Is fear a choice? What do you fear and why?

[Michael-5]

SamuelRSmith said:
Your brain is designed to catastrophise things. With early man, the person who decided that the rustling leaves was just the wind, got eaten by a tiger *. If you have a traumatic experience with something, especially at a young age, your brain is going to associate that with catastrophe, and boom, a fear is born.

You can also learn fears from others, ie, I learned my fear of spiders from my mother (also, had some traumatic experiences when I was younger... but already had the fear by that point).

It's not a choice, but it's not random. Fears do pass with experience, though. A common example of this is fear of flying - clocking up enough air miles tends to get people over this (particularly once they have enough for a free upgrade!).

* You can thank Stefan Molyneux for this argument

I agree 100%

My fear is heights, always had it, with no cue for fearing it. It's true that I fell from a tall tree when I was 6 or so, but I was terrified of heights before falling from that tree. The only reason I was up that high in the first place was because someone convinced me "there is nothing to be afraid of."

With that example of hard wiring the fear of rusling leaves, I think people who weren't naturally afraid of cliffs, or high places, tended to fall to their deaths a little more frequently then people like myself. However clearly many people without this fear lived on, otherwise we'd all be afraid of heights like myself.

Farsala said:
Fear is a choice imo. You could become a mindless drone and have no fear. If you were born without any senses at all it would impossible to feel fear imo.

To be born with or without senses, doesn't sound like a choice to me. In fact it sounds like the opposite.