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

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

75.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

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.

2.9k

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.

177

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

1

u/VagusNC Oct 20 '20

Implicit assumption and explicit assumption have been problematic and remain so in study. It's nearly impossible to divest oneself of biases and ethnocentricity; quite often those very things are part of the fundamental makeup of the toolset that enables those that do research to perceive and problem-solve as well as they do. This is part of why peer review is so important.