This leans far too heavily on the word “intelligence” to describe the behavior of fungus. Yes indeed almost every organism reacts to the world around it, a good word for that is “alive”. Intelligence requires a lot more than simple stimulus response and internal changeable state, much less consciousness or sentience.
Calling mushrooms intelligent appeals to a certain sort of person and publishing articles like this are just taking advantage of those people for their attention.
The behavior of fungi is interesting without having to project intelligence on to it.
The article is written by a professor of biology, a scientist.
Per the article, a fungus can somehow remember where it previously found food. That degree of spatial awareness/memory is surprising.
Thus, in the way that biologists use the word "intelligence", fungi are intelligent. They'd be pretty dumb on any intelligence scale, but they have intelligence.
Yeah, hippies get a little too excited about the mind of the fungus or whatever when they hear the word "intelligence" applied to fungi. Who cares.
>Yeah, hippies get a little too excited about the mind of the fungus or whatever when they hear the word "intelligence" applied to fungi. Who cares.
I care about the inflation of terms like intelligence and the selling of science as "woah dude" to get clicks. A professor of biology isn't necessarily an expert in what should be called "intelligence" or immune to writing things worth criticism.
People are constantly amazed that things that are alive aren't as inert as a rock, yes life is cool, but you don't need to thing that everything which interacts with the environment has an experience like "thinking".
>Thus, in the way that biologists use the word "intelligence", fungi are intelligent
In the way that this biologist is using the word, but it is well worth questioning that use of the word. Saying everything in the world is intelligent sort of makes the term not have any meaning. Is my mechanical thermostat intelligent?
Really simple systems can have complex behavior when you don't understand how they work, and when you do figure the system out you can be impressed by how something simple can accomplish but simple machines aren't intelligent, intelligence is something different and much more special.
Where would you draw the border between "merely alive" and "intelligent"?
All multicellular living things seem to do some information processing. We would not agree to call a fungus intelligent, but would agree to call a human intelligent.
OK, from human we can descend to an ape, a dog, a crow, a sparrow, a crocodile, a goldfish, a flatworm, a jellyfish. Jellyfish don't have a dedicated nervous system and probably can't be called "intelligent". But can you determine where in the sequence there is a cliff, an abrupt enough change that delimits "intelligence"? I have trouble doing that in a meaningful, non-arbitrary way.
I think intelligence starts when the internal system controlling behavior develops a model of the outside environment and operates on it to drive decisions. That is, behavior is not through a simple physical mechanism or evolutionarily refined control system, but by means of general purpose model making.
Intelligence has degrees that begins with any abstraction and ends with arbitrary conscious theorizing and decision making (and a metric of how effective this ability is).
> I think intelligence starts when the internal system controlling behavior develops a model of the outside environment and operates on it to drive decisions.
But isn't that what one of the studied fungi did? To make a decision to grow into the direction where it found food the last time instead of every direction like it did before, it needs to have some sort of model of its environment in its memory, and needs to be able to make decisions based on that model.
> All multicellular living things seem to do some information processing.
Even unicellular ones has to do it, that is what a complex adaptive system that wants to sustain its life-state has to do. But none of this is symbolic processing the way humans are capable of. Reducing intelligence to mere adaptivity simply makes it a useless term.
Intelligence is a human-biased term. We basically use it, informally at least, to separate ourselves from the rest of nature "oh, they're not sentient, they're not intelligent".
Not everything in the world. Rocks are not intelligent. That's simple enough. They don't encode any information as far as I can see, they certainly don't actively process or transform it.
Living systems seem to. Even bacteria. Information theory seems too applicable when I look at DNA. All living systems seem intelligent, to varying degrees, as they are storing, duplicating and conditionally applying patterns to various biochemical problems in the task of propagating the rulebook of solutions further, the same task that the intelligence of the brain was evolved for. I worry this is more pseudospiritual woo rather than philosophy, though.
>Sailing stones (also called sliding rocks, walking rocks, rolling stones, and moving rocks) are part of the geological phenomenon in which rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without animal intervention. The movement of the rocks occurs when large sheets of ice a few millimeters thick and floating in an ephemeral winter pond break up on sunny days. Frozen during cold winter nights, these thin, floating ice panels are driven by wind and shove rocks at speeds up to 5 meters per minute.
