75
We May Be Surrounded by Trillions of Conscious Beings, Research Suggests—And They Aren’t Human
(www.popularmechanics.com)
Is it ghosts? I'm gonna pick ghosts.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
75 points (80.5% liked)
science
27421 readers
255 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Humans have consistently moved the goalposts on "sentience" explicitly to ensure that we are the only living thing that fits into the category.
very interesting take. so, i do think that other species are sentient, like insects and plants.
the exceptional treatment that humans claim for themselves has to do with other things, not sentience. humans fulfill an important role in nature, because we do work that nobody else could do. with human's effort it's possible to make life multi-planetary which would not be possible otherwise. so the plants kinda should pay us for the service that we do for them.
plants should pay us on the off chance we pull our collective heads out of our asses to stop committing global ecocide and switch to benevolent stewarship of life itself instead some day? youll be pleased to learn the value of plants' lives is paid out in extracted value and we compensate them by basically encouraging the plants to be grateful for the exposure.
Lots of pseudo science mental masturbation going on in this comment section
An LLM Writes A Headline—And It's Not Deviating From The Usual Formula
tbf the machine learned it well from decades of human journalists who already applied this one trick that doctors hate.
Is this the game where we stretch the meaning of words beyond usefulness to force an exciting story. Consciousness is a peculiar state, if everything is then nothing is, is that the point of the exercise.
Consciousness is a peculiar state, if everything is then nothing is, is that the point of the exercise.
nah i don't think that everything is conscious but all living beings are.
My point is that if you do accept that human consciousness is a special case then you would still need a word for that level of sentience, and why not keep consciousness as that word and find another for the more general appreciation of environment that non-human terrestrial organisms possess. In truth I think there is already a word for that general condition and the word is life, I think an awareness of your place and a feeling for its beauty is a defining characteristic of all life.
People stretch the word "consciousness" to include things like free-will, human-level intelligence, articulating an understanding of the world, having ideologies, etc.
It's very close to the classical greek word ψυχή, soul, from where we get psyche. And very close to how many christians have understood "soul".
But often scientific inquiry leads us to realize how fictional and self-serving our understandings are. Souls aren't real and consciousness in the brain is just an information sorting process.
Much of life may exhibit that process to some degree. Unsurprising, really - information sorting as complex as ours should have precursors.
Is this the game where we stretch the meaning of words beyond usefulness to force an exciting story. Consciousness is a peculiar state, if everything is then nothing is, is that the point of the exercise.
No, you just don't know what you're talking about...
A simple aromatic ring can experience two states and prefer one or the other, they're not only a basic conciouness, but they're OCD too. Whichever state they prefer, they start organizing shit like that. And that leads to biological life.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10068-4
That paper covers a lot of what you'll need to know for that to make sense.
But that's also why true alien life is a 50/50 death sentence no matter what, if they have "left hand biology" any contamination would be a total wipeout. At the base level the new addition would outcompete the host base level, because nothing would be capable of using it as food.
Like that shit in the 80s with Revinar, it was an HIV medication that was liquid, however a crystalline molecule was created accidentally. Which made an entire production facility inoperable, no matter what they did they kept getting crystals not liquid.
Then it started spreading to other facilities and they could track it from specific people moving between locations.
Because just a single molecule in a lab was enough to make all future distiliations copy it.
Revinar is like a brick mansions, "left hand biology" is the scale of a single brick.
And an Aromatic ring can just be some kid who spends all day making little bricks for fun.
this is like the thing about prions which are proteins that make other proteins fold into a copy of themselves, thereby spreading.
they're not alive as we understand it (they don't have genetic code), they're just a single big molecule copying itself all over the world.
another example, as you've already said, is crystals growing over time (metabolism) in aequous solutions.
Got a source for this "Revinar" crystal business? I wasn't able to find what you are mentioning when I search for it, and it conflicts with my understanding of chemistry.
In general:
It is hypothesized that contact with a single microscopic seed crystal of the new polymorph can be enough to start a chain reaction causing the transformation of a much larger mass of material.[5] Widespread contamination with such microscopic seed crystals may lead to the impression that the original polymorph has "disappeared". In a few cases, such as progesterone and paroxetine hydrochloride, the disappearance gradually spread across the world, and it is suspected that it is because Earth's atmosphere has over time become permeated with tiny seed crystals. It is believed that seeds as small as a few million molecules (about 10−15 grams) are sufficient for converting one morph to another, making unwanted disappearance of morphs particularly difficult to prevent.[3] It is hypothesized that "unintentional seeding" may also be responsible for a related phenomenon, where a previously difficult-to-crystallize compound becomes easier to crystallize over time.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph
The actual thing I was thinking of and not my butchered spelling:
During development—ritonavir was introduced in 1996—only the crystal form now called form I was found; however, in 1998, a lower free energy,[54] more stable polymorph, form II, was discovered. This more stable crystal form was less soluble, which resulted in significantly lower bioavailability. The compromised oral bioavailability of the drug led to temporary removal of the oral capsule formulation from the market.[53] As a consequence of the fact that even a trace amount of form II can result in the conversion of the more bioavailable form I into form II, the presence of form II threatened the ruin of existing supplies of the oral capsule formulation of ritonavir; and indeed, form II was found in production lines, effectively halting ritonavir production.[52] Abbott withdrew the capsules from the market, and prescribing physicians were encouraged to switch to a Norvir suspension.[55] It has been estimated that Abbott lost more than US$250 million as a result, and the incident is often cited as a high-profile example of disappearing polymorphs.[56]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritonavir
But thanks for actually asking.
And sorry I guess for being off a decade, names and dates aren't as easy for me as concepts and science.
@givesomefucks @TriplePlaid Veritasium did a video about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksn5yrsC3Wg
There was a recent Verstasium video about it.
load more comments
(16 replies)
I remember the first time I did mushrooms too......
Every time I see a headline like this, I think without even having to look, "Popular Mechanics, you crazy bastards are at it again."
Can we ask them to take us out before WE destroy our planet
It's not just plants...
A cell is part of your body, but is still it's own unique thing.
And it is conscious.
That's 30-40 trillion cells per person.
What matters is how big of a microtubule racetrack can be built to support higher consciousness. But even what we think of as human consciousness is just a middle manager summarizing and reacting to shit.
Most people just don't know shit about how any of it works because science spent 40+ years saying the smartest mathematician alive had a flawed premise. Since humans can't maintain the quantum superposition in laboratory setting, we insisted evolution couldnt figure out how to do it in a human body.
But we can, and we do.
And those microtubules that link up to create that race track where quantum superposition is possible, are in literally every living cell. They're the same thing that pulls DNA apart for replication, they're fucking everywhere, in every living cell.
This is exactly where my thoughts have been leading. Consciousness is a fundamentally INTRA-cellular process, that is augmented by INTER-cellular effects. Neurons are merely specialized to support (among other things) higher consciousness, but every cell participates in some form of it.
These ideas go a long way to explain things like the somatic effects of trauma, personality aspects being transmitted through organ transplant, the obviously aware and self-interested behavior of micro-organisms, the way mental complexity doesn't really seem to scale with organism size, and a lot of other things that I have been thinking about that perhaps get a bit more metaphysical.
I suspect that consciousness is not generated but rather captured and exploited by biological systems.
I'm writing a game that explores a lot of these concepts.
If that game isn't too large, I'm definitely interested in seeing it/participating.
load more comments
(10 replies)
view more: next ›