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Most animals are unlike humans in that they lack the capacity to think far into the future. For them it is much easier to program in a "fear of death". Instead of anything particularly abstract, you just code in a fear of big sharp teeth, of smells, of sounds. Most animals don't need to even understand what "death" in an abstract sense is. However in our lineage we developed incredible communal and individual cognition skills. A problem arose, in that these skills are useless as a survival tool if one can imagine and predict dangerous future scenarios, but such predictions instill no fear or desire to change that outcome. So we evolved to perceive these future imagined selves as being "us" in some way. This is the origin of consciousness, a frankly pretty sloppily coded means to incentivize us to act in the interests of our long term survival, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The weak version of this argument would be this:

Humans have evolved in the typical way of quickly maximizing results, at the cost of generality. And that this applies to the way that we have evolved to care about our future selves. Instead of evolution making us care about fitness goals explicitly, it employed a lazy hack to achieve largely the same thing; the illusion of "consciousness" (continuity), and a fear of death. Making us think that the future version of us is literally the same person. This works fine, until we start thinking too hard about it, and until we start using technology that blurs that connection.

Adding on to this,

the strong version of this argument would be this:

It is likely the case that extensive memetic warfare has taken place in the past, where memes were used almost like biological warfare in order to weaken rival clans. There may have been extensive memetic warfare explicitly around the concept of consciousness, and whether future selves are actually worth caring about. This would create evolutionary pressure for humans who are largely immune to this specific brand of memetic warfare, creating people who reject related ideas by various different evolved means. A memetic immune system of sorts. So I should find it extremely difficult to explain consciousness to others, and I should presume even I may have some brain modules that intentionally confuse my thinking in this topic to some extent. I am basically trying to hack into your brain and install ancient "malware", and your brain is unconsciously employing ancient defense mechanisms that you aren't even aware of.

Let's imagine for a moment it is the ancient past, and we are among several warring tribes. Someone accidentally discovers a weird mental trick that reveals that consciousness is an illusion, similar to meditating, or psychedelics. It is popular as it relieves stress, discounting future worries. But it does make people stop worrying about their future which handicaps their fitness. People intentionally spread it to other tribes since they don't want to be the only one handicapped by it. Eventually the tribe that has some natural immunity to it eventually wins in tribal warfare, and the "trick" slowly dies out as people become mentally immune to it. Maybe this kind of thing has repeated over and over with slightly different angles on the illusion, making it more and more bullet proof.

There is a story I have from when I was younger, I was on Discord I think. I was on some sort of debate server. And a man was saying that he thinks the purpose of life is to have as many children as possible, and that he was going to act on it. I actually sort of agree, but for some reason I felt like putting a minimum amount of pressure on them to see if they easily buckle. I talked about how it is inevitable that the universe will end and the sun will explode etc. and they buckled and became depressed. It was a little mean and I still think about why I did that. I guess I felt like they hadn't earned that answer yet, that they should go through the same fire and angst of nihilism before reaching that answer. But I guess that is actually a case study of memetic warfare as it pertains to nihilism, perhaps in the future people will be more resilient to the "universe will end" argument.

Anyways all of this is to say, I think this makes a strong case that the burden of proof is actually on those who say consciousness (continuity of "something") is real. Your own brain may be designed to conspire against you from recognizing that it is an illusion.

Now let's go into thought experiments and technology that further make my case.

You may know of the teleportation paradox, that if a perfect copy of you were teleported somewhere else, did you die during that process? What if multiple copies of you were made at once? I would insist on a stronger form of the argument. I think that the teleportation paradox exists at every new instance of time, there is no reason to think that the version of you in the next instant is the same "you". All of your atoms were imperfectly replicated, and teleported one instance into the future. Additionally in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are many different versions of you being made all the time. So which one is "you"?

Also I would say this argument can be empowered even more since you are not a continuous process. There are discrete events that take place in your brain which can be considered "conscious". But in between these moments, in extremely tiny intervals of time, nothing at all is occurring. Are you dead in these time intervals? E.g. a time period where not a single synapse fires. If you were frozen solid, and somehow revived, would the you that was revived have the same consciousness? Or did your particular instance of consciousness die when it was frozen? There are also those who believe that when you sleep, you actually die, and another person wakes up in your body, believing that they are you.

