Had a strange thought on awakening this morning. For some reason I woke up grieving, for my recently lost family members, and did that bizarre moaning/weeping thing that only grief brings. I must have been dreaming about them (been doing that a lot).
Anyway, that got me to thinking about grief, and burial rituals. Neandertals buried their dead. Elephants stand vigil over their dead. Crows pay homage to their dead. One can assume cetaceans have some sort of rituals about honoring their dead. In short, all of the higher intelligences, those who pass the mirror test, those who have personalities and individualism and a sense of selfhood, all grieve with the loss of a close friend. This is not true of lower intelligences -- we've lost dogs and cats and the surviving pets just go on about their business. Granted, my sister's dog -- which she got when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer because she suddenly realized it was now or never -- her dog, which stood by her through her entire treatment and eventual decline and passing, this dog had serious signs of stress by the time my sister passed, and shortly afterwards had a series of very strange physical symptoms (nose bleeds, insomnia, weight loss). But generally animals lower on the evolutionary scale are not attached emotionally to individuals.
If evolution continues, or perhaps *as* evolution continues -- and it seems entirely possible to me (if not to Howard) that the next stage in evolution will be man-made intelligences -- we can expect that personalities will become even stronger, that individualization will be greater, and that the sense of loss when one of them loses power will be exponentially harder on them and us. That is a pain that maybe we cannot bear. That is a loss that might make crossing that threshold bittersweet, if not unendurable.
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