• nodsocket@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    This would only be the case if reincarnation is completely random, and it depends on what we consider an individual. You could arbitrarily define a human as just a cluster of cells, does that mean you could reincarnate as a single human cell?

    • Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      Similarly, could you be reincarnated as a society? A body and a society are both a conglomerate of individual organisms…

      • outer_spec@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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        9 months ago

        Now I want to write a book about a world where individual humans don’t have immortal souls but cities do. Would a person moving to a different city be like someone having a blood transfusion? If dead cities can be reincarnated as other cities, does that mean current-day Istanbul was Constantinople in a past life? Or does reincarnation happen more randomly, and Constantinople just happened to become some random town in New Jersey? Is genocide like murder for cities, or is it more like having a limb amputated?

        oh shit i’ve accidentally reinvented hetalia from first principles

      • gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de
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        9 months ago

        Yes, in fact, only for higher animals it is possible to draw a clear line between them. For plants (clones) this is less possible.

        So considering the life of anything other than an animal, probably there is no clear “I” anywhere else. It is always rather a “we”.

    • groet@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      The cells of your body are part of you. They share the same DNA and descend from the same cell (the fertilized egg) and depend on each other to stay alive. However there are more gut bacteria inside of you than there are cells of yourself (they are a lot smaller than human cells). And they are not related to you. So you could reincarnate as a gut bacteria of somebody else

      • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Me: Dies

        Me: Wakes up as a bacterium that was just asexually produced inside my former life’s corpse

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        However there are more gut bacteria inside of you than there are cells of yourself

        That’s a debunked myth. The number of human cells and gut bacteria is about the same which is still astonishing. If you ask me to, I can look up the YouTube video I’ve learned it from

      • nodsocket@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        OK, but there are some organisms that can live either as single cells or in colonies, like algae. How do you categorize them? Plus there are some colonial animals like Portuguese man o war that are composed of hundreds of separate individuals connected to each other, or ant colonies which work as a collective superorganism. And even in humans there are some cells that do not stay attached, like sperm cells. Could you reincarnate as a sperm cell?

      • angrystego@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        The fact that your cells share your DNA doesn’t mean they can’t have their own consiousness. They also don’t all use the DNA the same way (that’s why they differ). Some of your cells roam your body freely and even learn at “school” (certain leukocytes), and it’s quite easy to imagine they have some kind of consiousness. Recomended watch: Il était une fois la vie.

    • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Maybe every one of your cells each gets reincarnated as a distinct single cell. Some end up as part of multicellular organisms and some of which are single-celled organisms.