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I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

Of course, there is some intelligence in any life form behaviour, but if you want to say that a tomato plant is intelligent than you need to use another word or set of words for more advanced life forms. Putting in the same bag a tomato plant and a dolphin clearly makes the word intelligence so vague it loses almost every practical meaning.

To clarify also the part where it talks about earth being an organism. I've thought of this as well, the whole universe could be a life form, each planet and star in it a cell in its body. It's a possibility. Or maybe even our whole universe is just a cell in someone's body.

It's possible, but I fear there is little science in the people of that article and just old fashion Animism and protect "the mother earth" natural spiritual thinking that has existed for thousands of years. Those people see the world as if they are druids in a fantasy novel. I see myself more as a wizard. We might have different opinions. I will take them seriously when they can LITERALLY speak with animals daily in useful manners and tell vines to move. Until then is just (a) Fantasy. I can summon electricity and fireballs (with technology), if they want to say they are druids they better step up their enchantments. Telling "sit" to a dog and then writing long articles on how dogs are so intelligent doesn't cut it for me.


The term I’ve seen used the most is “basal cognition”. It’s used to describe agentic problem solving behavior seen at lower scales and in different problem spaces where we normally have trouble imagining intelligence. Michael Levin’s paper, “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”[0] is a good, readable explanation of the concept. He does a ton of YouTube talks explaining it as well.[1] Very watchable, and pretty mind-blowing. It’s not wishy washy animism. He and his lab are doing rigorous experiments and finding some very unusual things.

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/ar...

[1] https://youtu.be/StqX-LH0IN8?si=NhwMdWxBLZrghUom

While it shares some similarities with animism, it’s a fundamentally materialist viewpoint, which puts it at odds with animism. Materialism is so rooted within our culture that I think it can be hard to fully grok alternative viewpoints.
Trees giving you the very thing you need to live every minute wasn’t enough of a compromise for you? They’ve quite negotiable with us.

Gotta watch The Happening again.

To be clear, trees did not "give" us oxygen. Trees evolved from bushes which evolved from algaes, which evolved from some mono-cell life forms which are a common ancestors to us as well. They were shaped by natural selection, it was indeed awesome for them to get out of the water and start consuming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They did not give us oxygen though, there was no high level consciousness of gifting life to others as your sentence is implying. This said, trees are awesome and we should definitely not cut them or burn them for no reason or pure sadism. We should though also consider them as a parte of the environment where live. If we need them and there is plenty and there aren't other constraints we can use them to build things. Having too much carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere is a constraint very important to value. We don't want to literally destroy our home. I can keep this thoughts rationally in my brain without having to come up with metaphors where the giant rock we happened to be on is a "mother" nurturing us. The earth is not our "mother", we evolved here because simply all other rocks did not have the right conditions to sustain life. The universe is mostly a harsh and cold place, we should save/improve/increase the places that can be home. I feel though the people that start to lean into Animism are just not very scientific, they mean well, but they won't learn all the technology tools that could help me preserve our home planet more effectively.

Ending on a positive note, many scientists both love nature and are rationally scientific (rather than romantic). All the awesome work being done with using LLM to speak with whales and recognize better dogs emotions and pain levels is very inspiring.

It’s not that we’re unscientific, it’s just that we’re putting science aside unless it corroborates things. It’s totally a terrible process, there’s no evidence.

Some people over time cannot put down the fact that there’s just way too many coincidences. If you just pile up what it took for you to be here (let’s include your one in a million chance of out swimming the other sperm along with a perfect planet, possibly perfect parents, list goes on), I think you’d at least agree it’s one miracle after another.

I can sit here and measure the anger on your face based on the metric of how red your face is but I’ll never know why you are angry. You can tell me, but even then, is it true? That’s the issue with science, that measuring and collecting observations won’t reveal the true nature. So it must be put aside, at least to investigate the other possibility.

I don’t see how people aren’t open minded about there being more than a clinical understanding of this experience.

From my other comment:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...

Is it so hard to believe there is a global frequency?

You perceive one voice and give it a position of authority.

What if it isn't?

What if it's many voices and they compete for control?

This is 100% my experience. There are different captains, but since they share the same memory, there's an illusion that they are one. When you look into who is in the driver seat now at different times, it is clear that there are multiple drivers. Which one is driving now depends on the context and state of my brain.

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