When you’re young, everyone tells you that you are a unique individual. The idea of individuality stretches back centuries, but as we learn more about our bodies, some biologists have suggested that the microorganisms within us mean we’re more like a collection of trillions of organisms than an individual person.
Source: vice.com
Philosophers use the term ‘intuition’ in a slightly different sense than it is used in everyday discourse. Generally speaking, the difference is that philosophical intuitions are based solely on understanding a proposition, while non-philosophical intuitions are not. If a proposition seems true to you simply on the basis of your understanding of it, and not on the basis of empirical evidence, testimony, memory or reasoning, then you are having an intuition in a philosophical sense that it is true.
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For decades, descriptions of viruses have straddled life and nonlife, a divide that usually isn’t difficult to navigate. Their hallmark characteristics, namely their small size, tiny genomes and parasitic dependence on cellular hosts for replication, set them apart from all other living things despite their animation. But that story has gotten far more puzzling — particularly since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, which was so large that researchers initially thought it was a bacterium.
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Can you trust the world to be consistent? Scientists don’t have much choice. They need to assume that objective observations of the universe can be trusted.
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