This is a sort of pattern. (1) We create categories and concepts that rely on categories: molecules, organisms, species, galaxies; water, rebecca, potatoes, multiple personality disorder. (2) We use those categories to describe and understand things, engineer and theorize using them. We have evolution and chemistry and potato salad recipes. (3) Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not <i>really</i> real, you know what I mean. Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a contagious cancer. A mutated cell in some devil reproduced until it was lumps, then the devils bit another delve in the face (they're not nice animals) and some of that cancer jumped into another one and spread. Now, that cancer has outlived his maker and is going around spreading in the world with complete disregard for the concepts of organism or species and behaving like a bacteria, virus or somesuch. Instead of spreading normally like the rest of the devil by sexy with other devils it jumps into the other devil's face (sometimes during sex, they are not nice animals). Maybe one day it will evolve into our replacement. Maybe it will find symbioses with sheep and become a beneficial gut fauna (it is a taste devil after all).<p>We make up these categories for convenience. They are not obligated to comply.
Really interesting subject. I'm more like a forest than an animal!<p>If humans are higher-order animals on top of cells and bacteria (us not caring much about them and them not being aware of us), are humans also the cells of some super-er animals?<p>Apparently the Buddha said that one of the characteristics of reality is that there is no such thing as "you", no unchanging entity that could be called the perceiver of all these perceptions. I guess we're like the boat whose parts are all replaced over time.
This is really cool. Our bodies are essentially battle fields with different replicating agents struggling for control and a "place" in the future. Any cooperative "agreement" is loose and subject to change at any point (for example cancer), and those offspring stem cells invading a mother's brain: mind-blowing (no pun intended).
The way all organisms depend on the ecosystem for their basic function paints human-made self-replication in a different light. I used to think that we'll reach the proper level of nanotech if we learn to make machines that build themselves pretty much from the scratch. Throw a rock in, out swarm of robots go. I used to think that's how nature works. That it eats atoms or simple molecules and then spews out organisms.<p>But it turns out, nature is cheating. There are things that human cells can't make. We depend on other, smaller organisms to make them. For instance, we can't make vitamins ourselves, we need to source them from outside. It turns out that even for replication, cells need to have proper prefabs available in the environment. For instance, we're swimming in nitrogen, and plants can't use it anyway because it's not in a proper form.<p>Which means that if we want to copy this ability, we need to just focus on "vitamins". That is, all the hard-to-make stuff that requires large-scale, high-tech industry to be produced. If we can tile the area where a robot operates with universal microcontrollers and accept that as a part of its environment, then the problem of self-replication becomes much easier. There's a big volcano^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfactory operating somewhere, pumping out those small prefabs, and robots are "eating" them and incorporating into themselves and their children.<p>Yes, it's cheating. But nature cheats too.
I agree that humans aren't simple unitary individuals, but calling us "superorganisms" kinda devalues the word. If we're superorgansisms then so are cats, dogs, mice, birds, and anything else that relies on bacteria for digestion or has reproductive complexities like chimerism. This would probably include ants... making an ant colony a superorganism of superorganisms, so we'd need a new word for that.<p>How about we figure out which species <i>are</i> unitary individuals and give them a word? Mono-organisms or something.
On "meta-organisms," which several have mentioned...<p>It's not a stretch to think of human groups who act in a coordinated way as meta-organisms... In fact, we do it every day. "Google" does not exist -- it's a coordinated group of people acting as a corporation.<p>Even though they're spatiotemporally discontinuous, these organisms seem to be obviously real, even though this leads to some observations that sound really pagan. These entities (like Google, or governments) exert their own wills and controls over our actions and environments... We're basically their subjects.<p>If you're right-brained at all, try visualizing these entities. It can make for some interesting impressions :)<p>Oh, and on terminology: I think it's fair to refer to ourselves (or any higher-order but spatiotemporally continuous organisms) as "super-organisms." I think of higher-order, spatiotemporally _discontinous_ organisms "meta-organisms"
It's arguable that all organisms today are superorganisms. Try to grow a plant in inert soil without bacteria, for example.<p>You probably have to go back 3.5 billion years, to the dawn of life, to find organisms that did not depend on any other organism to grow and/or reproduce. And maybe not even then; it's possible that early life arrived on Earth from somewhere else, on a meteorite or comet.
What is of course interesting, is that these organisms, when working together, can create things such as the experience of pleasure. This makes me wonder what kind of experience could arise if humans organize into a single "meta" organism, and if the "lower" individuals would experience anything of the meta-experience.
Very shallow article, but very good problem raised into public attention. But rumours about Toxoplasmic pandemia in Britain are grossly exaggerated. Also our unique relationship with parasites like worms are not even touched.<p>UPD: more than 80% of Japanese people (living in Japan) have worms untreated and Japanese people life expectancy is dramatically better than in any other nation.
The fact that people are living with only a single brain hemisphere (or less) with relatively little difficulty has always been enough to make this real for me. I can easily imagine a hypothetical scientist slicing half of my brain out and transplanting it into another body, and that body acting as a new individual.<p>It's only the constant feedback and proximity of my parts that makes me feel unitary.
"A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control"<p>Interesting article, but I think it should be careful with exaggerations like this, "a large number of humans" is something entirely different than "possibly one if you had a born or unborn twin"
Kind of a fluffy piece to me, but that might be because as I write this, I am looking up on my shelf with "The Selfish Gene" sitting underneath "The Extended Phenotype".