The three types of pet rocks are: ingenius, sentimentalary, and anthropomorphic.
I invented and implemented a pie menu remote control touch screen interface on the PocketPC for sending commands to pet rocks (and it also works with many feral rocks):
The essential key to successfully training happy and obedient pet rocks is to repeatedly and consistently give them commands they can perform well, like "Sit", "Stay", "Play Dead", "Roll Over", "Gather Moss", and lots of positive reinforcement immediately after they obey what you tell them to do: "Good Rock!"
"alive" and "intelligent" shouldn't by synonyms. We should reserve the word "intelligent" for a certain considerably higher level of ability and complexity than can be ascribed to most anything living. When you say every living system is intelligent, the word ceases to add any information and you might as well just say "alive" and drop "intelligent".
For practical purposes, I get you. But if it is the same essence at its very core, maybe we shouldn't separate them so vigorously when we think about it philosophically.
Sure, but if you broaden the word "intelligent" to include the behavior of mycelium you probably need a different word for the quality only shared by vertebrates and cephalopods with more complex brains and internal representations of the world. Then somebody is going to use that word for fungus too and on and on. The key disagreement is the comparison in quality being measured between humans and to a lesser degree many animals and the degree of that quality had by fungi. The article is using a word in such a way that less familiar people make false associations between fungi and animals with brains. Like using the same word for a hammer and an industrial assembly robot. Ok sure, both "tools", but an article in a popular science magazine is trying to bring things close together which really are not, mostly because that kind of idea appeals to a kind of person who doesn't have very much knowledge. It's not harmful to debate the word intelligence, it probably is to go around using the word with a common understanding and broaden its meaning to make an appealing but misleading point.
So you are saying that portraying the levels of alive vs. intelligent as too similar can be detrimental and is used as a cheap tactic to appeal to a certain kind of lax thinking. I agree. I also think people can be too quick to write off systems or things they consider unintelligent. When we think it is just a “dumb” fungi or whatever else, it takes us longer to recognize true complexity and intelligence in a different form than we are used to. So I personally lean more into defending looser definitions of intelligence and aliveness because I think there’s a lot more to some of these systems we may not have the perspective for yet. I see the argument for a tighter definition too.
Hippies get a little too excited about the mind of the crystal and spirits inhabiting rocks and communicating through etherial protocols too, yet here we are in 2021, programming and communicating with silicon CPUs and wireless internet smartphones ensconced in shiny layers of Gorilla Glass that we obsessively carry around with us everywhere and continuously gaze into and hold up at each other and rub and tap on and talk and listen to.
You would appear to have not read the article, which specifically and persuasively makes points about the semantic limitations to a human-centered definition of intelligence. generalizing it to emergent and organized behavior will help us learn about all living things behavior as well as our own.
Diseases very often modify the behavior of the host to help them spread. They don't do it "intelligently" they do it on accident by hitting on a modification of the host which results in better transmission of the disease.
Covid makes you cough to spread little droplets filled with virii, rabies makes mammals violent so they'll bite to spread infection through saliva. It isn't through intense manipulation, it's by pulling a few levers. One species taking advantage of another species through biochemistry is extremely common. Every psychoactive drug, poison, etc. are all manipulations through chemistry.
This is a compiles and amazingly complex mechanism of propagation, but doesn't require any intelligence or awareness on the part of the fungus. Just millions of years of evolution and deterministic neurochemistry.
This is a very good point, but what alternative line in the sand do you draw? I would personally set the bar pretty high to showing purposeful control of behavior that is not the direct result of an evolved organism or species survival instinct, i.e., eating, fighting, fleeing, and mating doesn't count. Resourceful looking for food could count, as could certain camouflage maneuvers during flight, or multi-member hunting and defense, and all tool use. Definitely deception to win mates
"Intelligence" might be defined as requiring at least an internal abstracted ability to represent the world around which is not innate or hard-coded into biological mechanisms.
> This leans far too heavily on the word “intelligence” to describe the behavior of fungus.
True dat. However since there is not a single valid definition for intelligence, I started to speak and think of heuristics when others are referring to intelligence. As long as any traits can be learned and trained their testing has nothing to do with what I'd call intelligence.
