alt Hacker NewsI am more and more convinced that the separation into different living beings is somewhat artificial. If there are multicellular organisms, then an ecosystem as a whole can also be considered a life form.
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delusional • today at 7:41 AM
This isn't really a new thought. It's exactly what's meant by terms such as "circle of life" or "ecosystem". The separation of individual beings is entirely artificial, or if your being more charitable and technical, analytical and descriptive.
Science is not reality. We abstract reality to make nice and useful models. Reality violates our models constantly.
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Maybe a key distinction is collaboration vs. competition. The more collaboration between individual "units" (e.g. cells in a multicellular organism or organisms in an ecosystem) the more they behave like a single thing. Ant colonies are also a strong example.