We have more bacteria living on and in our bodies than we have “human” cells.
Kinda makes you wonder where the “human” starts and stops. Maybe we are bacteria driving human mechs.
“Mushroom!”
Mushroom!
The problem with consciousness is we don’t actually have a standard for it, largely because we see humans as conscious and everything else as not. But when we isolate a given trait (language, tool use, humor, etc.) we find examples in other species.
So we’re in a sorites situation: We can point to clearly conscious things and clearly not conscious things, but it’s rough finding an edge case that is by consensus on one side or another. Coco the gorilla might have been but turned out to be far removed (largely because she faked knowing sign language and her handlers didn’t know sign well enough to see she was faking it.)
That said, our brains clearly operate through material mechanics, and when its components deteriorate, so do we. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are serious cosmic horror: It’s not just tears in rain but tears of oceanwater joining rain into the sea. We really do dissolve into oblivion, and it would take some pretty fantastic steps to assume that whatever experiences an afterlife is the same thing as the engine that lived (👓🗲).
Heck, we can’t be certain the person who wakes up every morning is the same as the person who went to sleep. Continuity, like the Ship of Theseus, is the only thing that links us. And if this is the case, then you can bet your crypto some billionaire right now is looking at DeepSouth and wondering how far we are from putting their brain sim in one to run their estate from beyond the grave. If Deepsouth/EMusk was booted up the moment he died, would that be a legitimate case of immortality?
If this is the case, we can assume that any life is a continuity of ourselves, which doesn’t mean much without our memories and experiences that establish who we are. By the same argument the Ship of Theseus continues today as the USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier as well as the Space Shuttle Columbia.
The most convincing theory to me is Integrated Information Theory.
Basically the more integrated the information in a system is, the more potential for conscious experience. Different structures or “shapes” of information translate to different qualia, like the color red or the sound of a note.
Integration in this case means that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts; you can’t remove a piece without affecting the whole/most of the system.
This is an answer to the Ship of Theseus problem, because the old pieces of wood are getting un-integrated from the whole, they are no longer the ship. The ship made from old pieces is a new ship, with it’s pieces integrated into a new whole.
Animals would be as conscious as the complexity of their brains (not necessarily smarter), and yes this is a spectrum of consciousness.
Computers and AI are far off from this requirement. We purposely designed them to be modular and not overly integrated with itself. Even LLM’s have their neurons in strict layers that has information travel from Input to Output.
No concrete proof, but the theory is very robust and could maybe even be provable one day.
This would only be the case if reincarnation is completely random, and it depends on what we consider an individual. You could arbitrarily define a human as just a cluster of cells, does that mean you could reincarnate as a single human cell?
Similarly, could you be reincarnated as a society? A body and a society are both a conglomerate of individual organisms…
Now I want to write a book about a world where individual humans don’t have immortal souls but cities do. Would a person moving to a different city be like someone having a blood transfusion? If dead cities can be reincarnated as other cities, does that mean current-day Istanbul was Constantinople in a past life? Or does reincarnation happen more randomly, and Constantinople just happened to become some random town in New Jersey? Is genocide like murder for cities, or is it more like having a limb amputated?
oh shit i’ve accidentally reinvented hetalia from first principles
Andy Weir (author of The Martian and others) once wrote a short story called The Egg that was kinda similar in premise (though obviously not as a meme). You can read it here It’s maybe a 5 minute read, very good
I mean…I wouldn’t be depressed if I were a bacterium.
Bacterium life 🦠
Reject humanity, return to prokaryote.
Seize the means of reproduction from the bouigious organelles!
No more exploitation of other beings, let’s go cyanobacteria!
Yeah, like, even as fungi best case you connect a vast rainforest and provide communication and transportation services (also for sharing forest memes) … only to be keenly aware at all moments of how pollution, deforestation, and climate change is damaging the forest in real time. Yeah, no.
Even if I were an undead virus (a virus that is dead-ish, not a virus causing undead humans to pollute the planet even after death) I wouldn’t know how to (re)arrange my genome to target some apes.
Bacterium is peak lifeform, just settle into a literal rock, sleep a few billion years.
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Well, same for humans, there is no way we are this stupid. Just a bunch of natural algorithms and instincts.
(Also you saying that bacteria are “conscious”? What does that even mean? We all make active decisions all the time.)
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But how do you know that anyone except yourself can suffer or ‘be aware’?
If fungi can make decisions based on data, isn’t that what we do with neurons?
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Fungus is cool as shit. I wouldn’t mind being a part of a large mycelium hivemind.
Join the Fungiverse
You die and become a bacterium
billion years later: still that bacterium.
When a bakterium divides, what becomes of the soul? We need some rules for that.
