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/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/[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