What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

We are not thinking machines.

You are. I'm just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?