I disagree with the idea that the desire to die is normal for humans.
The vast majority of humanity, spanning hunter-gatherers to information economy techies, believe in some form of consciousness which continues after the physical body as passed away. They believe this to the point that, if you disabuse them of this notion, they’ll enter a spiritual crisis and begin to feel that life is meaningless. The older people get, the more enthusiastically they believe this.
If the collective fantasy common to our entire species doesn’t reflect an extremely powerful human wish to live longer than we currently do, I don’t know what does.
When the average person says they want to die at 80, what they really mean that they want to leave this world for another at 80. They don’t want to continue things as they are, or re-live their youth—they want to move on to a different sort of existence.
But practically speaking, I think you might be right that getting someone interested in something worldly would encourage them to stay on in this world longer, and in the end that might be better than trying to explain that death means really death (once we actually have the option to stop true death which doesn’t seem like a long shot, which realistically we really don’t yet).
I don’t think the belief in life after death necessarily indicates a wish to live longer than we currently do. I think it is a result of the fact that it appears to people to be incoherent to expect your consciousness to cease to be: if you expect that to happen, what experience will fulfill that expectation?
Obviously none. The only expectation that could theoretically be fulfilled by experience is expecting your consciousness to continue to exist. This doesn’t actually prove that your consciousness will in fact continue to exist, but it is probably the reason there is such a strong tendency to believe this.
This article here talks about how very young children tend to believe that a mouse will have consciousness after death, even though they certainly do not hear this from adults:
For example, in a study by Bering and Bjorklund (2004), children (as well as an adult comparison group) were presented with a puppet show in which an anthropomorphized mouse was killed and eaten by an alligator, and then asked about the biological and psychological functioning of the now-dead mouse. Kindergartners understood that various biological imperatives (e.g., the capacity to be sick, the need to eat, drink, and relieve oneself) no longer applied to the dead mouse. The majority of these children even said that the brain of the dead mouse no longer worked, which is especially telling given that children at this age also understand that the brain is “for thinking” (Bloom 2004; Gottfried & Jow 2003; Johnson & Wellman 1982; Slaughter & Lyons 2003). Yet when asked whether the dead mouse was hungry or thirsty, or whether it was thinking or had knowledge, most kindergartners said yes. In other words, young
children were cognizant of the fact that the body stops working at death but they viewed the mind as still active.
Furthermore, both the children and adults were particularly likely to attribute to the dead mouse the capacity
for certain psychological states (i.e., emotions, desires, and epistemic states) over others (i.e., psychobiological and perceptual states), a significant trend that will be addressed in the following section. In general, however, kindergartners were more apt to make psychological attributions to the dead mouse than were older children, who were not different from adults in this regard. This is precisely the opposite pattern that one would expect to find if the origins of such beliefs could be traced exclusively to cultural indoctrination. In fact, religious or eschatological-type answers (e.g.,
Heaven, God, spirits, etc.) among the youngest children were extraordinarily rare. Thus, a general belief in the continuity of mental states in dead agents seems not something that children acquire as a product of their social– religious upbringing, because increasing exposure to cultural norms would increase rather than attenuate afterlife beliefs in young minds. Instead, a natural disposition toward afterlife beliefs is more likely the default cognitive stance and interacts with various learning channels (for an alternative interpretation, see Astuti, forthcoming a). Moreover, in a follow-up study that included Catholic schoolchildren, this incongruous pattern of biological and psychological attributions to the dead mouse appeared even after controlling for differences in religious education (Bering et al. 2005).
Yeah, in general, I’m sure part of it is that humans can’t easily conceptualize true death in the first place (but that’s even further grounds for not taking them seriously when they say they want to die). Just like part of it is our instinctive animism/anthropomorphism. I certainly don’t want to minimize the role of “cognitive illusions” in the whole thing.
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these beliefs depict the universe as fairly utopian—the afterlife often resolves misunderstandings, rebalances moral scales, makes room for further growth… and earthly suffering is generally given higher purpose. Remember—a true human utopia doesn’t give its members all they think they desire, or eliminate the sort of suffering which serves a deeper human value, fiction is replete with failed utopias along those lines. Despite all the terrible things, we could be in a utopia right now if only we have sufficiently optimistic beliefs about what happens outside the narrow window of our worldly experiences. Is it a coincidence that religions often have precisely these optimistic beliefs?
Anyway, I doubt you need to get into “what does the mouse expect” to explain that particular result: Very young children also lack the theory of mind to understand that not everyone has the same information as they do. If the mouse had simply left the room and the alligator ate the mouse’s friend squirrel, they might say the mouse was sad and angry (not realizing that the mouse was gone from the room and wouldn’t know about what the alligator did).
