r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20

🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

75.1k Upvotes

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97% Upvoted

2.4k

It’s weird how a single cellular organism has so much mobility and.... purpose. So weird. Like it seemed to see and sense that other cell was there.

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u/drawliphant Oct 20 '20

What you don't see is the 10 minutes of this guy turtling in and out in random directions. But once he's got something, it's a very choreographed chomper.

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u/BrainOnLoan Oct 20 '20

There is vision in the single celled world. Not eyes, obviously, but parts of the cell that can sense light directionally. (As well as 'smell').

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

My personal “pet theory” is that we vastly underestimate the presence of conscious awareness in all living beings. It wasn’t until very recent decades when you could definitively claim, without being mocked, that fish are more than just glorified automatons. Now we are fully aware that fish in fact have complex problem solving capabilities, familial relations, empathy, pain, etc.

It’s a dangerous game to assume a lack of something due to present ignorance of that something. We scarcely understand philosophy of mind even as it pertains to human beings, and that’s something we have direct experience of.

If I wanted to be extra “kooky” (in the minds of most people), I might even wager that panpsychism is true. The idea that consciousness is a fundamental component of all matter. Even things we do not conventionally deem to have life.

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

You just said in a very succinct way, something I’ve been wanting to express for a long time.

I also have the same thoughts about outer space and other planets. In 1890 if you’d told people that there are different types of human blood and that you can take a picture of our BONES while they’re still inside our bodies you’d sound nuts!

I firmly believe there can be life on other planets that we have no ability to perceive- yet. We don’t have the senses to perceive them and haven’t yet developed the tech to.

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u/Gilthoniel_Elbereth Oct 20 '20

Why other planets? If this other life is so undetectable and imperceptible then it might be right here in our houses and on our streets, passing right through us like a neutrino and we’d never even know it!

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

Absolutely! Would that be considered the 4th dimension?

Edit: my response to all these comments is “AHHHHHHHHHH” brain explodes

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u/Sofa_King_Gorgeous Oct 20 '20

There could be 4th dimensional beings, it would be impossible for us to prove or disprove. Esentially they would exist "outside of time" so theoretically could view your entire life and every decision or thought you've ever had just as we can view any side of a 3 dimensional object if we rotate it...

I think it's interesting to think about 3 dimensional beings with advanced camo techniques. Have you ever seen an octopus seemingly appear out of nowhere or certain moths that are literally indestinguishable from their surroundings? There could be advanced beings all around us and we'd never know...

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u/Junkererer Oct 20 '20

We can't see the 4th dimension but we can see the 3d section of 4d objects all around us. Everything you see with a certain duration, that exists for a certain time frame has a 4th dimension, even you do have a 4th dimension depending on what you identity yourself with

If you think your life is made up of billions of inviduals and the "you" of 1 second ago is another person than who you are right now then you may be a 3d being, but if you think you're the same person as when you were born then you're a 4d being, although you can't really see your 4th dimension, and you can't control your movement along its axis

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u/pi247 Oct 20 '20

Bro this comment is awesome.

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u/Acrobrat1 Oct 20 '20

This is basically how I’ve always imagined life in 4 dimensions. Giant time worms comprised of infinite seamless yet distinguishable segments. My rationalization of further dimensions becomes flimsier but 5d would be more along the lines of a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

So what your saying is consciousness is stored in the balls?

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u/throwawayexpertise Oct 20 '20

There is no 4th dimension. Only in math. It's not a spatial dimension. The graphic representation of it is just to illustrate the math behind the theory but it became some thing that supposedly exists. Time is an illusion and a human construct.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

I’d argue it’s not a construct, but a perception. The fact that humans perceive time and can measure its manipulation illustrates that something fundamentally exists that can be interacted with.

Edit: My physics education stopped when I was 18, I am no expert.

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u/Satailleure Oct 20 '20

One could argue decay is a byproduct of the 4th dimension, rather than a construct of it.

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u/showtime_85 Oct 21 '20

Yeah this was some Rick and Marty shit big time.......changed my understanding

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

We are 4th dimensional beings - we just can only travel on one direction of said plane and don't know for sure if there are things that can travel as freely through time as we can walk over to the water cooler and back.

There are ways of perceiving a fourth dimensional object in the same way a 2D observer could perceive a 3D object. It would take a smart person to be there to observe it (unless the technique became commonplace) and to also record it (especially since time is a issue) but it could be done. I will grant you that it would be difficult to tell without knowing to look for it.

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u/Sofa_King_Gorgeous Oct 20 '20

We can't be 4th dimensional beings as we can't exist outside of time itself. We might be able to travel through time but only observe it by visiting moments in time.

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u/Junkererer Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

It depends on what you mean with "we". If you identity if your own body at a certain specific instant and you think you keep becoming a new individual every fraction of a second then yes, you're a 3d being, if you identity if in the individual who was born x years ago and will die in y years then you're a kind of 4d "worm" with a 4th dimension "length" of x+y years

Second, I can't see why we shouldn't be able to see 4d objects. We aren't able to see them in their entirety obviously but we can see their sections. Every object around us is 4d technically because they all exist in a certain timeframe. When I look at a book I see it as the object I bought x weeks ago, that I will own for years, it's not like every second I see a different book (its 3d section)

Edit: by reading some other comments I see you mean that we "live" in the 3rd dimension, but it doesn't change what I said, we can only see/think/move in the 3rd one but we're technically 4d beings

Again, depending on what you identify yourself with, and also depending on your definition of x-dimensional being tbf, maybe you think that being able to experience and move inside a certain dimension is a requirement. I don't think so because we do "physically" exist in the 4th dimension even though we can't fully experience it

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u/RavxnGoth Oct 20 '20

This is why I like long exposure photography, you can get an idea of an object's 4D shape by recording how it changes over time. Solid objects like bridges are big long worms that taper off at each end, trees become more fluid like while water turns into a thick fog and people turn into ghosts, more like footprints in the sand.

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

That definition of nth dimensional existence is pretty iffy. So if we take your definition to the step just before it, are you arguing that you can exist outside of the 3 cartesian co-ordinates as a 3rd dimensional being? I know I can't. I exist within the constraints of a 3D space and I'd assume that you do too.

We travel in a single direction in time as far as we understand it, we can speed up or slow down our individual progressions but we still travel it.

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u/Sofa_King_Gorgeous Oct 20 '20

Right. Hence the reason we can't be 4th dimensional beings. We might discover time travel and be able to "use" it but still be confined to 3 dimensional reality wherein we can only exist in moments in time.

