Brendan Long's Shortform

Brendan Long

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It always seemed weird to me that dying is frequently described as not particularly painful^[1], when I'd expect it to be the only literal 10 on the pain scale^[2], since dying ensures you have no further chances to pass your genes on.

Thinking about it more though, there's no reason for evolution to optimize that. If you think you're going to die, and the pain makes you do something about it so you don't die, then evolution should optimize to keep you alive. But in the case where you actually die it doesn't matter because (tautologically), if you succeeded you wouldn't die, so there's no selective pressure.

So,

Fear of death: Big

Pain from things that could cause death: Big

Pain from actual death: ¯_(ツ)_/¯

^{^}
This might also be exaggerated by movies and pain medication.
^{^}
Or at least, similar to being stabbed in the balls.

Probably depends on the way of dying. There are situations where doing something in the last moment might change your fate. There are situations where you fate has already pretty much been determined minutes or months ago, and it's just about how fast your body collapses.

3tryhard10001y

Seems very related to this post from the sequences on fitness of people of numerical ages correlating more with imagined emotional anguish resulting from such a death (at that age) than with experienced anguish actually following such a death. Maybe this is a more common phenomenon observable in other contexts too, but this was the only example that came to my mind.

4Brendan Long1y

I agree, I just think it's interesting that there's evolutionary pressure to make potentially dying extremely painful, but there's no evolutionary pressure to make actually dying painful, and all of the pain of actually dying is just collateral damage.

Brendan Long's Shortform

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Brendan Long's Shortform

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