Survival instinct

Factual Questions
21

I should bring up that I’ve seen reproduction mentioned several times in this conversation and as I far as I’m aware that is an instinctual tendency, probably just as much for humans as animals.

Although, for a person that can know that they don’t have the money to make that happen, they can aim towards this as a goal or they hate the idea and choose paths that eliminate this possibility.
I don’t think any lion is saying to itself, " let’s find a nice cave dear and settle down and have lot’s of cubs". That this really expands on this animal’s life. It’s a thing to do as much as the need to sleep or stay awake.

So maybe, I’m asking what has been asked so many times before. “What’s the point?” And is it I only that need there to be one?

If science is right, there is no “point”. I’m prepared for whatever truth feels to me the most honest. Yes, I said “feels”, because I do not negate that element of humanity even if true science removes this aspect as often as possible.
And I have to admit, if “just being” for the reason of “just because everything lined-up right” is the surest reality. Well, as a human I’d say that’s pretty depressing.

Why is it that people want there to be more? People (me included) can make things more complicated than they are.
Even science conflicts itself and “no” I’m not going to quote anything.
I’m sure if I scoured the internet enough I could find strong arguments, but then those arguments would become most highlighted -more than the core questions on animals and people and instincts and about life being the best path and death being the wrong one?

With no god in these questions, no afterlife; just worms and dirt. Why is death any kind of “problem” for a “lower” organism to fear it or even develop a genetic disposition to survive rather than not?
All things being equal death is just another outcome with no “bad” or “good” context to it. Why NOT die? “Because instincts tell animals not to” “because animals survive longer and able to keep their species and specific gene pool in existence by reproducing”. And why is that? Just something to do? They just decided to dabble with life a while and see what that’s all about?

Why fight to live when your whole life is both dependent on and primarily instinctual/programmed? What am I missing? I guess their motivation towards one outcome over the other.
Living just to live and make more life seems a weak …“answer” if you will.

Posters have consistently emphasized survival as kind of a " no-brainer" choice for anything alive. But I guess, “Why?” “what’s so good about it ?” For anything with a heartbeat, it exists in this world for a reason and many times it fights for that chance… but speaking of not recognizing your enemies, what makes death “bad”?

22

See social proof.

Because organisms that give up and die prior to reproducing don’t pass any of their traits (including their weak will-to-live) on to the next generation. If an animal isn’t around to make babies because it got killed and eaten before reaching sexual maturity, there will be no babies made with its traits.

There’s no “good” or “bad” involved here. It’s a simple rule: if a physical or behavioral trait tends to keep an individual animal from making babies, then that trait will not be transmitted to the next generation (because there won’t be a next generation).

The fact that an animal exists means that its ancestors did have an adequate will to live, and it means that animal probably has been endowed with a similarly adequate will to live (and make babies), too.

23

Some behaviour is programmed. People have children, sometimes when they don’t want to, because their programming urges them to do things their forebrain would possibly veto. Similarly, people eat fruit and vegetables but not dirt - that too is a deep programmed behaviour. Not is many cases, the “mechanism” is pleasure. Apples taste good. Mulch does not. Behaviour leading to possible reproduction is pleasurable on many levels - not just orgasm, but the satisfaction of relationships, etc. These mechanisms is obvious and simple… and have been evolving in parallel with the development of more complex organisms.

It’s obvious to see that any incremental increase or decrease in certain programmed behaviours can have the appropriate effect. Feel not enough pleasure, you won’t reproduce. If genetics cause that lack of interest, then that gene would be selected against. And so on…

Humans are a special case, the culmination of brain evolution in mammals - we have the ability to override programming to some extent. A person can starve himself to death, or be so caught up in something else that they neglect to eat or drink enough to survive, or do something else they know will not be good for them. Of course, the more urgent the instinctive need, the more brainpower required to override the instinct.

24

[QUOTE=Machine Elf]

It’s a simple rule: if a physical or behavioral trait tends to keep an individual animal from making babies, then that trait will not be transmitted to the next generation (because there won’t be a next generation).

[/QUOTE]

Ok, but what is it that makes things alive favor life?

25

Because if their ancestors hadn’t done so, they wouldn’t be here. The only ones alive today are the ones who’s ancestors favored life. If a component of that is hereditary that’s pretty much all you need.

26

The final line from my previous post is the answer to your question:

Living things favor life because they have been programmed to do so by their genetic makeup. Thirst, hunger, an aversion to pain, fear of predators, all of the fundamental drives that compel you to maintain your physiology. It’s not that living things consciously favor life; it’s just that they’ve been programmed to experience dangerous/deadly circumstances and physiological conditions as unpleasant.

Living things favor life because any living thing that doesn’t favor life soon stops being a living thing. To continue to be a living thing for more than a brief moment after birth requires favoring life.