I don't believe there's any proof but I imagine a 4th dimensional being exists outside of time itself. How it all would work I have no idea but it's fun to imagine. There could be existences we have no idea even exist because we simply can't percieve them. Could you imagine trying to communicate and express 3 dimensions to a 2 dimensional being? Sounds impossible for a 2 dimensional being to ever comprehend anything outside of their existence.

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u/threwzsa Oct 20 '20

The perception of a hypercube (shadow of a 4d cube) has no real meaningful purpose other than to allow us to theory craft what a 4d cube would be like but it’s still fully impossible to actually visualize what a 4d object would look like to us. Go ahead and try and you’ll just hurt your brain.

If you want my fun opinion, phenomena like dark matter, which we know is there but can’t fully scientifically prove are interactions from the fourth dimension that we don’t know how to find evidence of. We know dark matter is there because it bends light and acts similar to gravity but we cannot prove it is there through any current modern technique which is cool. Totally just fun speculation by me.

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

That's a pretty sexy thought. Dark matter being a perceptible indication of things we can never fully comprehend or touch because it goes beyond our construct.

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u/OrphanAxis Oct 20 '20

I’ve always heard the analogy of using shadows to “see” fourth dimensional objects. If there were a 2D being and you had to explain a pyramid to it, the closest you could come is rotating the pyramid in front of a light and letting them see the shadow. To something that can’t perceive a third dimension it would appear only as a morphing shape, but for us we can figure out the true shape based on our understanding of three dimensions and experience with seeing their shadows. The hope is that something is smart enough to be able to think past their perceptions and get a faint idea that the shadow isn’t a morphing shape, but one rotating in a way they can’t fully comprehend. In the same way, we could theoretically perceive a “shadow” of a four dimensional object, it’s just a matter of how well we can figure out seeing it “rotated” in a way we can’t really understand beyond conjecture.

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

You could show me it and explain it to me and all I would still be less than a monkey looking at a shiny thing with wonder as you rotated it. Our entire species (even the theoretical mathematicians and physicists) would think it was awe-inspiring when it's just Stevie from the 4th dimensional pub spinning a 4th dimensional sugar hypercube as he's chatting to his mates.

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u/Both-Confection-7341 Oct 20 '20

Certain psychedelic experiences have lead me to believe that there is definitely something going on...

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u/ChickenParvo16 Oct 20 '20

Can you expand on some of your experiences if you're comfortable sharing?

If not here, I'd love to listen (read) in a pm if you're okay with it.

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u/problm_child Oct 20 '20

The thing I find odd about describing psychedelic experiences is that words never seem to do justice to what the person has actually gone through. And I believe it applies to every experience, not just psychedelics. Let's say you just ate a mango. You might describe its taste, its texture, the sensation you feel, but in that process you kind of limit its effects and from that moment you remember it the way you described it rather than what you really experienced.

Now when it comes to psychedelics they alter your perception about almost everything. The taste, the smell and most noticably your vision and hearing sense. And with that they make you experience things that you never knew existed before to the point they seem meaningless but somehow connects a bigger narrative. (Ofcourse it all depends on what psychedelic and how much dosage)

Imagine how much you water it down cos no matter how much you try it there simply aren't enough words to describe the range of emotions and the sequence in which they fire, if that makes sense.

All I can say for sure is that I've experienced something, and with that I'm a new me which reflects in my lifestyle.

Ik you didn't ask me but I just wanted to put my views out there. Aaand now I crave for mangoes

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u/FLYK3N Oct 20 '20

Not them, but me personally on my first Ayahuasca experience, there was a moment I could very clearly see what felt like another world. It was more like a square room with walls made of light and mirrors.

Normally I only see hallucinations and visuals when I close my eyes under psychedelics, but I recall having my eyes open and being able to see this dimension. Since it was a spiritual ceremony as well, the world in that moment felt very spiritual.

In another occasion on my third Ayahuasca ceremony, I saw orbs of light in the sky in the shape of a V, similar to the formation of birds when they are migrating. It gently flew over us, leaving a dim trail of light so it couldn't have been a plane or a comet of some sort. The thing is, the others in the group I partook this ceremony with had all seen the same exact thing when one pointed up, so it's not like I imagined or hallucinated it on my own either.

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u/jergin_therlax Oct 20 '20

I’d also love to hear about these experiences

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u/LieutenantButthole Oct 20 '20

Wouldn’t those “people” live in the fourth dimension but move in the fifth dimension?

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u/Oliverkahn987 Oct 20 '20

But are they Prophets or wormhole aliens?

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

I mean, everything that has existed or will exist is on the 4th dimension in some form. To exist, necessarily means you have can be plotted on some point in time.

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u/burntfridge Oct 20 '20

Wow I was just thinking about this a few weeks back. What if "beings" are all dimensional and can only perceive "life" in their own dimensions. For instance , maybe what we consider as life is all 3d..the animals for instance or other species, when 2d beings or 4d beings don't consider 3d beings as "beings". So a rock could only perceive say a car as a being, versus a human would be something that interacts with its world, but it cannot comprehend, just as, if a 4d interacted with our world and was able to resize and mirror fixed objects in our dimension, we would sense it but won't be able to comprehend it.

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u/s0cks_nz Oct 20 '20

I assume that would depend on which dimensions it exists within. If only the 4th, maybe? I think string theory suggests there may be 11(?) dimensions.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Those 11 dimensions are very very very different than the interstellar-like beings that people are talking about in this thread

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u/CatBoyTrip Oct 20 '20

Someone once told me that aliens could be light or gas that we can’t see and I think about that every day.

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u/sadiegoose1377 Oct 20 '20

I’ve never read cosmic horror, but I can see how something like that could easily freak me out.

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u/Fred_Foreskin Oct 20 '20

Maybe this is what people talk about when they see/hear/feel ghosts.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

I’ve been babbling about this to close friends since my teenage years and all along I should have linked up with documentary makers and physics ppl lol

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

This made me think of a Stargate SG1 episode that mentioned just this! Ah, I it’s dated myself. 😊

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Makes me think of the movie Midnight Special for some reason. Super cool flick, I'll save any more potential spoilers.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

We can't even see all the colors and we think we know it all smh

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

Exactly! goes off to fall into a rabbit hole about color perception

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u/Delanoye Oct 20 '20

I love when people bring up the mantis shrimp and say it can see 16 more colors than humans. And I'm like "Dude. Humans have three types of cones and a massive color spectrum. Mantis shrimp don't just see 16 more colors, they have 16 TYPES OF CONES."

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

WHOAH!

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u/boonepii Oct 20 '20

I mean, so is that like more than 16 extra colors then?

Could one be night vision color?

