Slipper-shaped, it has an oral slit along one side, which is lined with tiny hairs. These constantly moving cilia pull in even tinier microscopic particles of food, bacteria for the most part, so that they end up in a mouth gullet. This gullet leads to a food vacuole inside the animal where it is digested (The Anatomy of Paramecium 1964). When a paramecium encounters food, it turns its body so that the food can be pulled into its oral slit.
How does the paramecium know to hunt food? How does it know to turn its body when it finds something digestible? Once again, I can only answer with the word instinct. The tiny one-celled creature wants to survive. As primitive as it is with no brain as such, it “knows” it wants to survive at all costs.
Trillion-Celled Descartes
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a philosopher, scientist, and mathematician. Born in La Haye, France, to an aristocratic family, Descartes lived a life of relative ease devoting much of his time to scientific research and philosophic reflection. Although he published works related to Earth’s position in our solar system and also the nature of light, after hearing of Galileo’s trial in Rome, he suppressed his own works. Descartes was known for using algebraic laws to solve geometrical problems. It is often thought that without his application of mathematics to physics, the development of the calculus a generation later by Isaac Newton (1642-1727) might not have happened (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Descartes is most well known for his philosophical ideas. He is often referred to as the Father of Modern Philosophy because his highlighting of the importance of rational thought laid the basis for modern scientific inquiry (The Life and Times of a Genius). What we gain through our senses can be doubted. It is the mind that gives a firm foundation to all true knowledge.
In his Discourse on Method, Descartes arrived at his conclusion by systematically doubting the reality of every belief that ultimately came through his senses. If Mindy Dog, mentioned above, was alive in Descartes time (1596-1650), he would look at her to see a black shape with fur, four feet, and an insatiable appetite for food.
But upon reflection, what he saw of Mindy, in the old Scholastic sense, were mere sensations of accidents. Mindy’s blackness, her shape, the appearance of her fur, and her hunger were all qualities that came through his senses. Descartes believed that his mind assembled these appearances into a form that he recognized as “dog.” If it wasn’t for his mind, Descartes would say that Mindy might not be out there in reality at all. She existed only within the confines of his mind.
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