27

“Survival” is simply a collection of all the components. Hunger and pleasure of good taste make animals seek out food; thirst- water. Urge to reproduce, produces offspring. Fear of pain, makes them run from danger. And so on… Each urge is pretty elementary.

If you’re like me, you probably have a fear of heights. I can force myself to walk up to the edge of a long drop, but I’ve very uncomfortable with it - even if my intellect tells me, there’s no danger of falling. I could stand on the edge of an apartment roof an look down, and tell myself “if I were on a curb 6 inches high I would never fall over” - but it’s still intensely uncomfortable to be near a 100-foot drop. that’s the sort of ingrained instincts all creatures have - preprogrammed behaviour. (I saw an experiment in Scientific American once, where they placed babies and young animals in a box; half the floor was glass, with a painted floor 4 feet below and the checkered wall/floor pattern made it easy to see the drop-off. Even when able to feel the solid transparent floor, typically no creature wants to walk (or crawl) on “mid-air”. Programming. Instinct. The sum of all these programs is survival instinct.

28

Lots o’ videos of that here: Visual Cliff Experiment

Explanation of the experiment here. The initial study was intended to investigate the ability of human infants to perceive depth; it did not establish whether avoidance of cliffs/fear of heights was instinctual or learned.

29

Actually, people are rarely pissed off by humble sincere curiosity. Maybe you piss people off for another reason. Just a thought.

30

“Instinct” is a very tricky word. We use it so loosely, but I doubt we really understand how it works or even what it is.

31

There was once an interesting experiment with flying birds and chicks on the ground. Characteristically, predatory raptors trend to have long tails and short necks, while non-predatory herbivorous large birds like geese and cranes fly with long necks and short tails. Cardboard cutouts were fashioned to appear like mostly outspread wings, with a single projection. When a cutout was passed over with the long projection forward (like a goose), baby chicks on the ground ignored it. But when it was passed over with the long projection trailing (like a falcon), the chicks all ran for cover.

The first visual cue that a simple organism recognizes is movement. Anything that moves triggers a reaction. As discrimination (and visual acuity) becomes more complex, the organism develops the ability to react instinctively to shapes of moving objects, classifying them as benign or threatening. On the ladder of selection, first those who cannot detect movement at all are weeded out, leaving only the sighted. Then, selection removes the sighted who lack instinctive discriminatory powers to know what to fear. Survival instinct.

32

While your post above was in my opinion unnecessary and didn’t add to the OP. This one does. “we” probably do not truly understand the full spectrum of instincts.

The biggest problem with my posting anything at all is that what I’m asking has no hard-lined structure to it. Because it originated as almost a brain-fart. I appreciate everyone’s patience in the matter as I composed new lines of questioning.
Even though I never formed the OP with the intention to point at science and state it doesn’t have all the answers, that was a given before I even asked. I simply wanted to see “how far are we” in understanding such things.

From my perspective the answers that are there, feel "empty"or unfinished, but that is a feeling and not much like scientific research at all. Unless you equate “feelings” to intuition which is a combination of experience and “instinct” …
The thing with science is, it can eternally run in cyclical style of thought revisiting the same variables in different orders, now add one more and start all over again… As close as it comes to the definition of insanity to me.

I doubt the answers will vary too much more greatly than what’s been written here, so I thank you all for allowing me to pick your brains. Without the added contributions I would have not found my way through the maze in my head so quickly and produced the necessary questions.

33

OP: You completely missed my point. I never meant to suggest that any organism learns anything over its individual life. Certainly some do. But that’s immaterial to my argument.

A species “learns” to be long-lived as a species via the simple expedient of out-reproducing other species competing for similar niches. The word “learn” is really over-loaded there. A better way to say it is: A species lasts longer (i.e. becomes longer-lived) as a consequence of that out-reproduction.

It’s clear you’re groping for some underlying meaning or motivation for life. That’s, IMO, a fool’s errand. The phenomenon of Life in the largest sense is in essence nothing more than an infection, a temporary disharmony in inanimate objects. Biology is simply an infection of physics.

Ancient Greeks & folks before them tried to imbue what we now call physics with Life-like tendencies. Rocks “wanted” to roll down hills. Waves “wanted” to crash onto shores. We now know that’s nonsense. Current humans are trying to imbue what we now call biology with those same metaphysical “wants”. And it’s equally nonsense thinking to do so.

Rocks roll down hills due to gravity, and gravity alone. DNA & RNA duplicate themselves because they can’t not; the physics of the molecules prevents anything other than duplication from happening. That physics in turn leads to what we now call Life. And once there are 2 different organisms, they will compete because there are two of them and only one food source. So one will come out ahead, and one will come out behind.