Ok, but you have to admit those studies on slime mold being able to able to find the fastest path to food is impressive. It may not be individual ego-centric intelligence like we have (it seems to me more genetic and predetermined), but it's still impressive.
"Calling mushrooms intelligent appeals to a certain sort of person and publishing articles like this are just taking advantage of those people for their attention."
that being said, I wonder if enough quantifiable data exists to estimate the amount of computation possible, i.e. basic computer science/turing machine/kolmogorov complexity stuff?
Once on a trip, I realized that the mushroom of our zeitgeist, the Alice in Wonderland / Mario mushroom, Amanita Muscaria [1], when spoken, sounds a lot like "A man eater must scare ya"
And to me, this universe is (at least metaphorically) a man eater, and it constantly has reminders for us [2]. And if you subscribe to any sort of notion of morality, it seems like the things that do scare us, like regret, do make us live our lives in better ways.
Most people are afraid of psychedelics because even those of us who do them, find them to be jarring. They show us the shitty things we've done, who we really are, and how we really think subconsciously. They wake us up from the slog of our usual comfortable lives. The motivational speakers of time and time again have always said that comfort is the enemy. I find this is why even near death experiences are life-renewing. Anything that makes us afraid, reminds us how short our lives are, and how important every detail, every moment, every butterfly effect is. So the man eater must scare us, if it is to help us do what is expedient.
If I withhold the truth I will go straight to hell where I will eat not but burning hot coals and drink not but burning hot cola. Where fiery demons will punch me in the back. Where my soul will be chopped into confetti and strewn upon a parade of murderers and single mothers. Where my tongue will be torn out by ravenous birds.
Edit: I'm not mocking you: I just SWORE TO GOD that I was telling the truth! How much more sincerity and evidence do you want from me? A Wikipedia citation? ;)
>When the inebriated Ingle then played the song for Bushy, who wrote down the lyrics for him, he was slurring his words so badly that what was supposed to be "in the Garden of Eden" was interpreted by Bushy as "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".[11][12]
[11] Dave Thompson (2014). Iron Butterfly: Live at the Galaxy 1967 (Liner notes). Purple Pyramid Records.
[12] "Top 10 Drum Solos of All Time". Catalogs.com. October 24, 2011. Retrieved June 6, 2017.
I know you are mocking me but the funny part is that the Simpsons itself is very allegorical. Sim ~ Simulation, and Springfield, Illinois ~ Spring Field, Ill-in-Noise.
Spacetime is a springy substrate filled with quantum noise :-)
And this is why the knowledge provided by psychedelics has a lot of hype, but is useless and deceptive.
Muscaria is a latin name, not english, so ideally should be pronounced respecting how the taxonomist used it instead to mess with the sounds for no purpose apart of introducing a lot of noise to distort a language that was created to be universal.
Muscaria means relative to flies (musca in latin). Musca should be pronounced as moos (like in moon) and ca (like in California). Not like 'must scare'.
Latin’s a dead language and was not certainly created to be universal. Pronounce it however you want; if people know what you mean then the goal is achieved.
Regarding descriptive species names, I present the following:
> I'm talking about the binomial system of classification that definitely was created to be universal
Fair point, I misunderstood. This is quite salient when talking about fungi and plants, where different species can share common names but which have different chemical properties, perhaps including edibility. Yes, the taxonomic identifiers are important.
> Can you see the problem?
No. The variations in how people speak these names do not tend to diverge much more significantly than word pronunciations with different regional accents. “Funj-eye” vs “fun-guy” vs “fun-jee” vs “fun-geeh” are all readily understood as the same thing. The same goes for “seye-loss-eye-bee” and “sill-o-sibe”.
> Spongiforma is a straightforward name to pronounce in fact.
I was more focused on learning the proper Latin pronunciation of “squarepantsii”. Should it not be “squa-ray-“ instead of the cognate “square-”? Doesn’t adding cognates throw the whole thing off?
I have never heard “Cordyceps” pronounced with a hard C in the second position, nor any hard Cs pronounced in “Cetacea”, even though Latin rules have no soft C. So the Latin pronunciation rules are already not strictly followed by most in the field and have not been for many decades, and the quest to keep the Kæsar’s Latin is quixotic.
