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Comment by cowb0yl0gic | Hacker News Reader

It is the natural state of fire to burn. It is the natural state of life to live. Humans are programmed genetically to do so, and to go to (and suffer) extremes to continue to do so. While there might be situations where suicide is (judged to be) the best bad alternative, it is literally the most unnatural thing a human can do to themselves. And poverty (vs. scarcity) is not a natural concept; is a wild rabbit with enough to eat "poor" (only if their neighbor rabbits have a larger burrow!)? This is the projection of human concepts about how the universe should be arranged (right/wrong, wealth/poverty, culturally-oriented logic) onto a physical universe which has no such concepts built into it.

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Your argument strongly depends on a narrow view of the word "natural". Could you explain why your definition of natural is useful in this context?

Suicide isn't new or specific to humans, so calling it "unnatural" seems unnecessarily silly to me.

> Suicide isn't new or specific to humans

Self-destruction is found in non-humans, but mostly as a reaction to acute circumstances. I'm assume you are widening the scope of what is suicide to include these examples, but they seem different than relieve of existential suffering that is human suicide.

By "natural", I mean according to the laws of physics, and all higher-order laws or principles which arise from them (basically, everything else). So, yes, narrow, but no, not. What we call "nature" is largely a fiction, a story that we impose on the universe (the "natural world") to help us navigate our place in it and understand it in abstract ways. Humans occupy a strange place, in that we are manifestations of "natural laws" (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology), but at the same time, able to understand and rationalize about our own existence and place in that world in ways that most (all?) other animals are not. I think suicide (vs. self-sacrifice, which is an entirely different thing) is a very human (or human-like) phenomenon, and can only arise from a high-level consciousness which can rationally/emotionally think in terms of "Is living my life worth the cost I am paying (in emotional or physical terms)?". No "less conscious" living thing would ever make that kind of calculation, because they will always follow their instincts to survive as a default (again, differentiating between sacrificing oneself for a goal vs. ending ones' own suffering on purpose). Not saying that it's impossible that "nature" has enabled such a mechanism in a species (though it would violate the "selfish gene" principle), but I don't see it.

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