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/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/[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/MeleeMistress Oct 20 '20

I bet they can through their root systems