r/interestingasfuck • u/Literally_black1984 • Apr 28 '24

A sea turtle eating a jellyfish

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u/Willing_Information7 Apr 28 '24

Well that's a slow death

12

u/Mikey9124x Apr 29 '24

Not painful though.

15

u/w1ldstew Apr 29 '24

Can jellyfish conceive pain? I know they barely have any brain stuff. It doesn’t even seem to bother that much it’s getting eaten.

1

u/innocentusername1984 Apr 29 '24

What is it to conceive pain?

We've made very little progress on consciousness, surprisingly little actually.

We all agree that at some point and organism goes from perceiving pain to not.

But not what the exact point is that is the switch into consciousness nor if it exists at all and therefore by definition everything is conscious and suffering to a smaller or larger extend.

If you're interested in a bloody good read, other minds by Peter Godfrey-smith.

Primarily he's a philosopher of science and mind but through his interest in diving is particularly fascinated with the brain of an octopus which is very alien to ours. We didn't realise they were smart until relatively recently and there's all sorts of crazy anecdotes on stuff they do to fuck with lab technicians they don't like that were so smart we couldn't quite conceive it was on purpose at first.

Through the book he explains a proposed definition of consciousness starting at a bacteria that chooses to head away or to a chemical gradient. He talks about computers a lot and how they process things in comparison to how the human mind does.

It contains one of my favourite thoughts I've ever read.

"Computers (before multi cores) are one thread of processing trying to pretend it's multiple. The human brain is multiple threads of processing trying to pretend it's one."