Fatalism
Imagine that you are sitting at a table. Two pills and a glass of water are in front of you. One pill is a deadly dose of an opioid drug. If you take it, you will die.
Earlier that day, you took a different pill, which had a strange effect. It affects the emotions in a way that causes suicidal desires. It inverts the natural fear of death, so that death becomes appealing. Now, because you took the pill, you desperately want to die.
Why did you take it? Curiosity. You didn’t believe that it would actually work, but you wanted to see what would happen. Also, you knew that there was an antidote. You thought that you would just take the pill, see what it felt like, and then quickly take the antidote. No harm done. “YOLO” you said, and then swallowed it.
Now, you are itching to take the suicide pill on the table in front of you, and end your life.
But there is another pill on the table. It is the antidote to the pill that you took earlier. If you take it, then you will no longer want to kill yourself. Instead, you will have your normal strong aversion to death.
But of course, you don’t want to take the antidote. If you take it, then you will no longer want to die, so you will go on living. The thought makes you feel sick to your stomach. The antidote signifies the horrible trap of life, from which death is the only escape.
You don’t want to revert back to your former self, the one who feared death and loved life. If you take the antidote, then you will believe that you made the right choice, in retrospect. You know that. But right now, you desperately want to die.
You gaze at the pills sitting on the table in front of you. Soon, this nightmare will be over.
You reach out, take a pill, and put it in your mouth. It is slightly sweet on the tongue. “YOLO” you say quietly to yourself. Then you pick up the glass of water, take a gulp, and swallow the pill.
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This story was not intended to glorify suicide. If you have suicidal feelings or thoughts, seek professional help.
Tangential, and probably off topic, but:
ReplyDeleteThat's what it feels like to have grown up very religious, but then becoming curios about these atheists and what they think, so you look into it, thinking you are immune to their ideas.
You can, in theory, shut down your brain and pretend you never read any of it, but, you don't want to anymore.
That's an interesting metaphor. Yeah, I guess once you took that "pill", there was no turning back. Disillusionment is irreversible.
DeleteGreat thought experiment as always. It demonstrates the very difficult psychological problem of modernity; that we have a brain that generates action by first generating motivation toward a certain outcome, and that mechanism preferentially assigns motivation to short term outcomes. It can generate motivation for long term outcomes, but the motivation is weaker. In a world where short term outcomes can be gamed with artificial stimulus, many people are left trapped in desire-satisfying cycles where the outcome doesn't move you anywhere. We're just being brains in vats. We have ideologies that encourage us to be brains in vats. It would be nice to have a brain that can generate strong motivation by assigning philosophical value to an outcome, but our evolutionary history hasn't required such a mechanism, and thus it did not arise. You can only overcome a maladaptive desire by recourse to yet another desire, which is likely less powerful most of the time. We can have a philosophical idea about what is good for us, while almost always lacking the motivation to actualize it. Motivation is the psychological prime mover. A difficult puzzle for us to solve because the problem IS us in a sense.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Yeah, that's the strange predicament of modern man. We have created an environment that we are not adapted to, but are addicted to. For the first time in history, we need to value reproduction to reproduce. Like you say, the problem is internal, not external, and it is hidden from almost everyone, because it is philosophical.
DeleteThere is some room for philosophical agency: for self-critique and self-control. People are motivated by abstract values. But the value must arise or be created psychologically.
Yeah i can understand that feeling.
ReplyDelete