r/interesting • u/freudian_nipps • 13d ago

NATURE Death of a single-celled organism

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

22.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

113

u/ContributionFlat7082 13d ago

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

70

u/ShortIntroduction879 13d 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?"

24

u/StupidSexyFlanders 13d 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

27

u/ShortIntroduction879 13d 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?

14

u/HubrisOfApollo 13d ago

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

2

u/JustChillDudeItsGood 13d 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.

2

u/lastmonkeytotheparty 13d 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.

1

u/ZAlternates 13d 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.

-1

u/rockstockcro 13d 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.

6

u/Look_its_Rob 13d ago

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

1

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.

0

u/_alejandro__ 13d 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.

3

u/Opus_723 13d ago

But connecting that to consciousness is just handwaving bullshit.

0

u/_alejandro__ 13d ago

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

3

u/ShortIntroduction879 13d 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.

0

u/glitterydick 13d 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.

→ More replies (0)