pain.

Thought, however, is some hard-working peasant, some king's servant that
does work but doesn't tend to have power. He is appreciated and respected
for benefiting the king, for his hard work, but he has no real authority to
contradict the king and queen. Thought can work so long as the King and
Queen don't mind, which they usually don't, and as the King and Queen
don't do much work in an advanced civilization where people's basic
survival is seldom threatened so the king is often idle, even if people's social
interaction causes a significant dependence upon the verdict of the queen,
most of the work, especially non-social work, is left to the peasant of
thought.

Racists argue that this indicates that "Africans did not evolve", when in
reality to argue that a species somehow "failed to evolve" is contrary to
biology itself. So long as a species continues to exist it will continue to
evolve, it will continue to adapt to the environment it exists in, because
beneficial traits are always selected in favor of while non-beneficial traits
are selected against

Instinct compels a person, just as any other animal: “I am alive, I must do
these things to survive, so I do them to avoid dying." they don't question
their instinct, it's just deeply held and unshakable resolve in the fabric of
their very existence. When you subject your own existence to thought-
oriented reasons, these instincts are no longer strong driving forces that
compel you to exist. You must think about your existence, your instinct tells
you “I am alive” your thought asks “Why?", and it is this capacity to
question one's own life is what makes it so dangerous.

To argue that Africans "did not evolve" would indicate that there was a
complete absence of selective pressure against the African people over the
course of their existence. That 100% of Africans survived 100% of the time,
and clearly this is not the case. So long as some people died and failed to
reproduce while other survived, this means that evolution took place.
The reason why this concept, "working to avoid the pain of dying", has
become ubiquitous within biological life is pretty simple. The animals that
did not feel this pain, that were indifferent to dying, were far more prone to
death. They had no instinct that would cause them to avoid death, as they
did not feel pain, and this caused them to die out. When they fail to
intentionally avoid death, they die at a much greater rate than the animals
that intentionally avoid death.

However, it is hard for this peasant to work when the King and Queen
condemn him. Thought has never ensured the protection of the kingdom
with the same track-record and success rate that the King and Queen have,
so naturally he doesn't have the same amount of respect or authority.
Thought was never more capable of ensuring a human's survival than
emotions or instinct, at least over the vast majority of the 1.9 million years
of human evolution, so at this point thought remains an appendage of the
human mind, the long arm of the King, the crafty friend, rather than
anyone with real authority. He is able to help the King and Queen out in
certain situations, but has no real power to overrule them.

Say you lived in Africa, millions of years ago, constantly seeing your friends
and family die from disease, being eaten by predators, constantly struggling
without any sort of comfort or safety provided by advanced technology. To
actually spend time thinking about how hard, painful, and saddening your
life is, watching your loved ones die all the time, constantly under pressure
from the environment, constant sickness surrounds you, induces despair;
these thoughts would wreak havoc on your mind.

Do note that the harder it is to die, the less evolution will take place, so in
reality the Western world is the one least prone to evolution because they
ensure the survival of people at a much higher rate. If 90% of births are
viable, and 100% of those people survive to reproduce, there is no selective
pressure, so no evolution takes place. Whereas if only 50% of birthed viable
animals survive to reproduce, this means that selective pressure was
applied and some traits were selected against and some were selected in
favor of, and the genetic baseline of the species changes in accordance with
this.

 

[Ben.]

Thanks, interesting read.

Is it ironic if i say this is food for thought?


I can't say i agree with the entire premise but it pictures the struggle of emotions/thoughts and modern life from a interesting angle that may explain certain conflicts we humans run into many times in our lives.

 

[Comstock]

I feel like this could have been more focused. It was very rambling, and many points were questionable and distasteful.

Anyway, I think a key point they were trying to get across was this:
"the human mind is a balance of IQ and Instinct. To have a
higher IQ means a general dulling of human instinct due to the capacity to
question it, while having a higher Instinctive Quotient leads one to be
reluctant to think, just because thought is so incredibly threatening to the
proper function of instinct."

I think this is straight up wrong, as the times when I had my most powerful and meaningful instincts are also when I preformed the best from an objective academic standpoint.

 

[Ben.]

Yeah it seemed to some degree very reductionistic. I also think "developing" thoughts that go beyond instincts does not have to be necessarily bad and may actually lead to advantages for the organism.

I think this is straight up wrong, as the times when I had my most powerful and meaningful instincts are also when I preformed the best from an objective academic standpoint.

Could you tell us the detail of the example your thinking off? But i guess instincts don't have to be the countermechanisms of thoughts and they can actually point the decision making into the same direction. Thoughts theoreticly can prevent failure which instincts could not.

Maybe its just me but i feel as if this is a whole lot more complex but at the same time much more intrinsic than what we humans make it out to be.

 

[Comstock]

Could you tell us the detail of the example your thinking off?

I don't have specific examples, but this was a time when I was both picking up things in class easily and quickly, and was also in tune with people emotionally. I was reliably predicting what people were feeling, what they wanted, how they wanted to interact. It was a really fun time, I think people enjoyed interacting with me, and I was certainly enjoying interacting with others. And I was doing my best academically.

 

[Herbie]

I learnt that the reason we found the time to be able to think and have vision and invent things was from the congealed energy of farming. That changed everything for us because we were no longer under the tyranny of hunting and gathering.