> I have never heard “Cordyceps” pronounced with a hard C in the second position, nor any hard Cs pronounced in “Cetacea
You just need to travel more then. Millions of people pronounce it exactly like that, including me. Cetacea, Cordiceps; one character, one sound. The easy, old and reliable way to do it that worked really, really well for 200 years.
Scientific language uses basically Greek and Latin, but also other languages and names of famous people. There are specific exceptions for this cases.
Believe it or not, Squarepantsii is a latin name.
Is a collage of english names of course, BUT the final ii is not english; It cames directly from latin, so is a "neolatinism". A new name latinised (Built using latin grammar rules). Therefore should be pronounced as any other latin word. It has 13 sounds.
If we think about it, Latin is a dead language that is "so dead" that is still growing and including new words. And of course there is still people alive that speak it routinely (In the Vatican, for example).
I'm aware that this is not a popular opinion, but the anglosphere is just doing simple things much more difficult for everybody (including them), and shooting themselves in the foot. To remember the scientific names [1] is much more difficult for them than for us.
[1] (i.e Metasequoia glyptostroboides, yep, easy. Just a couple of traps here. Everything else is clear and obvious)
I appreciate the information. You're missing the point though. The species being of latin origin is irrelevant. Synchronicity is acausal. The connection is relevant, not a shared cause.
And the HNer replied "How dare you mock my anti mystical view of the world?!!" and proceeded to slap the downvote button so hard that their mouse exploded into a poof of dark smoke!
Once the smoke cleared, the HNer realized their screen was also black. They hastily smacked their computer's power button, quickly realizing it had also died. A sickly black billowy puff of smoke then emanated from their once neon-lit PC case. They thought of that dumb joke from grade school about being punched so hard that their grandma felt it. Had they really done that to their PC by hitting their mouse so hard? "Impossible!" they thought, "Coincidences are ALWAYS just improbable events!"
All of a sudden the PC speaker inside the case started rattling. Then a voice echoed from it: "You kicked the Llama's ass!"
The HNer fell down on their knees. They couldn't believe that a Winamp loving entity ruled the universe. Was life a musical thing? "Things will never be the same." they muttered angrily as they downvoted yet another post by /u/carljung via their iPhone 47 Pro Max Plus Platinum Collector's Edition.
In my mind, alive is a binary term. Something is alive or it is not. We don't say something is more alive than something else.
Rocks, road signs and tables are not alive. Humans, pigs and fungi are alive. That is a useful distinction but it disregards differences in the latter group.
Fungi are reacting to stimuli with more complex behaviors than a single-celled organism can. We can't say fungi are more alive than the single celled organisms, so what are they?
Where does one draw the line with intelligence? In your opinion, what organisms can appropriately be considered intelligent?
I didn't think my education would be out of date so quickly. You're absolutely right. I was taught prions/viruses were in the gray area between alive and dead but alive is clearly just a spectrum.
Thank you for not ending your comment with "read up".
Thank you for responding to my incorrect take constructively. These were both good thought experiments and I concede, alive is definitely not a binary concept.
There’s almost definitely a lot of unexplored science in fungus that would have massive benefits for us. They are responsible for so much direct benefit, from beer to penicillin. They are a very critical part of our ecosystem.
I am a vegan, and have probably thought more about human interaction with other earth species than the average techie. While there is memory and stimulus-response there’s simply nothing we’ve found in nature that implies as much intelligence as a central nervous system.
Fungus seems to occupy an interesting niche where they can travel spores to various organisms that they can form fantastic symbiotic relationships with. It’s fascinating, but I’m not convinced it’s near mammal level intelligence.
Fungi are really interesting, though at least in terms of eating them many folks in the US are strangely reluctant. But this article does seem to be at pains to tease apart 'intelligence' from 'consciousness' - so I think it's not unreasonable for them to claim fungi can be intelligent without being very similar to us (in the same way we could say that of an ant colony, for example).
Michael Pollan talks about this in a few of his books. Some cultures are more mycophobic (USA), and some are more mycophilic (Russians, I would say Chinese as well). I think you can attribute some of it to whether there are many poisonous mushrooms in that culture's land area!
Knowing your local species is super important. Apparently lots of poisoning cases in the (western?) US is because one of the toxic species looks a lot like an edible species in Asia.