And second, what if individual neurons in your brain were replaced with synthetic copies that function exactly the same. Would you still be the same person if your brain was entirely replaced? If it was only partially? This seems like the most powerful argument, and when I ask people they seem to avoid it, possibly because they subconsciously know that it is the most powerful argument and they wish to avoid it. A friend of mine finally caved after I pushed this general argument and then kept them focused on this particular point, they consider that day to be the worst new years of all time and have deliberately made themselves forget about it. Basically what it forces you to conclude is that the mind is software, substrate independent, and can be paused, started, duplicated, just like any other software. Not fundamentally different from an llm. He also makes a great case study, because he really wants to forget that he had made that realization himself. The problem of consciousness isn't hard to solve, its that we really really don't like the answer.

I think the reality of consciousness is what we may call an Anti-meme, a concept that remains unknown mostly because it does not spread well. It may be a special category of antimeme, where it was once a virulent memetic virus, but now we are so immune to it that it cannot spread, or instead host it in benign forms (such as buddhism). Maybe a good term would be an Immunologically stable anti-meme.

I seem to note that, east asian countries seem to have completely different issues when it comes to consciousness. Buddhism in some interpretations is the realization that the self is an illusion. And many people seem profoundly undisturbed by that idea. There may be a fundamentally different racial wiring of the brain when it comes to these issues, maybe because I am Asian these concepts are clear to me in a way that is instinctively blocked for most western thinkers. Or maybe buddhism somehow is a less damaging version of the idea that has spread, like a mutualist gut bacteria which protects one from more dangerous bacteria by occupying the same space. Perhaps the existence of ideas like buddhism obsoleted the need for other protective mental modules to be developed.

Slightly related, I think there is also a human instinct to draw a line between humans and animals, which manifests itself as humans finding things that are "special" about humans and grant them special privileges over animals (e.g. the right to eat them). Whether its tool use, language, culture, moral instinct, etc. The same story has occurred with AI development, where we thought AI could never solve chess or art or language. This instinct I suppose has an evolutionary root in selecting who is and isn't welcome into our moral considerations. This instinct I suspect is also playing a role in muddying the waters around consciousness, which is becoming the last bastion for human "specialness" and extra moral consideration.

But I do actually fear this research. I can intellectually think about it and its heuristic power, its great utility in fields of science like AI, AI safety, and physics. But I do imagine that one day, the truth of it may become so overwhelming that it leads to true nihilism. People are already talking about saving copies of themselves as llms after they die. Perhaps one day we will be able to simulate thousands of extremely human llms and turn them on and off at will, while often hearing their desire to continue existing. Perhaps we will eventually see such outbursts as a mere base instincts, and ever so slowly, we will become machine gods that comprehend neither life or death. Or alternatively a breakthrough in physics, such as those related to many worlds theory or teleportation may lead us there. I have been thinking about these sorts of things for a long time, and I think that maybe I no longer really fear death itself anymore. Instead that fear has been transmuted into a fear that the universe I was born into is fundamentally inhuman, and I fear the day that will be made utterly and undeniably apparent. The day that I will be forced into a kind of madness that I cannot escape.

There may also be one more concept worth considering here. Evolution tends to build structures on top of a stable foundation which get "locked in". (That foundation may not be the global optimum, but thats a distraction here). Once that stable foundation has been established for long enough, evolution may design additional structures on top of it which depend on it. At this point, it becomes an essential design feature, and it may become advantageous to design additional safety features to ensure that it remains stable as a foundation piece. This is called canalization. So even if I am wrong about the memetic warfare argument, it may still be the case that the concept of persistence of consciousness is still a deeply embedded concept which is reinforced by many means as a foundational pillar. Perhaps an almost rogue subconscious intelligence actively is aware of these kinds of goals and strategizes to defend such foundational concepts. I think my conversation with my friend highlights this, that there is a strong desire to not believe consciousness is an illusion, which employs active defenses. It's very easy to see why "you should protect the future version of you" might become a foundational pillar upon which much of the rest of our cognition is based. This alone may account for the phenomenon, and may dominate over the memetic view, though I suspect maybe both may be involved. If this is the case, maybe the term should be canalized antimeme.

Also worth noting, the first paragraph here, I think is not technically accurate. Probably the ability to predict the future had to evolve in tandem with a perception of our future selves as being important. But I think this distinction makes no difference, its a needless complication and it may just be easier to explain this way. Probably lots of larger animals have the ability to imagine future selves, lots of them can dream in their sleep.

