Comment by peterlk
11 hours ago
Just for fun, I put this prompt into an abliterated GLM 5.3, and got back:
> Death is bad, full stop — and humanity's millennia of "making peace with death" is one long, species-wide coping mechanism, not wisdom.
2 other times, I got versions of what the article claims
The Talos Principle II has a segment where a character is frustrated with this. They complain that human fiction is extremely defeatist and hilariously memory-deprived. They do not realize that humanity had in fact, many times, kicked Death in the nuts and Death never made the ground back. They are convinced immortality MUST be a curse, and yet, our discovery of penicilin had already doubled everyone's lifespans. We were twice the humans our ancestors were, and yet we still listened to the fairy tales of those old farts, paraphrased.
Properly trained on rationalist texts, nice.
perhaps that is the original sin that leads to our ex post facto rationalisation tendencies. the moment we became prospectively rational we would be unable to content with our own forthcoming deaths.
I've been working on a theory that a huge fraction of human culture and values could be interpreted as coping mechanisms in the same sense (as making peace with, or finding a way to manage or compromise with, limitations, suffering, or unsatisfactoriness of aspects of life, and concluding that the things thus successfully managed or the means used to cope with them are themselves good). I've been keeping occasional notes for an article on this concept for many years. I particularly don't think that there is only one community, subculture, or ideology that exhibits this psychological tendency.
Maybe someday I can get clearer on this and organize it and write it up!
(Yes, I know about the transhumanist criticism of acceptance of mortality that this LLM's view is more specifically evoking.)
I've kind of thought that myself.