I am not sure "strangely" is a good adjective for the reluctance. Many people do not like the taste of various mushrooms. Additionally, for collecting in the wild, there's a lot of These Will Kill You. Meanwhile, a carrot is easy to identify and tasty.
This is not quite a misconception, but there’s some nuance that’s worth writing about.
A lot of plants will harm or kill you if you eat them too. The difference is that plants are less ephemeral, so we see more of them more often, and some of the more dangerous ones (e.g. poison ivy) are introduced to most people pretty early. There’s very little education about fungi at all, unless it’s self-directed, so the knowledge on how to ID safe species is just not as present in US culture.
I have read (no links, sorry) that the deadly ratio of wild plants is higher than that of wild mushrooms. Most plants like most mushrooms are considered to be “inedible,” meaning they won’t kill you but you won’t want to try and eat them either (flavor, texture). We don’t go around trying to eat maple leaves or grass because they don’t taste good and we just learned early to not try to eat them. This knowledge about mushrooms is lacking.
A carrot is easy to identify because it’s generally found on a store shelf, or was grown from a labeled seed packet. Try to find them in the wild, and you’re met with the deadliest common plant in the USA, Water Hemlock.
There are a number of safe mushroom species with good ID characteristics and no dangerous lookalikes, and a good number of them are considered to be choice edibles. If you can ID a particular pre-determined leafy green in the wild (which might be harder than you think) then you can do the same for a particular pre-determined mushroom species.
Yeah, I don't think the term intelligence helps define the novel behavior of fungus in this article. The better way to describe their behavior is adaptive. Fungus adapt in a way that's more like a resilient network than as a conscious being or organism. And that's really something we ought to focus on especially when it comes to engineering them for better use cases. I've seen one case of fungus being used for making insulation bricks for houses (non-load bearing) and it looks quite impressive considering it's cheaper and biodegradable.
> I don't think the term intelligence helps define the novel behavior of fungus in this article.
Maybe you are right, but I think humans are blind to any behavior that happens at a frequency either too low or too high.
If an organism responds too far out of our frequency band (on the order of hundreds of milliseconds), especially on the extreme low end, we seem unable to consider it 'intelligent' or even purposeful.
We barely even notice it and if any behaviour that unfolds over days seasons or even years.
It also doesn't help fungi that mycelial networks are almost all underground where they are literally invisible to us.
> The Elves do not imitate nature, they let nature do its magic and try to help it as best as they can. Allowing nature to solve a problem is extremely effective and efficient. The only downside is that it usually takes a lot of time - precisely the thing that the immortals have plenty of.
I'm a techie vegan too, and think about the fungi kingdom too, especially after watching Fantastic Fungi and some other personal experiences!
I'd like to video chat with you about this if you are ever up for it (and any others as well). If so, please send me an email at elijah@elijahlynn.net with a subject of "Video chat...".
I'm not a vegan, but I think about fungusamongus all the time. I'm not a vegan, and I make concious decisions about my meals too. Why are we adding vegan like it's 'special' in this case?
I'm just trying to meet other vegans. It is a lonely world for vegans, a very underrepresented group, so when I see there is another vegan in tech, I get excited, and HN doesn't provide a way to contact others so leaving a comment was my only option at creating this connection.
I think a vegan has a significantly different relationship with non-human life than non-vegans do. It’s quite the leap to avoid an exploitative relationship with animals.
Vegans are special, in all cases. They have made a superior moral decision (whether by moral grounds or not) to contribute less to global warming (and thus the destruction of our habitat) than other, non-vegan members of their species.
Not a full and consistent vegan, but what sentient becomes more important because it has practical implications for your diet choices. Should I eat fungi or not? I'm sticking with eating them but this topic is more relevant because of the diet impact
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of a fungal mycelium. Fungal intelligence (if it exists) is quite distributed, and exists mostly in the mycelial structure, since that’s where it eats and grows. It only puts up mushrooms when there are favorable conditions.
This is not to dismiss your concerns about sentience; it is an interesting topic. Compare with a raspberry, for example. That is the fruiting body of a plant. It has the capability to produce many other plants from its seeds. Part of the plant’s strategy is to be eaten by birds and then shat out, and so dispersed much more widely than it would be by wind.