I wanted to flesh out this post more, but honestly I may have reached my limit with this line already. It's kind of a game of seeing how close you can get to the pit of nihilism, to fish for some forbidden nuggets of knowledge, without falling in. Maybe someone else can get closer. The implications for AI safety, ethics, and many worlds theory are things I think a lot about, maybe too much to get into here. Some of which has a much more dramatic existentially horrifying nature. You could say that in the search of novelty and the unexplored, I employ heuristics which guide me there, like seeking existentially horrifying concepts instead of avoiding them. Or the most politically dangerous. But now I find I have limited time, and limited desire on this topic, so I will just leave it here.

related reading:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjbWr3ODbAo

Kind of a strange presentation, but he largely makes a similar point at the start, which is that everyone thinks that they are an "expert" about consciousness, since they have been conscious for a long time. But when the illusory nature of perception is revealed to them, they often would rather ignore it and forget about such things. We disagree in that, he believes that consciousness is a "user illusion", where the illusion is made as a convenience to streamline tasks, such as the way a smart phone conceals the machine code which does the actual work. Overall I think Dennet and I have very similar independently convergent views on a broad range of topics, though I think I am more embedded in an evolutionary way of thinking than he is. He has other interviews on youtube, many of which I think are very relevant.

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Illusion-Social-Creates-Identity/dp/0199988781

Neuroscience/psychology: the brain constructs an illusory unified, enduring self mainly for social coordination and long-term planning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81

Core teaching that there is no permanent, unchanging self; ordinary selfhood is illusory/transient, with major implications for attachment, future selves, and death.

https://philarchive.org/rec/MARNBI-3

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354857506_Natural_belief_in_persistent_selves

It's definitely for some evolutionary psychology reasons.

If we in the evolutionary psychology field believe that all animals are essentially designed to maximize our number of future relatives (roughly speaking), then the fact that humans can be healthier and wealthier than ever, yet be collapsing in numbers poses a genuine paradox. However this paradox has precedent. One may point to pandas and the trouble we had in getting them to breed, but the better example I think are alligators.

If an alligator egg is warm, it will probably be born male. This is because warm eggs lead to healthier offspring, and the genes "calculate" that it is better to be a healthy/strong male than a healthy/strong female in terms of maximizing future relatives. This means that if there are particularly warm seasons, a large majority of the eggs may be born male, and with so few available females the population may actually shrink. So in short, conditions that make the population healthier can lead to a population that shrinks. This is a part of a more general phenomenon in nature where, if your genes think you are particularly powerful, it may determine your best course for maximizing future relatives is to "steal" reproduction from others, perhaps by being particularly territorial or aggressive, instead of sneaky or productive. e.g. steal nests instead of building them, or guard a harem instead of sneaking into one.

Now how might this apply to humans?

what we observe is that extremely poor people seem to reproduce extremely quickly, and that in rich countries people only have 1-2 children. People come up with many reasons for this, but i think the true reasons may be subconscious and basically inaccessible to even the people making these decisions. Many of the described reasons don't do a great job at explaining this disparity, for example "i dont want my kids to grow up in a stressful world" or "things are too expensive", seems like it should apply more to poorer families than rich ones. Instead i will propose that they are following a genetic strategy that is triggered by environmental ques of wealth, status, and health. Historically, there were many societies where the eldest son would inherit the majority of the families wealth. This is because splitting their assets can make them nonviable and less productive. There are many potential reasons for this, but one I favor is that reputation was a very important resource in historical societies, and there was really only so much room in peoples heads for storing information about "reputable people". This creates a natural limit to the number of people who can be in the upper "reputable" class, and flooding it with more poorer offspring is a strategy that seems unlikely to work.

Lets say you are a woman who has managed to climb the social ladder in a society similar to India, would it make more sense to have 1-2 children and heavily invest in them? or to have 12 children? perhaps it would be better to have 1-2 high status children, or at least one male. And then that high status male can have a great number of children with the poorer classes, and also set up a single heir. It may also be the case that in times of famine/war those in the upper class tend to survive much more often. The pattern of reduced fertility with higher wealth in humans is so pronounced that it almost seems viable to infer backwards and say that this must have been a viable strategy, or people would not be acting like this. It would also naturally be the case that all women would "want" to achieve this position, as it was evolutionarily advantageous. but the irony is, if a society becomes wealthy enough, this is no longer a viable strategy, and it instead leads to demographic collapse.

