How much human individuals resemble cells

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨StephenT@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/27537921

How much do you think human individuals in the society resemble cells in a multicellar creature? Should a man have cognitions, so how about a cell to some extent? Are we enslaving the cells in our body to maintain the existence of our consciousness, by reduction in personalities and specification in cooperative functions? Would a collective mind of a more advanced and multipotent consciousness consisted of millions of people outperform single human individuals and hence utilize the latter to be pure gears of the grand machine?

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Contramuffin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The questions you’re asking about already exist. Portguese man-o-war are colonies of multiple organisms. Bees and ants are considered superorganisms.

It’s not going to happen to humans, if that’s what you’re asking. The evolutionary incentive simply isn’t there to form a superorganism physically, though you could definitely make the argument that society and culture can be interpreted as a superorganism

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- StephenT@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Oh yes portguese man-o-war are an excellent example I’d love to take, which I hadn’t heard of before, so thanks for sharing it! And surely it doesn’t seem possible for human to be tied together into one organic object, for we are structured with such mobility and, independent will, if I may say so. Still, for Portuguese man-of-war the way its polypuses are linked with each other has much less density than the way cells compose one single polypus. As for human it might just be the civilization we have, considering we have rules to restrict the behaviours of our members, and speciality differentiation making persons knowing a little bit of everything but don’t specialtize in one particular field hard to make a living or simply having most of their time dealing with specialized jobs assigned to them so the collective body gets better functioning units. And the way we elect the capable people might also contribute to the generic evolution to better fit as a component to the whole. And it gets more distinct when it comes to one country instead of all human on earth. Interactions between nations seems fairly like that between multicellar creatures to me, having some sections of its smaller components making the decision and some conduct actual actions, and even, show signs of cognition. So would it be appropriate to call countries as organic individuals about to be having cognitions of ‘ME’ and we are somewhat going through the stages before they’re completely formed? And how do you think of what drives the direction of evolution?
  
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givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Are we enslaving the cells in our body

Whoever wrote that must have slept thru every biology class they’ve ever taken…

Like, there’s some decent questions in there, but they’ve all been asked for over a thousand years.

It reads like someone used a chat bot and told it to try and sound like a philosopher.

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- StephenT@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Sorry, not trying to sound like a philosopher or what, but I do appreciate it if you’d like to offer me some materials on it if it’s so asked already that much times. I’ve just been curious and interested about arguments on that and not sure where to start searching for them.
  
  As for your quote, by saying ‘enslaving the cells’ I didn’t mean that a person controls all the behaviours of his/her cells, but rather, having noticed that every single cell is structured to have at least functions to intentionally keep itself alive, cells in multicellar bodies with immune system willingly obey orders for a suicide when needed, which seems to me that an individual of cell is erased from the system for the good of the collective body.
  
  Again I’m not trying to be smart and I wont try to make myself less look like a fool or some. If there’s fool in it I’d be very happy to know and I just like to talk about things. So why not tell me what do you think of it?
  
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