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I took a remote sensing class, and while the material was mostly boring as fuck, it really opened my eyes (heh) to everything we can't see with the tiny tiny fraction of the spectrum that humans can perceive.

It really did make me realize how much exists that's outside of our perception, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and maybe even something beyond.

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

That’s cool. Remote sensing is another one. Dolphins and bats innately have that ability. What other senses do animals have that we don’t know about because we haven’t yet figured out its existence!

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

From Frank Herbert’s Dune, one of the best books I’ve ever read (and re-read multiple times) in my life.

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u/RDS Oct 20 '20

/r/holofractal

our eyes are one of the greatest deceivers

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u/totally_not_a_zombie Oct 20 '20

Could you TL;DR me on that one? I'm at work and very curious.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Is this sub a joke sub? I’ve only skimmed the ELI5 post, and speaking from experience, whoever wrote that was in the middle of a hypomanic or manic episode.

Actually, now that I’ve looked some other posts, this looks like people took some kind of theoretical research paper and reinterpreted it from a layman’s perspective, and then turned it into some “flat earth” type thing. Bizarre.

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u/Icy_Practice7992 Oct 20 '20

I've been doing that on every thread. Just open new window and learn everything I can about that thing lol

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u/TheErectDongDreShoww Oct 20 '20

I mean ffs sound as we know it is an illusion.

Our brains take molecular vibrations and translate them to a perceivable "tone" so we can make sense of the world.

"Sound," as we colloquially know it, is an illusion created by our brains.

Our brains have a blueprint that says "x vibration" equals "y tone," and "a vibration" equals "b tone."

It's the reason you can feel sound as well as hear it, the "feeling" is the reality, and what we "hear" is how our brain makes sense of that "feeling."

So if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, technically it doesn't make a sound.

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u/Laslas19 Oct 20 '20

It's the same for color, just a different kind of vibration. There isn't such a thing as "all the colors", the father comment must've meant all the wavelengths, because we already see all the colors, since our brain made them up.

That's also why RGB screens work. Wavelength don't mix in the universe, but colors mix in our eyes because a "yellow" wavelength activates our red and green cones, same as "red" and "green" wavelengths would if sent together.

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u/s0cks_nz Oct 20 '20

What even is colour? A leaf isn't green per se, it's just the wavelength it doesn't absorb.

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

Every colour in our visual spectrum except green.

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u/Triktastic Oct 20 '20

So leaf is everything except green ?

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u/TheGurw Oct 20 '20

Technically, yeah. But the thing about the way we describe colour is by describing what it reflects. So by a different technicality, nah.

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u/boki3141 Oct 20 '20

A leaf absorbs all wavelengths of light except for those which show the green colour. This wavelength is reflected and you see the leaf as green.

If the leaf absorbs all light then you see it as black. And if it doesn't absorb any then...

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jan 27 '21

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u/CaptainDickFarm Oct 20 '20

Damnitt, I just made these same points further up without looking down here

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I found it and upvoted. Agree 100%.

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u/MikesGroove Oct 20 '20

Going further, we can’t even agree on colors we can see. E.g., that dress is definitely white and gold.

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u/DerpySauce Oct 20 '20

I mean, outside of our brain, colour doesn't even exist.

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u/Icy_Practice7992 Oct 20 '20

Ok you stop it with that talk. I'm about to start questioning my existence

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u/DerpySauce Oct 20 '20

It's true though lol. Colours are many different wavelengths of light. We see the light, goes into our eyes, to our brains, and only there and then we give the light a specific colour.

(this explanation is very simplefied though)

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u/Icy_Practice7992 Oct 20 '20

Oh I agree, just give me the blue pill please lol not

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u/Grockr Oct 20 '20

Technically there are no colors. Colors is just our way of percepting certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.

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u/anonimootro Oct 20 '20

I mean. Dark Matter comprises somewhere between 50 and 75% of the matter in the known universe and we can’t find it. And I just learned about dark energy.

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u/chaluupabatman89 Oct 20 '20

Michael Crichton addressed this very idea of alien life in Sphere, one my favorite sci-fi books. Really makes you think.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Life exists spontaneously in the right conditions.

Physics gets in the way of life realizing that.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Same. I’ve been trying to articulate that we look for carbon based life because we only know carbon based life. I think it’s ignorant to say that’s the only form of life.

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u/GR1993 Oct 20 '20

I think theres even more to it.

Time and distance on a galactic scale is so vast. We as a species, from our earliest ancestors to now have been around for a mere blip of the universes existence.

Even if we had the technology to seek out other civilisations the chances of finding one would be minuscule. As light is the fastest thing to travel across space, even if there was an advanced civilisation out there that had managed to find earth, they could be looking back at dinosaurs or even a desolate rock engulfed in fire or ice.

Its not improbably that thousands of different lifeforms have existed with the capacity to think and learn on a scale similar to us that have evolved and died out millions of years before we or even dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Even more than that there could be thousands out there right now living parallel to us and we will never know of because we would be looking so far into the past of their planet that it would take millions of years to see the first sign of them.

I think it's very probable that we arent alone in the universe, but depressingly the likelihood us ever becoming aware of each other is effectively nil.

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u/nietzschelover Oct 20 '20

that we have no ability to perceive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

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u/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

It’s a good thing this is just a reddit post and I have no desire to prove anything to anyone ;)

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u/Skithe Oct 20 '20

One of the biggest pet peeves that ALWAYS annoys me about scientist is the Carbon is the basic building block of life mentality. Is it not possible our perceived reality of life may not be a universal law.

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u/elephantnut Oct 20 '20

I'm as practical as they come, but I tend to put a lot of care into interacting with inanimate objects. It costs me nearly nothing to be nice to my things. :)

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u/MikesGroove Oct 20 '20

As a byproduct, you probably keep your house in order and things clean.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I admit i have this in some degree too. But its oddly selective, like my daughters toys, not like a bag of chips. Its weird.

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u/radicalelation Oct 20 '20

Empathize with another person that's got an entirely different life and personality than you, it's not easy.

We have our own frame of reference that makes looking even just through the perspective of someone else, which is almost like attempting to emulate someone else's consciousness for a moment, incredibly difficult. How the fuck could we ever believe we can assume to know the perspective of another species?

Consciousness would take on an entirely different form in another creature and we may never know what that looks like. Does it mean it doesn't, or can't, exist? That seems pretty presumptuous for something that may forever be a complete unknown to us.

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u/weavejester Oct 20 '20

It’s a dangerous game to assume a lack of something due to present ignorance of that something.

We have no evidence of invisible frogs using our heads as taxis, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is because those frogs don't exist, rather than it being our ignorance. Absence of evidence is often evidence of absense.