Is belief in the supernatural (crystal healing, ghosts, “something higher”, that sort of thing) actually lower? I’d be very surprised if this turned out to be a cultural or demographic thing, rather than a human thing. I think that, absent some sort of active cultural intervention preventing it, a psychologically typical human will believe in spirits and magic. I know I would.
I think atheists, being psychologically typical humans, still retain certain implicit beliefs about this sort of thing. Ideas about how our matter goes on to circulate through the ecosystem, or the notion that we’re all made of star-stuff and are generally one with the universe, are powerful and comforting to many.
The embrace of impermanence is so often accomplished by manufacturing a different sort of permanence to cling to.
Is belief in the supernatural (crystal healing, ghosts, “something higher”, that sort of thing) actually lower?
If you take ghosts in Germany as an example 79.7% say they don’t believe while only 17.7 believe they do.
I think that, absent some sort of active cultural intervention preventing it, a psychologically typical human will believe in spirits and magic. I know I would.
School curriculums are written in a way to discourage belief in ghosts and not treat it as a mainstream belief. Mainstream media does the same. We don’t have figures like Oprah on German mainstream TV.
Ideas about how our matter goes on to circulate through the ecosystem, or the notion that we’re all made of star-stuff and are generally one with the universe, are powerful and comforting to many.
While that might be true, I don’t think that people on LW are radically different on that count.
While that might be true, I don’t think that people on LW are radically different on that count.
Yes, neither do I. I’m not even personally different on that count. Aside from the forum-specific ideologies, Lesswrongers being unusual is a more extreme case of internet forum users being unusual, which is in turn a more extreme case of extremely literate people being unusual, and so on.
But Lesswrongers are different when it comes to the question whether curing ageing is a valuable goal. Few people on LW want to die before they are 1000. That’s different for the general population. It’s worthwhile to try to understand where the difference comes from.
Desire to live indefinitely is not that uncommon in the general population in the first place, this is a transhumanist forum so there is a self-selection effect from the outset (LWers beliefs about AI are way weirder than the immortality thing), and almost every single person here has been exposed to explicit arguments for wanting immortality, moreover, in a setting where not wanting immortality is low status. Isn’t this kind of like asking why church members are more likely to believe in God?
In this discussion there was the hypothesis that people don’t want to fight aging because of the promise of eternal life from religion.
When we want to convince people it’s useful to know whether that’s true.
The polling data doesn’t seem to suggest that hypothesis when religious Brazil in general is pro-longevity while more atheistic Russia has the lowest support for longevity.
Of course that are single data points but it still suggests that religion isn’t the core force that prevents people from wanting longevity.
Isn’t this kind of like asking why church members are more likely to believe in God?
It quite useful to understand how people come to believe and then go to Church.
(By the way, I never was suggesting that religion caused people to not desire earthly longevity. I was saying that the fact that nearly all human religions often feature immorality suggest that nearly all humans find it difficult to understand and accept true-death and wish for immortality on some level.
Furthermore I was saying that if someone happily believes in an afterlife, we should probably count them as desiring immortality even if they claim to desire an earthly death. I’m disagreeing with the idea that we should take claims of wishing to die at face value—I think that most who would turn down an eternal life (assuming good health, companionship, purpose, and so on) are either mistaken about what they prefer, or mistaken about the universe.
I disagree with the idea that the desire to die is normal for humans.
The vast majority of humanity, spanning hunter-gatherers to information economy techies, believe in some form of consciousness which continues after the physical body as passed away. They believe this to the point that, if you disabuse them of this notion, they’ll enter a spiritual crisis and begin to feel that life is meaningless. The older people get, the more enthusiastically they believe this.
If the collective fantasy common to our entire species doesn’t reflect an extremely powerful human wish to live longer than we currently do, I don’t know what does.
When the average person says they want to die at 80, what they really mean that they want to leave this world for another at 80. They don’t want to continue things as they are, or re-live their youth—they want to move on to a different sort of existence.
But practically speaking, I think you might be right that getting someone interested in something worldly would encourage them to stay on in this world longer, and in the end that might be better than trying to explain that death means really death (once we actually have the option to stop true death which doesn’t seem like a long shot, which realistically we really don’t yet).
I don’t think the belief in life after death necessarily indicates a wish to live longer than we currently do. I think it is a result of the fact that it appears to people to be incoherent to expect your consciousness to cease to be: if you expect that to happen, what experience will fulfill that expectation?
