Most animals are triploblastic. Our bodies have three layers - skin/muscle/guts. Only a handful of primitive animals get to defy this. There's variation in human forms but the basic structure of our anatomy is clearly defined.
When we try to imagine an alien consciousness the first thing we think about is what it would be like to be a tree. Trees are kind of like us in that they're tall and vertical and have upper and lower limbs. But they can grow as many limbs as they want in whatever order and arrangement, because they have no internal structure of bones and muscle that needs to be maintained.
Same thing with brains. We have one brain in one skull in one head. As we begin to think of consciousness in more biological terms we start trying to imagine what our minds would be like if the brains could "grow" into each other. Like grafting fruit trees. There's always a little jealousy here, we're mad that the flexibility of plants has been denied us.
The Thing and Parasyte are both "what if the human body worked like a plant?" Or a fungus which is basically the same but creepier.
You have to wonder if a plantlike intelligence would see anything to emulate about our own system. Are there benefits to having individual and separate brains or is it just an unfortunate structural necessity of being a vertebrate?
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time does a great job of imagining how highly evolved spiders might think. The follow-up did the same for octopi, but didn't work as well for me (though that may well be because I listened to it on audiobook, which is a medium I rarely connect with as well as a book, where I can control the speed to suit my comprehension or lack of)
I am currently reading the third book! Was also thinking of this series as I read this post.
Similarly, I think you could parallel some of the themes in this post with the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (i.e. Three Body Problem).
Some of the East vs. West dichotomy stuff gets muddled when you see just how different Cixin Liu's perspective is than either the Western or Japanese perspectives presented in the works discussed in this post.
Most animals are triploblastic. Our bodies have three layers - skin/muscle/guts. Only a handful of primitive animals get to defy this. There's variation in human forms but the basic structure of our anatomy is clearly defined.
When we try to imagine an alien consciousness the first thing we think about is what it would be like to be a tree. Trees are kind of like us in that they're tall and vertical and have upper and lower limbs. But they can grow as many limbs as they want in whatever order and arrangement, because they have no internal structure of bones and muscle that needs to be maintained.
Same thing with brains. We have one brain in one skull in one head. As we begin to think of consciousness in more biological terms we start trying to imagine what our minds would be like if the brains could "grow" into each other. Like grafting fruit trees. There's always a little jealousy here, we're mad that the flexibility of plants has been denied us.
The Thing and Parasyte are both "what if the human body worked like a plant?" Or a fungus which is basically the same but creepier.
You have to wonder if a plantlike intelligence would see anything to emulate about our own system. Are there benefits to having individual and separate brains or is it just an unfortunate structural necessity of being a vertebrate?
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time does a great job of imagining how highly evolved spiders might think. The follow-up did the same for octopi, but didn't work as well for me (though that may well be because I listened to it on audiobook, which is a medium I rarely connect with as well as a book, where I can control the speed to suit my comprehension or lack of)
I am currently reading the third book! Was also thinking of this series as I read this post.
Similarly, I think you could parallel some of the themes in this post with the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (i.e. Three Body Problem).
Some of the East vs. West dichotomy stuff gets muddled when you see just how different Cixin Liu's perspective is than either the Western or Japanese perspectives presented in the works discussed in this post.