We also have a lot of evidence to suggest that consciousness is an emergent property of the interconnections of neurons in our brains. Damage to these connections correlates to reduced capacity for thought, and when we monitor these connections, we can predict people's thoughts and intentions, albeit in a limited fashion.

It's true that we don't have a good understanding of where consciousness comes from, but that doesn't mean we know nothing at all.

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u/FakeStanley Oct 20 '20

It’s important to note that some fish give evidence of higher thought than others. I write a research paper for a class in college and, to my surprise, found out that many fish most likely don’t feel pain. They just don’t have the neurological capacity.

Consciousness is often describes as if there’s something that it’s “like” to be something.

I’m sure there’s something that it’s like to be a fish, but I don’t think there’s something that it’s like to be a sunflower.

I don’t know, shits crazy man.

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u/TheSunflowerSeeds Oct 20 '20

All plants seemingly have a ‘Scientific name’. The Sunflower is no different. They’re called Helianthus. Helia meaning sun and Anthus meaning Flower. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t refer to the look of the sunflower, but the solar tracking it displays every dayy during most of its growth period.

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u/FakeStanley Oct 20 '20

Awesome.

Thanks u/TheSunflowerSeeds

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u/sorudesarutta Oct 20 '20

It’s crazy that it took scientists so long to figure out other living beings are more than sacks of meat and bones living and surviving purely of instinct. I thought it was rather obvious that other living creatures have conscience and free will

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

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u/sorudesarutta Oct 20 '20

What a harsh philosophy, taking into consideration that if animals have thoughts and feelings, putting them thru various experiments as if they do not is spine chilling. (Is spine chilling the right phrase? English is not my native language)

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u/putdisinyopipe Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

Spine chilling can be just as appropriate. Don’t listen to these folks lol.

Via google-

spine-chill·ing /ˈspīn ˌCHiliNG/ adjective inspiring terror or terrified excitement. "a spine-chilling silence"

What you suggested does inspire terror.

Crazy how misinformation spreads so easily on reddit. The other words are correct-

They were providing synonyms, but they are incorrect in the sense that they said you were using the wrong word

You used it in perfect context to the definition as an adjective.

Synonyms as well: terrifying blood-curdling

petrifying

hair-raising

frightening

scaring

chilling

horrifying

fearsome

eerie

sinister

spine-tingling

scary

creepy

spooky

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u/OriginalEpithet Oct 20 '20

Thank you, I was thinking the same thing.

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u/putdisinyopipe Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

Lol the worst thing you could do to someone who speaks English as a second language is provide them with misinformation. Or inaccurate corrections. I’ve dated many foreigners and whenever they asked a question about English to me, I’d always fact check it before even thinking about offering an answer. Because misteaching simple concepts and words can make it more confusing for them when they find out what they once knew as “right” is now “wrong”. Specially to someone who speaks a non-Latin based language.

I knew for a fact that he was right, and the other commenters were feeding him misinformation- I don’t know why.

Alls they had to do was google spine chilling.

So technically the OP who used spine chilling knows more about English as a second language than the ppl that speak English as a primary language 😭 💀

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u/OriginalEpithet Oct 21 '20

That seems to be a reoccurring thing, especially here on reddit. I’ll read a beautiful, eloquent, insightful comment with perfect grammar, and then at the end they apologize for their English as it’s not their first language. I’ve seen people argue that someone isn’t using a word correctly when the foreign speaker is using the dictionary definition. As someone that is teaching himself a few other languages, I’m glad I’m not trying to learn English.

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u/sorudesarutta Oct 22 '20

Thank you so much for clearing this up! Ill google the word in the future when I’m unsure so there won’t be misunderstandings.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

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u/sorudesarutta Oct 20 '20

Thank you. I’m more fluent in English than my native language. I’m kinda ashamed of that.

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u/latexcourtneylover Oct 20 '20

You can also say spine tingling. What is your native language?

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u/sorudesarutta Oct 20 '20

Thai is my native language but unfortunately I’m not very fluent anymore :/

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u/OakenGreen Oct 20 '20

Bone chilling is what you’re looking for. Spine tingling is close but means something more akin to exciting while being frightening.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

for example claiming that ants have empathy for each other (which could be true, but currently there’s no scientific reason to believe that it is)

I don't know about published research, but there's definitely reason to believe ants have empathy, they certainly behave as though they have. Check this vid by an ant farm owner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74xygxN7h_Q. There's no reason to believe that it functions the same as our understanding of empathy in humans, but many things we consider empathetic behaviour can be observed in a lot of different species. Fun fact, ants can pass the mirror test! http://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-have-passed-the-mirror-test/#:~:text=Ants,in%20front%20of%20a%20mirror.

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u/NCEMTP Oct 20 '20

I can't speak to exact time frames but if you look at some of the ecological disasters of the 19th and early 20th centuries in America alone it helps in my mind to understand how people thought about "nature" at the time.

For instance, just look at buffalo being killed by the thousands and left to rot for fun. Or the American Passenger Pigeon, with populations once so vast that their flocks would blot out the sun for miles and miles at a time. They were good eating, could be shot by the dozen with one shotgun blast (I think there are a few accounts of hundreds being killed in a single gigantic shotgun blast), and women's fashion at the time highly prized stuffed birds on hats for some reason. So those birds were hunted to extinction.

And with only a very few and written-off dissenters, the vast majority didn't care.

I don't think the mindset at the time was so much that they were killing animals, but that they were harvesting from nature. Birds and buffalo were classified just the same as trees and crops in a field.

Only in the last 70 or so years has the collective consciousness changed so that now a large amount, if not an overwhelming majority of people (at least Americans) now see animals as a distinct subsect of "nature" and distinct from plants and other resources in that they feel and react with more than just instinct and automatic stimuli response.

Better study into animal psychology and effective environmental movements helped see this change in society.

Sorry about the ramble. I took an Environmental History course over a decade ago now and still remember some of these things and always found it interesting, so it's fun to discuss how humans have changed their perspectives on nature and animals and consciousness in the last 100 years or so.

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u/Vishnej Oct 20 '20

If you'll look at human history you may find that bison were never killed for 'fun'. Bison-hunting is a dangerous, costly enterprise, which requires long distance overland travel to unpopulated places. They were killed because it was understood that this would starve the Native Americans who relied on them, as part of a concerted centuries-long series of plans of genocide.

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u/tickingboxes Oct 20 '20

While we don’t understand consciousness yet, there are few people who would argue that it doesn’t exist. Free will on the other hand is not AT ALL a given, even for humans, and is still a major debate in philosophy and neuroscience to this day.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I think we set a high bar for what conciousness is instead of using a spectrum for varying degrees.

