Watching pond microorganisms under a microscope reveals single-cell creatures like Euglena making decisions without brains: they hunt food, flee from threats, and respond to stimuli. One speaker argues consciousness is fundamental to biology itself, suggesting it came before learning rather than after.
I have like a microscope at home and I love looking at little microorganisms. Of course you do. I know, I thought you might like this actually. Just another one of my weird hobbies. But so you gotta like go to the pond down the road and you scoop some pond slime and then you put it under the microscope and you see all these little creatures.
This next one's pretty cool. It's a Euglena, but you can see the flagellum, which is pretty rare.
And you can interact with them. You can like poke them with a needle. Some of them are really small and just watch what they do. They're like zipping around looking for food. But if you start interacting with them, they go into a different mode. They start hiding. They'll run away from you. You will not be able to catch them. It's kind of crazy. And they'll have all these super interesting behaviors. They don't have a single neuron. They don't have a nervous system. They're making decisions somehow without any of the things we would think going into massive trained AI networks. So it's kind of an interesting question is what inside that little dude is making those decisions and having that little 5-micron guy be hyper-aware of what's going around it so it can survive.
I see.
So I'm pretty sure that guy from an evolutionary perspective has never had like a pencil poked in its face. And it's a totally novel situation.
Yeah. And so this has to be, this has to be built in even, even at that, that most basic level.
And I think consciousness is in that level. I think it's a very deep thing that gets deep into biology and physics. So I think consciousness came first. And then learning came from consciousness, not, not the other way around.
