Comment by shikon7
17 hours ago
It's not that life wants to continue existing, it's that life is what continues existing. That's not a moral standard, but a matter of causality, that life that lacks in "want" to continue existing mostly stops existing.
The moral standard isn't trying to explain why life wants to exist. That's what evolution explains. Rather, the moral standard is making a judgement about how we should respond to life's already evolved desire to exist.
I disagree, this we don't know. You treat life as if persistence is it's overarching quality, but rocks also persist and a rock that keeps persisting through time has nothing that resembles wanting. I could be a bit pedantic and say that life doesnt want to keep existing but genes do.
But what I really want to say is that wanting to live is a prerequisite to the evolutionary proces where not wanting to live is a self filtering causality. When we have this discussion the word wanting should be correctly defined or else we risk sitting on our own islands.
Do you think conscious beings actually experience wanting to continue existing, or is even that subjective feeling just a story we tell about mechanical processes?