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Comment by timeagain | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty.

In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “right” since I’m just a tube? What would being cut in half and becoming two separate organisms feel like? Sensing vibrations with no ear drums? Do I have a “plan” or are my actions more passive responses?

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And most important of all, would she still love you if you were a worm?

If she was a crab, she certainly would.

There's a story about a man who woke up as a dung bettle...

The Metamorphosis? Yeah, a pretty sad story to say the least

We've all been there at some point in one way or another

The book "the tree of possibilities" wrote by Bernard Werber, contains twenty "philosophy-fiction" stories. One of them is about a scientist who want to "free" its brain from its body, so he put his brain in a jar, and just...think. I think it kind of relate to your comment. It's a good reading (an other story is the left hand of one guy taking control and starting to act as a human).

That sounds amazing. Did you read it in English? I can only find it in French and Korean.

I've read it in French, looks like it have never been translated in English. They are quite short novels, so maybe automatic traduction can work.

It is sometimes surprising to learn which organisms are more or less like us. Annelid worms like the ones you likely find in the soils where you live do have brains, for example, albeit ones with different characteristics than those of crustaceans or mammals [1]. They don’t have lungs though sometimes gills. Are they more like crabs or humans? Tough to say but fun to ponder. Incidentally, of the marine invertebrates, the ones we are most closely related to are tunicates and salps, which are blobs that filter feed [2]. Who said cladistics wasn’t cool?

Imagine all the ways we can’t imagine how other organisms experience their existence. But as you learn more about their biology it’s incredible how much we share.

1. https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...

2. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/tunicates-not-...

One difficult thing to imagine is having no thoughts!

At least not the way I/we have thoughts.

Most worms don't actually become separate organisms when cut in half, it's just a myth based on their reaction. They usually just die after while.

The only ones that I know of which do so are Planarians [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian

Well, we can imagine all sorts of things which have nothing to do with how things actually are. It gets us into problems all the time. The trouble with your imagination is that you are imagining being the crab while remaining yourself, as yourself. But this is nonsense. If you were a crab, you wouldn't be you as your identity is to be human, with all the typical human powers and capacities. But when you merely imagine being a crab, you essentially maintain your human identity while changing some minor features here and there. You are effectively anthropomorphizing.

We don't live in some weird Cartesian universe where minds can be attached to any old living thing (though, strictly speaking, Descartes only recognized that human beings have minds).

You're imagining something you think is what it's like to be a crab, or what you think it's like to have more legs, etc., but why do you have any confidence that's what it actually is like?

Interesting. How would it feel to know you’re just a battery?

Well you’re just a battery and you don’t seem to mind!

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