alt Hacker NewsWhat is it like to be your left kidney? Your brain is connected to it through nerves, which ofc are conscious too in your worldview. If fungus and rocks are consciously linked, there should be a conscious link between your brain and your kidney. Yet, you have no idea what your kidney is experiencing every day, it certainly doesn't have any deep thoughts. And when the kidney gets taken out of your body, your conscious experience won't change. When your brain gets surgically or violently altered on the other hand...
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shepherdjerred • today at 12:13 AM
Dumb question. My left kidney is geodistributed so that my consciousness is highly available
I don't know, we don't communicate in a way that I could ask it.
But the principles of biological organization are often fractal. If you observe a phenomenon at one level (selection acting on an organism, say) you can often zoom out and see it again (acting at the ecosystem level) or you can zoom in and see it (at the organ level, the tissue level, or even on certain macromolecules).
It's not necessary for me to be able to strike up a conversation with my kidney for me to see that it's well situated to experience changes in my diet a bit like how we experience el nino, the machinations of my immune system might be like politics to it. I'll never know for sure, so I err on the side of caution.