Is biology and evolution supposed to be beautiful?

[aquasaltstripes]

How do people who study science and neurology and stuff not lose their minds? Knowing that we're all just sort of slaves to the chemicals in our brains and primitive impulses. Everything else is just millennia of embellishment. As for me it really just drills in the meaninglessness and complete lack of control we have over it all. Like how everything we do is more or less a byproduct of the drive to survive until we reproduce and everything else is just a distraction, a side-quest. And why do I want to have control so much? (Probably a personal trauma thing, but still…)

I used to love consuming art and basked in the seas and cocktails of emotions it provoked in me, but now a great deal of it is ruined by my endless rationalizing and intellectualizing (which I can understand is a coping mech.). Like, "Oh, I'm only feeling these emotions because survival of the fitness and the people who listened to their emotions survive better and reproduced better" — etc.

Why does biology have to contradict itself so much? I crave agency because I need some sort of control to survive but the problem is that I want control over my past and human history which I don't. Or maybe it's all part of the plan and everything is designed to self-destruct, just as the sun is gonna explode and the universe is gonna cave in on itself (hypothetically, according to us, anyway) one day and we're just witnessing it on our own human scale, in real time?

I want to know where it ends, where's the escape. I feel my life is just an endless search for the perfect entertainment that will distract me from this bloody filthy mess. Is there such a thing as an ideal life form, completely beyond human comprehension, in another universe? Or is the ideal life form just nothing, just anything without consciousness is good.

I apologize for this mess of a post, stream-of-consciousness vent.

 

[sserafim]

Same, my thoughts exactly. I hate that we're all just the sum of biochemical reactions and that we're biological creatures at the end of the day. All emotions are just chemical reactions occurring in our brains. I think that people think they have free will over their lives but in reality they're just governed by instinct and urges (which stem from our biology and chemistry).

Sometimes I wish that I could be one of my brain or eye cells rather than me. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (humans being more than a combination of all their organs, and having consciousness), and I hate the whole that I am right now. I hate the fact that my body is a biological machine and I wish that it would simply just stop working. I wish that one of the parts of the machine would malfunction so that I could have a higher chance of ctb.

I hate the fact that nature gave us the biological urge to procreate, and I hate SI. I hate that we still have these instincts even when we want to ctb and when we logically want to get the hell out of here, but our own body wants to prevent itself from doing so. I really hate the fact that we're just meat suits, forced to be conscious and have consciousness in this hellish world and existence.

I believe that the universe is too vast for humans to be the only intelligent beings. There must be life elsewhere in the universe. Hopefully the people (or beings) in other galaxies are happy and enjoy their existence.

 

[Ligand]

Determinism and free-will are not really deeply discussed topics for most biologists or most people that study biology. I enjoy biology immensely even though I don't believe in free will. It's very easy to disconnect these two topics.

 

[sserafim]

Determinism and free-will are not really deeply discussed topics for most biologists or most people that study biology. I enjoy biology immensely even though I don't believe in free will. It's very easy to disconnect these two topics.

Why not?

 

[Ligand]

Why not?

They're not discussed much because they aren't especially relevant to the bulk of what people study in biology. Free-will/determinism really only intersect with biology in very niche neuroscience research and a few other minor areas.

Biologists that study earthworm habitats or work in drug development don't really sit around pondering free will for the majority of their day lol

 

[Darkover]

Just being alive today means that you're a winner. Your species made it. But think of all the misery that has gone before.
Evolution is cruel, i belive we have choice to choose between a selection of thing and that is not deterministic hence we have free will

 

[aquasaltstripes]

Same, my thoughts exactly. I hate that we're all just the sum of biochemical reactions and that we're biological creatures at the end of the day. All emotions are just chemical reactions occurring in our brains. I think that people think they have free will over their lives but in reality they're just governed by instinct and urges (which stem from our biology and chemistry).

Sometimes I wish that I could be one of my brain or eye cells rather than me. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (humans being more than a combination of all their organs, and having consciousness), and I hate the whole that I am right now. I hate the fact that my body is a biological machine and I wish that it would simply just stop working. I wish that one of the parts of the machine would malfunction so that I could have a higher chance of ctb.

I hate the fact that nature gave us the biological urge to procreate, and I hate SI. I hate that we still have these instincts even when we want to ctb and when we logically want to get the hell out of here, but our own body wants to prevent itself from doing so. I really hate the fact that we're just meat suits, forced to be conscious and have consciousness in this hellish world and existence.

I believe that the universe is too vast for humans to be the only intelligent beings. There must be life elsewhere in the universe. Hopefully the people (or beings) in other galaxies are happy and enjoy their existence.

Yeah, being a cog in some sort great machinery (except, say, capitalism) sounds cozy sometimes. And SI is so annoying. I also wish it was easier and more built-in and hardwired into us, but then again I guess that wouldn't make much sense speaking from a biological standpoint or something.