Mushrooms are different in that you can take a piece of one, stick it into some growth medium, and get more mycelial growth from it, unlike the plant material around a seed. They are maybe roughly analogous to pluripotent stem cells in that respect. But a mushroom’s main reason for being is to send out spores, not to act as a central part of the organism’s “mind.” If it was essential, it wouldn’t rot after a few days.[0]
If we ignore for a moment the question of sentience, then it is clearly more ethical to eat a mushroom than a carrot, or any other root vegetable. Pulling a carrot kills the whole plant, while picking a mushroom does not kill the organism.
They’re just…weird. That’s part of why I love them. Somewhere between plant and animal, hard to map our notions of existence and intelligence onto, a mysterious form of existence, etc.
[0] Some species have very hardy mushrooms, so this reasoning doesn’t necessarily apply to them, but they are also inedible.
I personally draw the line at “I don’t want to form an exploitative relationship with another life-form with a central nervous system.” I’m open to expanding the line to include explorative relationships with fungus, but given the current science I haven’t found any reason to believe any fungus is more intelligent than a goldfish.
OP never claimed to be special but simply above average, which I think is fair since most vegans transitioned to that stage by starting to think much more about what they consume than they ever did before.
Did your philosophy on non-human life lead you to choosing to be vegan, or because you were vegan led you to learn about non-human life? I ask, because you can have the same learning of non-human life and still choose to not be vegan. They are not exclusive. (I ask as curiosity not a challenge to you)
I’m not sure I agree. If I were to hire a Personal Trainer and they were in terrible shape I’d be doubtful of their skill. What shape the person is in _shouldnt_ matter for their ability to do the job, but because they haven’t gone through the process themselves I’d have initial doubts about their skills. Your actions say a lot about your values and thoughts.
Good take. Vegans are so silly. So hilarious and worthy of criticism when people take the time to consider the ethical ramifications of their actions and move their moral bar without descending into absurd reductionism. /s
It's so weird how uptight some people get at the concept of... not eating meat.
I think it's something like "if your ethics != my ethics, I must preemptively discredit and attack you to prevent you from criticizing me". A very natural xenophobic reaction when you look at it like that.
Not eating meat is a simple decision. But feeling morally superior to those eating meat is a problem. Especially when the meatless lifestyle is defended by saying to save other creatures' life, yet the same lifestyle is heavily supported by products which were grown in large monocultures, destroying the natural habitat of countless critters in an otherwise rich flora and fauna all over the globe.
Both lifestyles require monocultures. One more than the other actually, and that same one also requires more water and land, and creates more pollution. I'm not a vegan, or even a vegetarian, but I think it's objectively true that those diets are morally superior even with animal rights aside.
This feels a bit like part of a pendulum swing from Human Exceptionalism to recognizing how far back eukaryotes developed certain traits.
I suspect it’s closer to the truth to say that fungi exhibit instincts of a sophistication that we usually expect from the insect and animal kingdom, and less so from plants and fungi.
The botulism bacteria is capable of voting, but I hope we don’t try to cheapen that discovery and others by calling it a hive mind to sell ads.
Agreed. I think it is part of a growing tend to anthropomorphize everything.
Water flowing down hill shows remarkable problem solving skills in determining paths to lower elevation. Rivers could probably outperform most college graduates in calculating the optimal path in a head to head challenge. Iterative floods communicate information across hundreds or thousands of years between events, ect.
I don't see the relevance. Doesn't physics do the job of exhaustively explaining that behavior at this point? (I don't want to minimize that difficulty, as it may get into quantum physics if one hurls enough Socratic bombs at the explanation)
And even if you concoct a bad faith experiment to see how "priming" the water's temperature makes this look similar to the fungi example, doesn't mundane science still already cover that in terms of viscosity?
On the other hand, how would physics explain why fungi primed with high temperature stress recovered more quickly and grew more evenly in mild temp stress than the control group? Furthermore, how would physics explain why that improvement disappeared after 24 hours?
And what about the Beechwood example? What do you think of that one?
That's not to say we should anthropomorphize fungi, only that the experiments are vastly more interesting from a scientific standpoint than your analogy would suggest.
