Are the animals luckier than humans?

[R00tKiT]

Would it have been better to have had zero conceptual knowledge of reality? Animals seem to thrive pretty well without conceptual knowledge.

Not being able to apprehend reality means no science, no progress. Would it have been better if we couldn't figure out a vaccine for smallpox ? Definitely not. Knowledge clearly helps our own survival, after all.

Human capacity to think about life has only enlarged wider the huge gaping gap that is this not-knowing mystery of reality. There is a longing to fill this black hole with endless questions, even though all our answers are unavailable. Yet, we still try to unravel the mystery, we never give up the quest for self knowledge.

I am not sure what questions or mystery you're alluding to. If you reject religious narratives, you're left with the established scientific theories that clearly set a threshold to what we can ever know about reality. A religious narrative can be seen as a special kind of knowledge that is complementary to scientific knowledge. Consider this very simple analogy, just to make this point clear : 

let's say you finished having dinner (say, a portion of beefsteak), and after a while your friend comes over and asks you what you were doing ? would your answer be : 

"I ate dinner", or,

"A sliced portion of animal meat, muscle fibers, went along my digestive system, my oesophagus carried the beef steak to my stomach after I swallowed it, next the stomach produced hydrocloric acid that digested the food before sending the resulting soupy liquid to my small intestine, where enzymes from the pancreas -among other things- helped break down protein into amino acids and fat into fatty acids, then absorbed the stuff into my bloodstream, I'll save you now from the large intestine and anus part, unless you really want to know",

The second answer contains more information than most people ever knew in the history of mankind, and the curious thing is, we don't always need the second answer. The action of a personal agent (you) having dinner is, in some circumstances, far more informative than a detailed description of what's going on inside your belly.

The first answer resembles the religious narrative or account of reality, the second one is the scientific account of reality. So people either view life as "A part of God's plan for people", or they can look at the various parts of nature and life forms and how they fit together, and then try to figure out how, precisely, the parts fit together. These two viewpoints are not in conflict, they are complementary, the same way eating dinner while abstracting away the internal mechanics of your digestive system doesn't mean you consider biology or medical sciences useless. But most people unfortunately don't understand this. It's most of the time either religious fundamentalism or scientism.

With this in mind you can easily see why you regard life to be a mystery : you're looking at an heterogenous collection of various parts of the world (animals, people, nature), and then, because of the cognitive limitations of the human mind, can't process the overwhelmingly complicated biological and physical mechanisms that govern our existence. It's this inability that we are repressing, and instead prefer to regard the whole thing as a mystery -a cop out. Yes, some realms of knowledge are probably inaccessible to us forever, but so what? 

And if one rejects the religious narrative, then there is no mystery about life, really, when you think about it more realistically, I can't do better in this context than quote the following paragraph from "the denial of death", probably the most accurate description of reality that there is: 

"We live in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is tearing others apart with teeth of all types -biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue".

That's the fundamental fact that takes away all the beauty and mystery in life: in the end, everything is decay and excrement. One either seeks the belief that this birth and decay cycle is part of a larger divine plan, or sit there, and excrete some more.