[SEQ RERUN] An Alien God
Today’s post, An Alien God was originally published on 02 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Evolution is awesomely powerful, unbelievably stupid, incredibly slow, monomaniacally singleminded, irrevocably splintered in focus, blindly shortsighted, and itself a completely accidental process. If evolution were a god, it would not be Jehovah, but H. P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Fake Justification, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
This is among my favorites. Partly because it helped me to understand evolution better, partly for the awesomely cool Lovecraft metaphor.
Maybe this is a good starting point. Ever since reading this article (like a year ago), I have been bothered by the fact that freezing to death and oxygen deprivation seem like rather pleasant ways to go. I’ve talked to some friends in Biology, and they didn’t know why this might be the case. I’m not really sure where to go from there. It could be that probability dictates that some deaths will be less horrible, but since the strength of a theory rests on what it prohibits, I would appreciate information that could help me understand the mechanism for why this would be the case.
What’s bothersome about it?
Evolution doesn’t care one way or another what death feels like. It’s totally irrelevant. Some ways to die are painful, and this is not selected against because it has no impact on reproductive fitness. Some ways to die are pleasant, and this is not selected against because it has no impact on reproductive fitness.
Sure. And the two I focused on constitute a pretty tiny sample. What bothers me is that I cannot see a mechanism for why it is the case. Why does freezing give you the warm cozies? With a drug overdose, I can see how the poison activates or inhibits certain receptors, potentially killing you happy.
I have been told that drowning is supposed to be a horrible way to go; in what way(s) is it different from autoerotic asphyxiation? You know, besides the obvious.
With [asphyxiation], I can see how the [CO2] activates or inhibits certain receptors, potentially killing you happy.
Um… you might want to take a closer look at the obvious. Intuitively, I would expect water in your lungs to be rather unpleasant, for the same reason fire on your hand is—animals that went ‘this isn’t very nice, I think I’ll remove myself from this situation’ tended to have more kids.
Pointing the following out is a little pedanterrific on my part, but in a typical drowning, very little water enters the lungs until after unconsciousness (and in a minority of drownings, until after cardiac arrest).
Edit: I would nonetheless expect most drownings to be unpleasant for the same reasons as any other involuntary asphyxiation (but not all).
:s/lungs/airways/
The point seems to hold. Involuntary laryngospasm wouldn’t do much good if the organism experienced no distress or desire to leave the water.
That said, thanks for pointing that out. I really should know better than to say “Intuitively, I would expect” and then not bother to do the research.
This led me to make a prediction that I can’t test at the moment (being that I am at work). There must be a group or fraction of the population that actually does like drowning for the exact same reason as they like autoerotic asphyxiation. I would expect there to be fewer, though, if only because suffocation has a much easier dead-man’s switch.