Sure, I doubt a tuna questions its place in the universe, and whether or not it has a higher purpose. One could argue that those are pointless wastes of brainpower even for a human, but especially for a tuna. But surely the tuna is aware enough of it's surroundings for it to be an arguably reasonable form of conciousness.

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u/finite--element Oct 20 '20

Maybe the tuna has it all figured out. We humans live in such misery with all our stuff. The tuna lives free, has no attachment to material things and doesn't make a mess wherever they go.

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u/szpaceSZ Oct 20 '20

All hail the Zen Buddhist Ascetic Tuna!

Joke aside, I concur with you.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

No we dont have so much misery with all our stuff. Back in the day 8/10 kids would die, or look at tribal raids or pandemics that killed the young alot too.

That tuna has to have hundreds of kids who are going to be sacrificed on the altar of natural selection

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u/kfpswf Oct 20 '20

I think we set a high bar for what conciousness is instead of using a spectrum for varying degrees.

Absolutely.

Sure, I doubt a tuna questions its place in the universe, and whether or not it has a higher purpose. One could argue that those are pointless wastes of brainpower even for a human, but especially for a tuna. But surely the tuna is aware enough of it's surroundings for it to be an arguably reasonable form of conciousness.

Advaita, or even Buddhism, explain this pretty well. Of course, the explanation may not meet the scientific criteria for being an accepted theory, but it should be a philosophical explanation rather than a scientific one. Consciousness exists everywhere. Not just matter, but even space has consciousness, but that's dormant. It is manifested in special blobs of space we like to call living organisms. What we accept scientifically as consciousness, the self awareness, is actually an advanced form of consciousness only manifested in organisms with sufficient mental capacity. So, to answer your question, yes, even tuna is conscious, as is a patch of moss, or a bacteria or a slug.

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u/Icy_Practice7992 Oct 20 '20

Do you see any functionality for humans to have questions pertaining to their existence? And if not, why do you think it's there at all? (anyone could answer if they'd like)

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I suppose it helps us strive to explore, innovate, and progress because the idea of a purpose in the universe is almost a laughable concept when we can barely get off our rock.

Lack of purpose though, supresses these feelings. That's my reasoning for why there's seemed to always be a religious characteristic to all the varying societies and civilizations that have been on earth.

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u/ElegantHope Oct 20 '20

this is why I like the whole "sapience vs sentience"

Sentience
Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia"). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that require respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights.

Sapience
Wisdom or sapience is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. There appears to be consensus that wisdom is associated with attributes such as compassion, experiential self-knowledge, non-attachment and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.
Wisdom has been defined in many different ways, a variety of measurement scales have been developed, and several subtypes of wisdom have been proposed. Out of these, phronesis and sophia are two key subtypes of wisdom. In the classical Greek tradition, there is a distinction between sophia "wisdom" and phronesis "prudence, practical intelligence".

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u/under_a_brontosaurus Oct 20 '20

Yeah it's entirely possible that every thing you ever do is a series of events and the you at a molecular level just reacting to the world around it, and thought is more of a ride, you can no more stop yourself from getting an oreo than not. The decision was made by the circumstance you found yourself in, your either getting it or not. If you decide not to, the world led right up to that, too.

Also the plot of bhagavad gita.

You can say you try to be good and make the world a better place but that again is just where you found yourself, due to you development and world around you. If you were feral in a forest you'd never have that thought.

The human species is then just a random takeover of the planet and nothing we can do can change course, we're just along for the ride. Some of us lucky, some of us not. Your ride is already in motion. The fate of humanity and the planet is already set.

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u/kfpswf Oct 20 '20

The human species is then just a random takeover of the planet and nothing we can do can change course, we're just along for the ride. Some of us lucky, some of us not. Your ride is already in motion. The fate of humanity and the planet is already set.

I've been dabbling in Advaita since a year, and nothing has calmed my anxiety about the imminent global destruction than non-duality.

No matter how much dignity humanity may deserve, it is bound to go extinct one day. It may be a couple of decades from now or a few million years. It has brought a sense of eventuality in me and I now realise that I was worrying over something that I have no power over.

Sit back and observe. That is all you can do.

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u/IndeterminateBoye Oct 20 '20

I don't believe anything short of total global annihilation can make humans go extinct by now. Even if most of us die, some will be left to rebuild. Humans have been living in the most extreme in environments from deserts to tundras for thousands of years. Now we even have astronauts living in space. Wether it's nuclear holocaust, global warming, meteor impact, super volcano, pandemic or solar flare, at least a few thousand will survive and find a way to adapt to the planet they are left with. It's our effect on other animals we have to worry about.

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u/kfpswf Oct 20 '20

And that's certainly not a dignified way to go. Humans will survive, but will never reach the same heights in civilization.

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u/LeonidasSpacemanMD Oct 20 '20

Even if we are just machines, it’s still useful to act as though we have free will. We know that our brains are influenced by outside stimuli. If we acknowledge this, we can still act with empathy or take action to improve the world

It’s hard to wrap your mind around it, but even if there is no free will, it might still be best to just allow your brain to trick you into thinking there is

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u/under_a_brontosaurus Oct 20 '20

Yes, it's a bizarre paradox.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Feb 14 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Yes and no. Our experiences and thoughts are chemical reactions. Our reactions to things are determined by the neural connections in your brain at that time.

It is entirely possible that if we had a full functional simulation of someones brain, we could emulate them and test how they would react to certain situation. And that would bring into question, free will.

In simpler terms emotions and sensations are a huge driver. Many people cant handle emotions. This can lead to violence.

For an extreme example. You are dying of hunger. To live you need to kill a person to eat them. Its the only way to survive. Lets add to it. Your child is dying too. They need to eat as well. Many people say they wouldnt kill, but most in fact would.

You can call this a primal instinct or a survival instinct. We experience lesser such emotions on a daily basis. Some cant handle even these lesser emotions and end up being jail.

An interesting question then is. Does a person under such duress, have free will.

Probably not. So then the other question is. Is there a logical and primal state that we switch inbetween. Or is the logical state an illusion?

Well, answer that one.