Part of me hopes that the whole concept of hope and happiness don't even exist for such life forms. The human imagination can be beautiful in our eyes sometimes, but I'm thinking about a creature that our neural structures just literally cannot imagine. Like, the word "Lovecraftian" might scratch the surface of the sketch of the vague idea of them on a very, very good day, and even then no, as pretentious as that may sound.

 

[Actovania]

I hate the idea of everything just being biological reactions, and I have the idea that everything has to have a scientific answer. The human spirit is supposed to be something that's beautiful and unique, something that births art and music and culture, and denying this is denying everything that makes people beautifully unique. It does seem very depressing,

 

[duwangJEff]

For me personally, I do recognize that life is likely a coincidence, and that we're here because some amino acids started accidentally reproducing themselves billions of years ago. Many of our urges and experiences are just a result of the biological drive to stay alive and reproduce.

But in spite of that, I tend not to think too hard about it, or I've just accepted it. If something is beautiful to me, I simply accept its beauty. Even if it's just chemicals in my head, those chemicals still make me feel good or bad, and they matter a lot to me, weather I like it or not.

Even if there is no meaning to it all, we're still here, and we still have this urge to do something or find a meaning; quite strange for a bunch of chemicals and biological urges to take us this far

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

It does drive you crazy, but only certain people ponder it on an extensential level. I did a neuroscience degree and I would be deeply disturbed by certain topics in evolution, graphic depictions of genetic diseases that render the sufferer completely nonfunctional, unethical experiments, etc, while my classmates would laugh and make jokes about things like photos of deformed infants suffering from rare skin disorders or conditions like encephalopathies.

Learning a lot about biology and disease gives you insight into the sheer fragility of life. All it takes is one cellular pathway to collapse, one pathogen to invade, one homeostatic process to go haywire, and someone can end up incapacitated or dead. What's even scarier is there are so many diseases and afflictions that we do not understand in the slightest (most things effecting the brain that don't cause massive lesions or tumors which would be visible on an MRI, let's be real) and due to this lack of knowledge/understanding the people suffering from these ailments get treated like they are making things up or can use physiological willpower to fix themselves. It's so unscientific, but a lot of the medical field is deeply entwined with bunk psychology concepts that spit in the face of all empirical validity.

Evolution is coincidental and doesn't operate on self-awareness. A camouflaged snake isn't aware, for example, that it survives or reproduces more frequently than snakes who don't share their discreet colouring. In ten years, if the species of plants that the snake pattern matches goes extinct due to a random storm or wildfire, then the snakes will no longer win in natural selection either, despite having an advantage in their previous environment. All the snakes are blissfully unaware that there's all of these complicated forces at play dictating their survival. So there isn't some grand or intelligent design at play when it comes to evolution, it simply just happens, often randomly, and that lack of free will can be very disturbing to us humans.

We want to have control over our circumstances, but biology shows us the exact opposite of that is true. Sickness can come at any time, no matter how healthy or active we are. We can't (yet) alter our genetics, and our ability to change our environment is often limited by a multitude of factors. These revelations are scary and go against many of the philosophies we are taught in life that instill hope in a person. To have control is to have freedom, and biology is an absurd and random thing.

 

[LaVieEnRose]

It does drive you crazy, but only certain people ponder it on an extensential level.

I've always found the natural world to be pretty depressing but I've noticed that most (perhaps all) people who engage with animals and nature professionally aren't emotionally affected by it. I guess I'm just extra sensitive.

Shitty materialism can be difficult to accept too.

while my classmates would laugh and make jokes about things like photos of deformed infants suffering from rare skin disorders or conditions like encephalopathies.

The next crop of doctors.

Learning a lot about biology and disease gives you insight into the sheer fragility of life. All it takes is one cellular pathway to collapse, one pathogen to invade, one homeostatic process to go haywire, and someone can end up incapacitated or dead. .

As far as the natural world is concerned, which is the world humans evolved in and to the laws of which they are still subject to, the only thing that matters is that enough of organisms population's offspring live to reproduce to sustain the population. Nature doesn't care, so to speak, about keeping animals alive past sexual maturity. What does this implu? It means that the individual's health breaking down in any number of ways is perfectly in line with the way the natural world operates. Simple fucking facts about evolutionary biology and doctors still act like "oh, it is not possible for you to be experiencing that". Couplentjis either the fact that there are over 8 billion humans in existence now. For a large, complex animal to exist in such numbers....that's not natural at all. And it means there are a lot of bodies and a lot of brains for abnormal pathological processes to happen in some of them.

I know I'm preaching at the Pope with you about this.

Unfortunately this all also means that as far as the natural world goes the concept of suffering is an irrelevant one.