Obviously none. The only expectation that could theoretically be fulfilled by experience is expecting your consciousness to continue to exist. This doesn’t actually prove that your consciousness will in fact continue to exist, but it is probably the reason there is such a strong tendency to believe this.
This article here talks about how very young children tend to believe that a mouse will have consciousness after death, even though they certainly do not hear this from adults:
Yeah, in general, I’m sure part of it is that humans can’t easily conceptualize true death in the first place (but that’s even further grounds for not taking them seriously when they say they want to die). Just like part of it is our instinctive animism/anthropomorphism. I certainly don’t want to minimize the role of “cognitive illusions” in the whole thing.
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these beliefs depict the universe as fairly utopian—the afterlife often resolves misunderstandings, rebalances moral scales, makes room for further growth… and earthly suffering is generally given higher purpose. Remember—a true human utopia doesn’t give its members all they think they desire, or eliminate the sort of suffering which serves a deeper human value, fiction is replete with failed utopias along those lines. Despite all the terrible things, we could be in a utopia right now if only we have sufficiently optimistic beliefs about what happens outside the narrow window of our worldly experiences. Is it a coincidence that religions often have precisely these optimistic beliefs?
Anyway, I doubt you need to get into “what does the mouse expect” to explain that particular result: Very young children also lack the theory of mind to understand that not everyone has the same information as they do. If the mouse had simply left the room and the alligator ate the mouse’s friend squirrel, they might say the mouse was sad and angry (not realizing that the mouse was gone from the room and wouldn’t know about what the alligator did).
.
In Europe with higher rates of atheism you still don’t get a majority of people to want to live forever.
Is belief in the supernatural (crystal healing, ghosts, “something higher”, that sort of thing) actually lower? I’d be very surprised if this turned out to be a cultural or demographic thing, rather than a human thing. I think that, absent some sort of active cultural intervention preventing it, a psychologically typical human will believe in spirits and magic. I know I would.
I think atheists, being psychologically typical humans, still retain certain implicit beliefs about this sort of thing. Ideas about how our matter goes on to circulate through the ecosystem, or the notion that we’re all made of star-stuff and are generally one with the universe, are powerful and comforting to many.
The embrace of impermanence is so often accomplished by manufacturing a different sort of permanence to cling to.
If you take ghosts in Germany as an example 79.7% say they don’t believe while only 17.7 believe they do.
School curriculums are written in a way to discourage belief in ghosts and not treat it as a mainstream belief. Mainstream media does the same. We don’t have figures like Oprah on German mainstream TV.
While that might be true, I don’t think that people on LW are radically different on that count.
Yes, neither do I. I’m not even personally different on that count. Aside from the forum-specific ideologies, Lesswrongers being unusual is a more extreme case of internet forum users being unusual, which is in turn a more extreme case of extremely literate people being unusual, and so on.
But Lesswrongers are different when it comes to the question whether curing ageing is a valuable goal. Few people on LW want to die before they are 1000. That’s different for the general population. It’s worthwhile to try to understand where the difference comes from.
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/
http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/07/who-wants-to-live-forever.html
Desire to live indefinitely is not that uncommon in the general population in the first place, this is a transhumanist forum so there is a self-selection effect from the outset (LWers beliefs about AI are way weirder than the immortality thing), and almost every single person here has been exposed to explicit arguments for wanting immortality, moreover, in a setting where not wanting immortality is low status. Isn’t this kind of like asking why church members are more likely to believe in God?
In this discussion there was the hypothesis that people don’t want to fight aging because of the promise of eternal life from religion. When we want to convince people it’s useful to know whether that’s true.
The polling data doesn’t seem to suggest that hypothesis when religious Brazil in general is pro-longevity while more atheistic Russia has the lowest support for longevity. Of course that are single data points but it still suggests that religion isn’t the core force that prevents people from wanting longevity.
It quite useful to understand how people come to believe and then go to Church.
Agreed.
(By the way, I never was suggesting that religion caused people to not desire earthly longevity. I was saying that the fact that nearly all human religions often feature immorality suggest that nearly all humans find it difficult to understand and accept true-death and wish for immortality on some level.
Furthermore I was saying that if someone happily believes in an afterlife, we should probably count them as desiring immortality even if they claim to desire an earthly death. I’m disagreeing with the idea that we should take claims of wishing to die at face value—I think that most who would turn down an eternal life (assuming good health, companionship, purpose, and so on) are either mistaken about what they prefer, or mistaken about the universe.
With many exceptions, of course.)