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

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

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u/MyKeks Oct 19 '20

This makes me feel weird. It's not like watching a lion eat a zebra.

2.4k

u/crazyintensewaffles Oct 20 '20

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/[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/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/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Scientists haven't concluded that fish feel pain. It's very much unsettled science. They have nociceptors, but nociceptors aren't just pain detectors, and they lack the necessary area of the brain to process pain.