Survival Advantages of Mortality and Discord
We can never all agree upon anything of great significance. Have you ever noticed that? Even in democratic nations, there are at least two parties, if not more, in any election. There are Republicans and Democrats, there are Liberals and Conservatives, and perhaps all sorts of shades in between.
I have come to see mortality and discord as distinct survival advantages.
But, how can this be, you ask? How can there be an advantage in the fact that we are all doomed to die? How can there be an advantage to the fact that we can never arrive at unanimous agreement upon important issues?
How wonderful this world of ours would be (you say) if none of us would ever face death, and if all of us could share in one religion, one language, one culture, one nation, one philosophy, one economy and one single set of values and principles. Allow me to explain.
I see the vanished races of north American Indians, who dwelt for millennia in that continent, as having been very hardy because of natural selection, and kept hardy as a race by the rigors of survival. Modern man, by contrast, becomes a progressively weaker and less robust species because of high tech and increasing dependence on things like antibiotics, surgical procedures, insulin, etc., which in the short run greatly benefit individuals, but in the long run weaken the species.
Amoral nature, with its natural selection and survival of the fittest, seems to have a very different agenda which favors groups and species over individuals. Our society now seems to place the well-being and interest of the individual above the well-being and interests of the group as a whole. In the short run this emphasis on the individual is quite benevolent. But what is long-term benovelence? Does long-term benevolence sometimes wear the mask of cruelty and indifference?
Nature makes it difficult for the weak and defective to pass their genes on to another generation, but medicine and modern technology makes it easy for even the infertile to pass on their genetic traits to future generations. For me, the problem is so patently obvious. Physis and Nomos, Nature and Law, mortal enemies for eternity!
Of course, we may ocassionally discover some temporary cure for a particular disease, but then all those little pathogens turn around and produce thousands of generations in a short time, and evolve a resistant strain, so then we develop a different antibiotic, and so it goes, on and on, in
a vicious cycle, a Catch-22. Those pathogens desire immortality just as much as we. Their oeuvres are plagues.
As individuals, certainly we benefit from this medicine and technology, but as a species we were obviously better off under the amoral natural scheme of survival of the fittest. Now, as a species, we are gradually becoming weakened and dependent upon that medicine and technology. "Better Living Through Chemistry."
Mind you, I am not saying whether this increased dependence upon medicine and technology and genetic engineering and this progressive weakening of our species is bad or good in the long run. I am merely pointing it out as an observable phenomenon.
In an odd way, mortality is a survival advantage.
In Ham's Histology (a textbook from the 1960's), generation after generation of mice had their haemopoetic marrow tissue destroyed by radiation, and received a transplant of the same strain of tissue received by the previous generation
In theory, that culture of haemopoetic tissue should be immortal, but in practice, it was not, it became weak (exhibited its mortality.)
Here is why I think the property of immortality is a survival disadvantage for the species. That strain of haemopoetic tissue weakened because it was perpetuated asexually, with no chance for change, modification, evolution.
In theory, there is no reason why a strain of cells could not be asexually immortal (in fact, the hela cell cultures are one example), BUT, from an evolutionary point of view, that very immortality is a survival disadvantage, since it does not permit change and adaptation
http://www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/video/culture.html
Humanity's inability to reach universal consensus in philosophy, theology, politics/government is possibly related to the obvious survival advantage inherent in a genetic tendency towards diversity/uniqueness, so that some might be shoemakers, others soldiers, others scholars, others politicians, each happy in their ecological niche of specialization.
We might have evolved as a species capable of a higher degree agreement with one another, but that would have been a survival disadvantage.
If what I have said is the case, then that aspect of humanity has every bearing in the world on philosophy.
If everyone saw things the same way, then everyone would want to be a philosophy professor (or movie star) or president.... there would be no diversity... no one to live on mountain tops, no one at the polar circle, no one in the Amazon rain forests; that very diversity which was key to species survival now makes unanimous agreement difficult or impossible.
I think of the imaginative faculty of the human mind as a kaleidoscope, constantly churning, changing (almost by chance) , (and how interesting it is that a similar image of "the churning of the oceans" is given in the Vedas as the process by which nectar is produced)
Such a kaleidoscopic churning may produce many mathematical models (model theory), but then by an arduous process, we apply those random productions of imagination to reality, until one day someone stumbles upon a "match" between model and noumena, like Archimedes in the tub, shouts Eureka!, and runs naked through the streets.
For years, people called "imaginary numbers" imaginary precisely because it was felt they had no reality or analog, but now they are indespensable in treating such phenomena as radio waves.
Yet, the products of imagination are a part of reality.
The laws of physics and chemistry do not predict rabbits, but the existence of rabbits in no way defies the laws of physics. If you wanted to learn to play poker, would you study probability and statistics?
Obviously, gambling and gamblers came first, and then the mathematicians like Pascal turned their attention to it.
The universe will continue after our sun supernovas in 8 billion years, and humankind are extinct, and this 8 billion year from now doomsday is something which we could be addressing to preserve culture and knowledge, but no one is concerned because that doomsday seems so
remote.
There is no causal connection, I suspect, between the laws of reality, and the activities and products of human imagination, and yet imagination (and the imaginary) is our source for this kalaidescope of models which we heave at reality in a hit or miss fashion.
In a certain sense, imagination is the threshhold of Being.
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