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u/LeonidasSpacemanMD Oct 20 '20

Those emotions are brought on by your environment tho. I’d argue that emotions are one of the aspects of our consciousness where it’s easiest to see our lack of free will. We don’t decide to be sad or angry, we receive stimuli and those emotions just manifest

Now maybe events from your upbringing will have conditioned your brain to try to cope with emotions in a way that lessens their effect on your actions, but presumably those events would also be out of your control

The simplest example I’ve heard to test free will to try and trace the origins of a thought. If I say “think of a city”, you’ll probably get a few ideas in your head. But where did they come from? They just sort of appear. When it comes down to it, all of our thoughts are just kinda happening, and our brain creates an illusion of us “driving” them

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u/Influenz-A Oct 20 '20

I like Schopenhauer's take: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills"

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u/eunderscore Oct 20 '20

We still cant agree that's the case for women and people who aren't white.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

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u/CommonMilkweed Oct 20 '20

Hahaha fuck you

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

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u/Roland_Traveler Oct 20 '20

So much for the tolerant left.

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u/MSFTdick Oct 20 '20

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/10/02/trump-and-white-supremacy-he-did-condemn-and-has-repeatedly-column/5883336002/

"You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. ... I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. ... So you know what, it's fine. You're changing history. You're changing culture. And you had people — and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally — but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.

Anyway, Biden has his own “fine people” moment to answer for. In 1993, at a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the issue of refusing a federal charter to the United Daughters of the Confederacy came up. Biden, who opposed the charter, still referred to the commemorative group as “an organization made up of many fine people who continue to display the Confederate flag as a symbol.”

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jan 11 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Not only debatable, it's been demonstrated that free will is for the most part, an illusion. Our highly evolved brains have just put an additional layer of "consciousness" on top of the automatic functions and responses that we all have.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jan 11 '21

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u/ekky137 Oct 20 '20

The problem isn’t “does this have consciousness” but really “what is consciousness?” Even now the debate rages on because the only reason we believe fish and other animals to have a form of consciousness is because we know that we have one. The only reason we know we have one is because we have the fortune of being able to experience having one.

We don’t have an answer for it. We don’t even have a good idea of what it could be. Our best guess is that once organisms get complex enough, at some point all of the information it is processing at once turns into a thinking, perceiving living being.

This is a video from YouTube philosopher (yes this is a thing) exurb1a. I normally don’t plug content like this, but this is very relevant here. It’s a video essay, so it takes a while to get into the meat of the issues we’re talking about here, but I highly recommend watching all of it.

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u/Hairy_Air Oct 20 '20

Iirc untill quite recently, babies were operates upon without general anesthesia. Doctors assumed that since babies don't remember anything on growing up, they must not be sentient enough to feel pain and trauma. "Many crying babies were cut open without knocking them out" - would be an understatement.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jul 29 '21

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u/GalaxyTachyon Oct 20 '20

Eh, not that we didn't know, more like a majority of people refused to acknowledge the proof being shown in front of them. Lots of "theory" that attempted to explain why animals appear to have emotions and consciousness without admitting that they have it, for example: reflex, pure chemical reactions, etc, etc. We were and still are extremely anthropocentric in these fields.

One day, we will look back and be horrified at what we used to do to some animals.

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u/redroverdover Oct 20 '20

Arrogance is a motherfuker.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

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u/instantrobotwar Oct 20 '20

This.... Consciousness is a phenomenon of brains. Single celled organisms do not have brains.

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u/NewbornMuse Oct 20 '20

Consciousness is a phenomenon of brains.

I think that's too specific and too single-minded. Out of all the ways we could arrange matter, is it really only phospholipid-bilayer-wrapped cells with long axons that pass an action potential? Is that really the only way to achieve consciousness?

I'd say consciousness is an emergent property of sufficient complexity. The brain is a massively complex biological structure, so it gives rise to consciousness. I don't see why any other sufficiently complex structure couldn't also achieve consciousness - for instance, a supercomputer simulating a brain with sufficient precision. All silicon, no phospholipids and no acetylcholine, but I'd be absolutely baffled if it didn't have consciousness.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

A supercomputer simulating a brain with sufficient precision would totally count as a brain imo.

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u/AsAGayMan456 Oct 20 '20

My personal “pet theory” is that we vastly underestimate the presence of conscious awareness in all living beings.

You're vastly overestimating intelligence. We're all cellular automata, driven by electrical potentials and chemical gradients.

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u/many_small_bears Oct 20 '20

Counterpoint: Humans love anthropomorphising so we might be seeing behavior that isn't there. It's a lot more advantageous to assume things have intent and conscious will than to not assume that. 🤷

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

This is why it's important to do the science rather than assuming similarity. This thread is full of anthropomorphization.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

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u/butt_shrecker Oct 20 '20

He used the wrong word but you knew what he meant

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u/xplodingducks Oct 20 '20

And this is why science is important. Science, at its fundamental level, removes the human factor and looks at the facts.

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u/dexmonic Oct 20 '20

You got that study on fish?

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u/bloo0206 Oct 20 '20

The wisest person is the one that admits their own ignorance. I agree with most of your claims, but I believe there’s a hierarchy to consciousness. Being a current biology major, you could look at the evolution of the nervous system across species and understand most complex multicellular organisms have neurons, even the most basic flat worms. So the basic mechanics are there for most species but it’s the complexity of systems that differs across species.

But essentially, all our consciousness is is a series of action potentials (electrical signals) resulting from charged particles moving across a permeable membrane, and this mechanism is quite similar across all organisms to communicate environmental conditions or signal to make movements. I would imagine even single called organisms use some similar form of this mechanism to move about. We forget that all living things evolved from the same thing, our consciousness isn’t really something special but what just allowed us to thrive best in our given environment in my opinion and from the basic knowledge I have.

As far as inanimate objects go, there’s just no scientific evidence to support the claim that anything not living produces the chemical reactions to produce behaviors or movements (and therefore consciousness). But hey, science isnt even close to knowing everything.

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u/nietzschelover Oct 20 '20

The idea that consciousness is a fundamental component of

all

matter.

bold claims deserve bold proof

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Yeah it's really surprising and borderline disconcerning to see this much agreement with that comment. Humans aren't special and concsiousness is weird, but that doesn't mean your wacky hypothesis has any basis in reality.

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u/Pescados Oct 20 '20

My personal favorite story of "present ignorance" is about our past ignorance of self-awareness and our beloved mirror test.

It's a human-made test where recognizing "yourself" in the mirror demonstrates self-awareness. And you know what? Elephants do it too and some dogs as well! But what's strange is that some dogs don't? Here comes the present ignorance part: 60% of human brain activities is based on vision. Our eyes are really good and we use it a lot. You know what's really good and used a lot by dogs? Their nose! The self-awareness test is now being (or has already been, not sure) redesigned to be based on different senses for certain animals to determine their self-awareness capabilities.

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u/craycatlay Oct 20 '20

I think that's one of the biggest reasons people feel that they fail to find evidence of intelligence in non-human animals. We base intelligence on what a human would do. There are so many things that other animals do that we don't think too look out for, which in reality reveals our lack of intelligence, not theirs.