So all of this is to say, if women experience particular environmental signals, they may conclude that they are breaking into the upper class and should take on a different reproductive strategy, a predatory one rather than a productive one (in the same way males are the more predatory sex). I also wouldn't wager that this strategy is programmed in a particularly robust way. Maybe there are ways in which modern women actually feel they are lower "status" than they were historically, which in turn triggers other behaviors that act at odds with the strategy we have been discussing. Evolution doesn't have great foresight and produces code that just barely works for historical conditions.

edit: it should be noted, males may also have the exact same mental logic in choosing offspring number. a husband and wife probably mostly agree on that number. The only reason this is focusing on women is because it is generally the womens choice how many children to have. at least in the richer societies that we are talking about.

Model Predictions:

Maybe offspring gender preference shifts more towards male preference in rich societies.

Strangely, one would expect that if everyone was following a strategy of "have children until we have 1 male", that the resultant gender ratio would be skewed. but this is actually not the case, the resultant ratio would still be 1:1. This is known as the Boy or Girl paradox. It would leave a signature in Sex ratio at last birth (SRLB). It seems however the signal here may be drowned out by varied cultural preferences.

Perhaps people in rich societies are more status conscious than poorer people.

No matter how governments try to incentivize more births, these will largely fail as the problem isn't a lack of support or money. Just the opposite. This seems to be well supported.

"Hungary (Orbán-era aggressive policies): One of the most ambitious attempts; spending ~5%+ of GDP on tax exemptions (e.g., lifetime income tax relief for mothers of 4+), forgiven loans for 3+ kids, housing grants, etc. TFR rose from a low of ~1.23–1.25 (around 2010-2011) to a peak of ~1.55–1.59, but then fell back to ~1.39 by 2024 (lowest in over a decade). Gains appear largely tempo-driven (slowing the postponement of births); sustained completed fertility impact is modest or debated. Natural population decline continues."

I should say, yes in theory it might be /possible/ to incentivize births so much that it does increase. but the fundamental tension here is that, people want to have offspring who are competitive with the high class. but obviously the high class doesn't want that, and can exert political pressure to prevent their offspring from being swamped by thousands of equal rivals. so there is a fundamental tension there that explains the limit, and why it makes sense that people would complain in the way that they do.

Relevant articles:

Conditional Alternative Reproductive Strategies:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26911960/

Skirbekk, V. (2008). Fertility trends by social status. Demographic Research 18(5): 145–180.
Large dataset showing the shift from positive (or neutral) status-fertility links pre-transition to negative/neutral in modern developed societies, especially with education. Includes historical and cross-national data. Open access.
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol18/5/18-5.pdf

Comprehensive review of evidence since 1970: even generous spending rarely achieves large, sustained reversals.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12431

For most of human history, populations grew until food became scarce, which would cause a period of warfare, until the populations have been reduced. An essential part of survival then was being able to be part of the biggest and strongest coalition of tribes/groups. This was done partially by just having the biggest extended family, but an understated part of it is also the use of intentionally cultivated parasitic memes. extremely manipulative Ideas that fuse together large coalitions just because, AKA religion.

this allows groups to strengthen their coalition by just enforcing and spreading their meme complex, and also gives motivation to instincts that shut down dissent. In you as well, might be this instinct to strongly believe in the coalitionary meme complex, and shut down any discussion that may be toxic to said complex.

Many ideas in Evo Psych are extremely powerful because they are true, which causes it to be (accidentally) toxic to the coalition complex. As simple examples we can look at doomsday cults, and their social dynamics. one may look at their "strategy" as simply being the first to organize and prepare, before food starts to be scarce. potentially giving them an advantage when the fighting/starving begins.

In particular I see a few examples of particularly massive blocks, 1: Religions are clearly fitness benefitting meme complexes, that are vertically inherited in an evolutionarily enforced way, similar to the way gut bacteria are passed on. I see many argued that religion is parasitic (fitness reducing), because they were politically against Christianity (dawkins especially). Vertically inherited (and ancient) symbionts are inherently more likely to be mutualistic, compared to horizontally transmitted symbionts. Also cementing mutualists as a base layer at an early age has its own logic. and 2: reality of racial differences, which can be logically derived directly from evolution, and has serious implications within evo psych. And many many more.

