(August 27, 2015 at 10:53 am)Redbeard The Pink Wrote:(August 27, 2015 at 9:23 am)Rekeisha Wrote: So I am not trying to attack you but understand you. The reason you value your life over a tree is because you have a survival instinct? If this is what you are saying why does it matter than your progeny survive or that they Human race survives? How does a species become aware enough to see the need to survive?
Not every animal cares deeply about the survival of their offspring, but in humans this tendency is likely also the result of evolution. Beings that don't produce a lot of offspring at once tend to be very protective of their young, and this is likely because beings with low birth rates who didn't protect their young didn't survive as a species. Spiders don't have to care for their babies because there are so many; statistics says that at least a few will survive, even though they're so tiny and edible. Humans, on the other hand, most often have only one baby at a time, which means we would have died off if we hadn't tended toward caring for our babies. The tendency to survive long enough to replicate itself seems to be an innate quality of life that doesn't even require a consciousness to function. Survival even at the microscopic level takes some work, so things that don't work toward survival don't achieve it. Awareness is simply an evolved quality that makes the survival of certain species more likely. The need for survival predates the need for awareness; not all levels of life require awareness to survive.
Again this is not an attack but evolution seems to be like a magic word for grand leaps of development in an organism life. I don't know if you ascribe to this but how does a collection of atoms 1) produce life and 2) how does this collection of atoms produce a self aware organism? Where is this in the process of evolution and how did this start to happen?