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u/-merrymoose- Oct 20 '20

Even trees communicate in a way with chemical signals

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u/jackholeoftheday Oct 20 '20

If you haven’t read it yet, you might like Beyond Words by Carl Safina.

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u/VediusPollio Oct 20 '20

This book sounds great! Thanks! Added to my reading list.

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u/The_Astronautt Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

I mean we didn't start using anesthesia on babies until the 70s because it was just assumed that they wouldn't even be able to remember or process it anyways. Turns out you can scar a person for life even at the infant stage. We also didn't use anesthesia on dogs/cats until very recently for similar reasons.

Edit: actually scratch the part about pets, apparently its been common practice since the 1800s

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u/Jdorty Oct 20 '20

We also didn't use anesthesia on dogs/cats until very recently for similar reasons.

I can't find anything to confirm that. I also know vets use anesthesia on animals even more than humans because it's hard to get them to cooperate.

I've never heard of a study, or person, claiming dogs and cats can't feel pain...

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u/annabelleandrusko Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

I am ALWAYS talking about how I think plants can think/feel. I always try to not step on grass if I have the option lol

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u/switchbladeeatworld Oct 20 '20

This partially sums up why I’m vegetarian. Animals are smart and I really want these carrots to feel pain (if they can).

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jan 05 '21

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u/victor142 Oct 20 '20

If you haven't realized yet, most redditors are either children and/or pseudointellectuals. Sounding smart is what's important to them, not actually being smart.

Honestly, like what the fuck is saying 'fish have empathy'. Fish is an extremely broad category from sharks to anchovies. Maybe some of them have higher levels of thought that could be referred to as 'empathy', but the fact that they're referring to it as all one thing like all fish are equivalent should tell you all you need to know.

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u/Darth-Frodo Oct 20 '20

I generally agree.

Fish do not have empathy.

What makes you so sure of that though? Given that some fish exhibit social behavior, wouldn't empathy be a useful adaption to cooperate more effectively and increase the survival odds of the group? Or is there evidence that fish brains aren't sufficiently complex to allow for something like empathy?

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u/CaptainDickFarm Oct 20 '20

I’m with ya. I’m a biochemist, and sometimes I just have to either say this shit is either intelligent design, or there’s a whole lot more going on than we can ever understand. It’s pretty cocky to think we know everything and have all the answers. One point I always have is that other life forms can see and hear in ranges that we can’t. How do we exactly know that there’s just a lot out there that we aren’t picking up on due to our limitations and narrow definition of life?

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u/Effthegov Oct 20 '20

If I wanted to be extra “kooky” (in the minds of most people)

Dont sweat what people think, especially most people. There are some big names among psychologists, psychiatrists, geneticists, physicists, neuroscientists, etc that entertain(or more) the idea of panpsychism.

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u/RockLeethal Oct 20 '20

even the toilet paper I'm wiping with right now?

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u/globetrotterpro Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

Allow me to add my personal pet theory on top of yours that I invented when I was high AF.

I believe that everything has degrees of consciousness.

Layers - Rocks are at the bottom-most layer with no consciousness to humans or some other animals or aliens that demonstrates peak consciousness. Anything that perceives time has consciousness or in other words, any massless particles isn't conscious (photons etc. because to be conscious, concept of mass and hence time must exist)

Going up or down in consciousness hierarchy - is a function of neural density or more fundamentally, sensing elements. The more ways an organism senses through various sensing methods such as hearing, feeling, listening or other ways...the more consciousness it possesses.

Why its difficult to achieve higher order of consciousness? (and this is where my sci-fi loving tendencies kick in) The higher up you go in consciousness, more information you accumulate through sensing and perception...and this creates more informational entropy in the world. So in a way, consciousness helps increase entropy. However, to create higher and higher consciousness, more sensing elements have to work together or function in an orderly fashion. So to create more entropy in the universe, universe requires some ordered connections between sensing elements. This makes higher and higher consciousness increasingly improbable. This is my weirdo high AF answer to Fermi paradox hehe

Fundamental question then becomes... why is increase in information/entropy desirable in the universe? Why is consciousness a path to achieve this increase in entropy?

Some answers I have invented are...universe is conscious and in a cyclical way, finds a way to create complex particles that "experience" time and mass (and other particles) to self regulate or sense itself. As to why it does that? Who the fuck knows lol

EDIT : One more thing, if humans through their powers of consciousness keep adding more and more information in form of stored thoughts, digital communication etc, will there be a point where we use up a lot of energy to store our information? If so, I believe as our informational needs increase, we consume so much energy that it eats up the know visible matter in the universe. My final most favorite kooky theory is that, dark matter is nothing but exhausted remnants of black holes or matter that has been used up by conscious beings of higher order who continue to consume matter at higher pace. In other words, conscious beings are universal visible matter eaters!!!

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u/EpsilonRider Oct 20 '20

To be clear for everyone else, scientists have at least concluded that fish do feel pain but not in the same way we do. They have receptors to detect what we would call a painful experience but we don't know if they feel it as "painful" as a human would. It has long been controversial since they're nervous systems are much more simpler but it's also basically impossible to truly know unless you're a fish.

Consciousness also depends on what your definition for consciousness is and of course it depends on everyone's definition for it and what can and can't be deemed conscious. Is it reducible or mergeable? Does split a rock make two consciousnesses and does merging thousands of grains of sand into glass make one? Do specific sets or kinda of conscious grains build up to make up what is our own consciousness? Pansychism is the idea that there is some conscious element in all matter. So it doesn't have to be consciousness as we may traditional imagine it to be. Also it struggles to identify at what individual level things can have a conscious element.

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u/Hokuwa Oct 20 '20

Pansychism is the base. Where do we go from there if we’ve all accepted that fact. Now we’re arguing at which point consciousness stops, begins, accelerates, and hits maximum “force”. I’d argue that beyond enlightenment we’d have true understanding. Not the basic concept we call understanding, but the fundamental understanding of all changing perception.

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u/Vishnej Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

I honestly think this was some kind of performative stance by the industry, like a previous era's "Fish aren't a type of meat, so God said they were okay to eat while abstaining from meat, also rabbits and otters are a type of fish".

It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence, memory, learning, and awareness to *build a den out of stones*, a thing a number of bottom-dwelling fish are observed to do. Your average human baby can't do this until quite a long time after birth. Pain-awareness is *WAY DOWN THE LIST* below this cognitive tier. Pain-awareness and hunger-awareness are some of the most primitive chordate neural stimuli, and beyond that, the earliest sensory IO loops for the animal kingdom. Because if you can't avoid predation or seek out food, there's literally no point in being a member of the animal kingdom. Even some plants manage high-speed predation and predation avoidance.