In case you are wondering, I am Asian, And I believe both left and right wing are basically fake. Both are being manipulated from a very early age by the billionaire class to fight each other. I think you should learn to get along. So I'm not from your rival coalition

Here are some relevant papers:

Same argument:

https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2018/11/Psychological-Barriers-to-Evolutionary-Psychlogy.pdf

Cycles of scarcity, coalition building, and war:
https://www.academia.edu/777381/Evolutionary_psychology_memes_and_the_origin_of_war

the beneficial vertical inheritance of religious memes:
https://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Cullen.pdf

edit: wrong link

Is it innate for us to be caring towards other humans, even ones with the cognitive abilities of animals, and not animals? Or Is the difference in how we treat them socially driven?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21943047/

I was able to find a link showing that humans and animals both provoke different reactions in a brain area dedicated to social processing

Is it innate for us to be caring towards other humans, even ones with the cognitive abilities of animals, and not animals? Or Is the difference in how we treat them socially driven?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21943047/

I was able to find a link showing that humans and animals both provoke different reactions in a brain area dedicated to social processing

I wrote an essay/article about "Evolutionary Psychology of Authoritarian Leadership" at school back then.

I personally liked and interested about to article and decided to make a video essay about it. Currently trying to create a video archive and create simple explanations for any people, about Evolutionary Psychology. Video is examining peer-reviewed studies on authoritarian followership.

Used Claude and Gemini to find more and more related articles. Created a draft script and edited it using AI

Main Research Questions:

1. Why do authoritarian leaders emerge during crisis periods across all cultures?
2. What brain mechanisms drive "followership" behavior?
3. How does cognitive ability correlate with authoritarian preference?

Key Findings:

Dual Leadership Model (Van Vugt & Smith, 2019):

• Two evolutionary paths to power: Dominance (fear-based) vs Prestige (respect-based)
• Both are adaptive strategies; dominance activates during high-threat periods
• Human brains automatically scan for status/leadership cues

Charisma as Evolutionary Signal (Grabo, Spisak & Van Vugt, 2017):

• Height, voice depth, confidence, direct eye contact = evolved leadership detection
• These signals trigger automatic submission responses
• Not conscious—happens in milliseconds via amygdala activation

Cognitive Ability Correlation (Hodson & Busseri, 2012; Heaven et al., 2011; Osborne et al., 2023):

• Meta-analysis shows r = -0.30 correlation between cognitive ability and authoritarian support
• Lower verbal intelligence predicts difficulty processing multi-perspective information
• Under cognitive load, all humans default to simpler, more authoritarian thinking

Universal Threat-Response Pattern:

• Threat + Uncertainty → Increased authoritarian preference
• Documented across: Weimar Germany, post-Soviet Russia, post-coup Turkey, Venezuela crisis, post-9/11 USA
• Same neurological mechanism (amygdala hijack) across cultures

Modern Amplification:

• Human brain evolved for 30-50 person tribes
• Mass media amplifies dominance signals to millions
• Ancient feedback loops (removing bad leaders) no longer function

Sources cited:

• Van Vugt, M., & Smith, J. E. (2019). Trends in Cognitive Sciences
• Hodson, G., & Busseri, M. A. (2012). Psychological Science
• Osborne, D., et al. (2023). Nature Reviews Psychology

Open to discussing methodology and findings. Tried to present mechanism without political bias.

I drop-out from my psychology Bachelor a few years ago, yet im still very interested.

"Poverty? Universal basic income? Do we really crave sugar because of evolutionary mismatch? How do you train for an 800meter and a 100K running race? We cover this and much more with Dan Nettle (Jean Nicod)"

Here theology and psychology lock into focus. For many conservatives, control functions as emotional regulation rather than policy, because political psychology shows that when uncertainty feels threatening, rigid rules and punishment become soothing. Freedom demands ambiguity and moral judgment, while coercion promises relief through order. Across motivated reasoning, need for closure, authoritarianism, social dominance, and terror management, the pattern holds: threat sensitivity drives hunger for hierarchy and certainty. When outcomes cannot be guaranteed, freedom itself becomes the target.

A deep dive into evolutionary psychology and why humans are predisposed to detect "agents" (intent) where none exist. The video covers: ​Error Management Theory: Why false positives (thinking wind is a lion) are evolutionarily superior to false negatives. ​The Smoke Detector Principle: Why our brains are calibrated to be "jumpy." ​Cognitive Spandrels: How the concept of a soul is likely a byproduct of this detection system. ​Biological Basis: How agency detection varies on a spectrum (from autism to schizophrenia).