Lather rinse, repeat for a few million years and you get Life on Earth as it is today. Keep lathering & rinsing for another few million years and it’ll be massively different, yet similar or identical in underlying mechanism.

An gigantic avalanche starts when one grain of sand or snow slides against another. All it takes is the initial trigger and the whole rest of the avalanche is inevitable by the laws of physics. Millions of particles interacting in uncountable and uncomputable ways.

Likewise, the whole tree of Life we see on Earth today is inevitable (barring intervening catastrophe) once simple self-replicating molecules exist. Physics demands it, just as it demand the avalanche form once the single grain starts to move (in a favorable environment).

You’ll never see an avalanche fall up. Can’t happen. The laws of physics prevent it. You’ll never see Life do anything but spread, and reproduce, and compete, & get ever-better within its niches. The laws of physics prevent any other outcome.

Searching for any deeper meaning within Biology is as silly as Ancients saying rocks “want” to roll down hill. Rocks “want” nothing; they are blind “victims” of physics. Biology & Evolution is the same; just more complex.

Humans as conscious social animals can decide to imbue “meaning” into their interactions with others. But that’s totally a social / mental belief, not a physical reality.

34

:dubious:

We know exactly what instinct is. We observed the phenomenon, and came up with the word “instinct” to describe it:

As to how it works, well, that depends on how deeply you want to understand it. In a general sense we know it comes down to genes, but if you want to explain (for example) exactly which genes are responsible for making an animal seek out water when it’s dehydrated, then yes, we’re not there yet.

35

But it did demonstrate real hesitancy to “step off” the cliff, despite physically determining there was a (transparent) floor present. Essentially, the experiment required both depth perception and a fear of falling, meaning some sort of “instinctive” understanding that falls are not good. It’s not as if the parents had explained the danger, and we hope the subjects had not acquired the aversion by being repeatedly dropped.

It’s a good example of a pre-programmed behaviour.

36

Great post,** LSLGuy**.

37

First thoughts on scanning thead:

“SD flipping it’s shit” is good.
Has anyone mentioned, at least, suicide? (Like I said, quick scan.) The exception proves the rule.

38

well, they do, but it’s limited by animals’ understanding.

You have to remember, we humans are exceedingly smart AND we have amazingly good eyesight. We can see every detail instantly, whereas animals rely a lot on sight and smell.

That combines with our ability to form concepts/abstractions and create the “survival instinct” we know of.

It’s not that animals don’t have it, I believe they do indeed understand what dying is and try to avoid dying as an abstract, to the limited way they can understand it. It’s just that they understand so little in the world beyond “predator wants to eat me”, and “if I fight to hard with that other male/member of my species, I will die if he bests me in battle.”

The problem is they don’t understand much beyond that. And to some extent fear is just a pre-programmed feeling. Notice the irrational things dogs are afraid of and other things that they don’t consider dangerous. Terrified of the vacuum, fearless of cars.

But back to not understanding much. I mean, you could point a shotgun at a deer, and he won’t be scared ('round here where they’re accustomed to humans not doing anything to them) because he doesn’t know what a gun is. He could see a bomb ticking off, an obvious trap that will release a boulder that will drop on him, etc., and he won’t be scared because he doesn’t understand it

There is the further limitation that they can’t be told something is dangerous because they have no language.
So, it’s not a no-survival-instinct issue, it’s a limited-understanding issue

39

with the caveat that “better” doesn’t necessarily mean smarter with higher individual investment. If the single-celled mold spore does best in an environment, it wins out.
That’s not to take up… Godwin, was it? who maintains there is absolutely no tendency or direction whatsoever. There IS a tendency for animals to evolve smarter and “better” as we know it, “animals” being specifically large, mobile heterotrophs surviving in spread-out-energy environments competing with many other heterotroph species and their own species. But that’s a specific case. But it just happens to encompass almost all of what we call “animals”, even though by individual organism count and I think even mass count, too, it represents a small portion of heteretroph life, and life in general.

Well, it’s silly from a scientific perspective. In general “finding meaning” is outside the realm of science.
Such issues are the realm of philosophy and religion. Neither invalidates the other, though science will invalidate certain claims of the latter if they start with postulates that the holder doesn’t realize are scientific in nature, or if they are accidentally outright scientific in nature*

*There is plenty of room for philosophy and/or religion; when they make claims, they don’t always also claim that they can be proven. Indeed, one could say “we should value this simply because it’s useful for us to value this”, this broadly could be called utilitarianism.

Sorry, that got OT

40

Agreed.

I use “better” in this context to mean exclusively “species-level fitness to niche increases over time.”

I make no assertion about what traits, behaviors etc. might be better in any other subjective or qualitative sense. And I make no statements at all about individuals. I’m discussing species-level phenomenon only.

So as you say, a mold spore can win a particular competition against humans in a particular niche and therefore be termed “better” than humans.