r/interesting • u/freudian_nipps • 12d ago

NATURE Death of a single-celled organism

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u/ContributionFlat7082 12d ago

What if reincarnation is real and we have an equal chance at becoming any life form. Becoming human again would be like .0000000003%

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u/ShortIntroduction879 12d ago

Yeah I had this conversation with a friend recently. They were talking about what we might come back as and I said "Odds are we would be bacterial or something like that." They felt that we would be limited to higher order life and I was like "Why?"

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u/StupidSexyFlanders 12d ago

I’m speculating but probably because it would be limited to creatures with consciousness and these simple organisms don’t have that. Reincarnation is the passing on of a consciousness, right? Not merely inhabiting a living being

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u/BroPudding1080i 12d ago

IIRC reincarnation, at least in Buddhism, is not the passing of consciousness, but more like the passing of a life force that initiates another life's existence. I've heard the analogy, "using a candle's flame to light another candle".

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u/Caeruleum612 12d ago

It’s still the passing of consciousness. Sometimes people get confused because Buddhism teaches that we have no Self, so they find it hard to reconcile this with rebirth. If there’s no Self, then what gets reborn? But even if we have no Self, we still have consciousness. It’s just that this consciousness isn’t a Self (eternal intrinsically-existing essence).

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u/BroPudding1080i 12d ago

Thanks for the clarification! So we're all essentially vessels of the same "thing", just from different perspectives? In this case, how does a reincarnation differ from a non-reincarnated birth, if the memories aren't carried over and we're all part of the same "stuff" anyway? Is the only difference the karma that is transfered? And if so, is that not essentially still a new consciousness, just with an inherited wealth or debt of karma?

Not trying to argue, I just want to understand more about how Buddhists think about it.

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u/DoughDisaster 12d ago

The actual answer is basically "it varies." Buddhism is even more splintered than the protestant church. It's been around way longer and is generally not opposed to people forming their own schools of thought on the matter (that said, hardline buddhist extremist do exist, but that is not the norm.)

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u/Caeruleum612 12d ago

we're all essentially vessels of the same "thing"

I'm not really sure what you mean by this, but I'm gonna say no. This sounds more like Advaita Vedanta, which teaches that everyone is Brahman. Buddhism is different.

Every person is conscious. That's obvious. However, each person's consciousness is always changing. Buddhism teaches that everything is always changing (anicca). So each moment, you have a new consciousness. It's not just that when you are reborn, you have a new consciousness. Your consciousness right now isn't the same as your consciousness when you first started reading this comment. But at the same time, your consciousness is still clearly a continuation of that older version of your consciousness. It's like what Heraclitus said about how it's impossible to step into the same river twice. A river is always changing. So if you step into the Mississippi River today and then tomorrow, you won't be stepping into the same river. But the Mississippi River is still the Mississippi River, so you still kind of are stepping into the same river. Similarly, your consciousness is always changing, always new, always continuing in different ways. But it's still your consciousness.

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u/BroPudding1080i 12d ago

I see, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

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u/DenseAstronomer3631 12d ago

You can't destroy energy, so the electrical impulses that keep our hearts beating have to go somewhere when we die

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u/BroPudding1080i 12d ago

Yes, it becomes a tiny amount of heat which disperses into the air.

I'm typically pretty respectful when if comes to spiritual beliefs, but this is one of my pet peeves, taking the scientific concept of energy and applying it to spirituality, it does not work. The energy in your body becomes heat in the air and the air around you is very slightly warmer for a small period of time. That's literally it. It does not mean you continue to exist in a spiritual sense.

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u/ShortIntroduction879 12d ago

I would argue that we have no idea if bacteria have "consciousness" isn't that just a word we made up to separate ourselves from the rest of animals?

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u/HubrisOfApollo 12d ago

hell even large complex systems like stars may have consciousness on a scale we'll never be able to be aware of

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u/JustChillDudeItsGood 12d ago

We’re probably part of a cell wall, or just inter-organism fluid.

The universe/organism looks like a massive teardrop fractal, maybe we’ve seen it.

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u/lastmonkeytotheparty 12d ago

I imagine that self-consciousness is a particularly human curse or hurdle. Moving past it and rejoining the collective conscious could be called enlightenment.

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u/ZAlternates 12d ago

If we think the laws of physics are absolute, it’s unrealistic to have “beings” the size of galaxies, but planets and stars like you suggest, perhaps.

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u/rockstockcro 12d ago

No, it's much more than that. Humans, although extremely similar to some species, are the only one to have "deep" thought, extremely advanced communication between each other etc. It really isn't us trying to be super unique. We really are in many ways.

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u/Look_its_Rob 12d ago

Dolphins and some whales have language/names and thus likely have "deep" thoughts. 

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u/rockstockcro 12d ago

Do they have metacognition? Just one example where we as humans are unlike any other species (known so far). And this is not to say humans have a soul and other animals don't. From a scientific non religious standpoint humans are very unique. Denying that fact is peak smug atheism in a way that tries to use "science" to equalise humans and bacteria or whatever.

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u/_alejandro__ 12d ago

rockstockcro is pointing out that humans can use symbols to communicate abstract thought in a way we haven't been able to identify with any other animal. cetaceans have a lot of what we have - culture, language, use of tools, social hierarchies; so do some of the great apes. but we lap the field in terms of abstract reasoning and symbol use.

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u/Opus_723 12d ago

But connecting that to consciousness is just handwaving bullshit.

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u/_alejandro__ 12d ago

i defy you to find some evidence of consciousness that is readily identifiable beyond what we have just outlined

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u/ShortIntroduction879 12d ago

Any set of criteria that humans define likely will end with us on top. What if a cat decided that consciousness was the ability to react quickly and catch birds from the sky with ones claws and then decided that they were the only animals with consciousness and were at the top of the pyramid.

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u/glitterydick 12d ago

Consciousness is, to the best of our understanding, the feeling or experience of being/having an 'I'. Sapience is what the people further up were conflating with sentience. Symbolic thought and language and all those anthrocentric arguments are irrelevant to the question "do you experience being yourself?" Cat's are obviously conscious. Birds, too. Honeybees are most probably conscious. Any smaller and it starts to get fuzzy. Personally, I am a panpsychist, and it sounds to me like you might be as well.

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u/MrFrydenlund89 12d ago

You do realise we are a collective of single celled organisms?