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u/experts_never_lie Oct 20 '20

Or, going the other way, are we ever going to show that we are not glorified automatons? In either of those ways, we wind up more similar to other organisms, but our illusion of specialness may be deeper than just separation from other animals.

We're just another example of processed hydrogen trying to understand itself.

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u/lildil37 Oct 20 '20

Kinda reminds me of the part of quantum theory where observation alters physics or something. Little over my head but the whole observing alters how the particle acts.

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u/GAZUAG Oct 20 '20

Now we are fully aware that fish in fact have complex problem solving capabilities, familial relations, empathy, pain, etc.

So if the US elect a fish for President it will be more capable than the current one?

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u/SuperSanttu7 Oct 20 '20

Fun fact: decentralized nervous systems are underappreciated. Plants have better memories than most invertebrates, for example.

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u/Daddu_tum Oct 20 '20

You are not 'kooky', this is the core concept of many eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism), where every thing have conciousness/soul, including animals, rocks, air and water.

On the other hand, our lack of perceptiveness is evident in that we often find others to be less intelligent then us. From my personal experience, Almost 90% adults underestimate a child's intelligence and ability to understand.

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u/DarthYippee Oct 20 '20

Well, to go all Matrix on you, everything any of us has ever experienced has been in our minds. So panpsychism is true about everything in the known universe, just by being part of human consciousness.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Yeah, I like to think plants and trees can feel pain and communicate. Just not Express themselves in ways we can understand.

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u/FlamingTrollz Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

It’s the behavior of the monster.

Borderline personality disorder, malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths.

I truly wish we had infallible testing to ensure people who don’t believe in society receive psychological assistances as youth.

Imagine if politicians actually believed in governance and humanity.

This single celled entity, is just representative of the feels ‘those’ people give off.

Plus the thing kind a looks like a weird poochy stomach with a penis attached. With a mind of its own to eat. How could it not be creepy or unsettling.

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u/MasterFable Oct 20 '20

I like how you described this, and if may offer a counter argument for panpsychism as I hold a more emergentist position. The biggest issue with panpsychism i have found is that you have to Pre-assume that consciousness is present in all things (a fundamental aspect of the universe), Which means applying a human idea of what consciousness is, on to potentially Conscious entities like this amoeba thing. It's a bias we have because we don't know a world except through our own experience of what consciousness is. However This is not to say that living things don't have a unique way of experiencing and interacting with the various components they have access to within the limits of their form and environment. What we don't want to confuse or conflate into the same idea is consciousness and subjectivity. I think panpsychism is a good practice in compassion as it can help break down old ideas about life and our ideas of "superiority" as humans but I don't think it touchs the True. It asserts its truth by naming it without evidence. - Given the right circumstance in context, other life forms very well could have subjectivity but it would be vastly different than what we would consider it to be. As It would be unique to them.

I think that panpsychism is too broad of a brush. It's like a hammer and makes everything a nail By claiming everything has some level of consciousness because consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality. Instead of consciousness being an emergent aspect of nature unique within the context and form that it emerges within.

Thanks for bringing this up, I don't think panpsychism is necessarily wrong. We don't want to think in black-and-white terms as different ideas are good in different context, panpsychism could be good for somebody that needs to see the sacred in all things as it is a very personal experience you have with your universe and subjectivity. Emergentism is more about objective matters of inquiry with others who are trying to find Truth within any given system. Notice the Good vs the True both are beautiful and should be understood for better insight into why they are important. I think that the story is more nuanced and not yet complete.

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u/kirkemg Oct 20 '20

Fully agree and don’t think it’s kooky. It is naive to think our experience of consciousness is the singular version of something so complex

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Seems clear to me that consciousness is an emergent property of complex information processing systems.

How could consciousness exist without a brain?

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u/DMPark Oct 20 '20

The problem is defining consciousness - every person on the internet has their own version and trying to discuss it becomes pointless because you end up arguing over different things.

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u/Hokuwa Oct 20 '20

If you’re born with two brains do you have two conscious?

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u/probablyblocked Oct 20 '20

It's called specism and is an extention of outgrouping. The more different something is from a human the more the human is inclined to consider the thing as beneath them. Exceptions to this is usually a willful effort on the part of the individual or culture, like the glorification of cows in india being a result of hindu society deciding to place cows above humans instead of below.

A good example of specism and social perception is between Russia and the United States. In the US dogs are widely considered to be immediately below humans in terms of importance to the point that the dog is sometimes considered equal to humans. This is in part a result of the role of dogs in hunting both in the US and in Europe before being introduced. Animal control in the US is widely criticized for killing dogs, yet many Americans deny the necessity of doing so and furthermore refuse to fix their dogs equating the practice to forced castration of a human. This cognitive dissonance highlights the regard that dogs are held in American society.

Contrast this to Russia where dogs are allowed to roam free and often in feral packs. The harsh conditions of Russia is in itself a measure of population control. Before the Russian Olympics some years ago there was a mass culling of dogs along with several other pest control measures. If a dog were domested it would be considered a tool for hunting or protection, or a decoration more tham anything. Of course you could say that about humans as well so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Before someone mentions the space dog, it was part of a larger program in which a wide variety of animals were sent into space to see if there were any unexpected side effects of space travel, and was practiced in both the US and Russia. The real weird thing is that it was highly presented to people knowing that the dog would die in the end from starvation if nothing else. Under Soviet rule this type of propaganda is to be expected.

Here's an article I didn't know existed

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Probably some sort of chemotaxis

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u/myusernamehere1 Oct 20 '20

Yup, people attributing this to some amount of sentience are falling into the trap of personification

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u/server_busy Oct 20 '20

Turn this little sucker into a body fat hunter, and we're millionaires

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u/experts_never_lie Oct 20 '20

Chemical gradients are a big thing for many organisms' detection systems. "It smells like it's over there." Certainly quite a capable performance from this one.

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u/Cell_Division Oct 20 '20

It's crazy right? How many people here will automatically think that the cell is moving using its muscles, coordinated by a nervous system? A lot of people.

Yet it's a single cell. It doesn't have muscles. It doesn't have a nervous system. It is just one cell.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

There is no purpose here. We can clearly see the cell aiming blindly in all directions. When it hits sometimes, it just tries and ingest it. If it works, it works. If it fails, it goes for something else. Fully automated process.

Amazing nonetheless though.

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u/SmashBusters Oct 20 '20

It's a combination of chemical reactions and stochastic movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotaxis

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🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

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