> how would physics explain why fungi primed with high temperature stress recovered more quickly
Easily. Artifact of the experiment or results being misunderstood (or ehem, embellished as requisite for publishing), is a perfectly possible explanation
Increase in metabolism triggered by temperature could be another. Is well known that mushrom formation depend a lot on soil temperatures reaching a threesold. All fungus in temperate areas evolved to react to any sign of fall or spring. Mushrom harvest is strictly seasonal and fixed for each species.
And movilisation of resources after an attack (leading to an accelerated grow just for a while) has been reported in plants since decades.
So, in resume, there are lots of possible explanations than don't need to force feed the concept of intelligence here at the slightest opportunity.
I'm not saying the experiments aren't interesting oh, they are. The fungi shows an amazing amount of sophistication and conditional response. I do however think that anthropomorphizing it actually detracts from the exciting response observed. Framing it as being mindful intelligent and having memory implies some concept of mind which clearly isn't there and isn't an is misleading. This distracts from the interesting chemistry and physics problems of how conditional responses are formed and information is stored. If one were to push back on a physics explanation, what would the alternative be: Magic? A soul? Some sort of new decentralized cognitive process never seen elsewhere in nature capable of awareness and decision making?
> I do however think that anthropomorphizing it actually detracts from the exciting response observed.
Sure, we don't want scientists to overestimate the impact of new findings. And perhaps that's what is going on here.
But it's daft to try to convince others to be more sensible about new findings by offering up an unscientific musing about an alternative to an existing field. Especially when that musing includes no experimentation, no predictions, and no citations.
As unfortunate as it is, sometimes there is just no way around reading an article and replying based on the actual content of it.
> I don't see the relevance. Doesn't physics do the job of exhaustively explaining that behavior at this point?
Unless you believe in God, it's literally all just physics, so the point stands. Rivers solving optimal flow paths is physics. Neurons solving commenting on hackernews is just physics too.
And by the way our physical theories are terrible at solving fluid dynamics problems. There's a reason why wind tunnels are still a thing. It's because that way we can let the real physics solve for what our models can't.
However, I'm reliably informed that we live in a material universe and I'm just matter that somehow started thinking, so therefore physics can explain why I'm posting this. I'm not sure how to get from F=ma to there, but assuredly it's solvable with enough computing power.
Water isn't an organism, but is also amazing at solving maze and routing problems. In fact, using an inanimate model is often a powerful method of solving such problems.
I think my point was more that something is lost when test problems are extrapolated out of their intended class. You can compare a rat and a dog performance at a maze problem and draw some interesting hypothesis about memory and spatial awareness. but what does it mean to compare a rat vs water? Certainly not the same ideas of cognitive function
Definitely. And water works well to illustrate that point.
But hyphae are not fluids. They could grow one way or another in a 3 dimensional space. They pick one direction, and as a system they often pick a efficient one.
They are not subject to gravity or whatever force make water runs ( I’m that ignorant … )
Unlike water, they also focus their forces when a resource is found, the rest of the network stop searching and redirect effort toward food.
That makes it … alive for a start. And remarkable.
But I’m with you that jumping on the « intelligence » thing is weird.
I would say It’s more like plant finding the perfect orientation to optimise photosynthesis .
Plants are not genius. But they do process information in some way that is efficient and act on it.
>But I’m with you that jumping on the « intelligence » thing is weird
Agreed, And the article going down the route of ascribing "mindfulness" and "memory" to the fungi simply detracts and distracts from the amazing and fascinating phenomenon going on. Anthropomorphizing it and saying it "wants" to do something glosses over the driving mechanism which is the most interesting part!
They produce a chemical signal in the blood and when it reaches a threshold they all start producing toxin at once, before they can be identified by the immune system as a pathogen. It’s why the bacteria is so deadly. By the time you’re fully symptomatic it’s often too late for IV antibiotics to kill them in time.
They’re studying whether they can trick the bacteria to switch on sooner or block the receptors to keep them from quorum sensing.
I'm an indie researcher developing a diy-friendly approach to genetic engineering of mushrooms [1][2][3]. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to provide a piece of the same slime mold species (Physarum polycephalum[4]) referenced in the article and used to study fungi memory and intelligence. It's pretty easy to grow and the only food it needs is oats.
The best way to send me your request is probably to send me a DM on Instagram or to email me (josh@everymanbio.com). Depending on how many requests there are, it may take me some time to get it to you - but I will.
A few $ donation for shipping would be helpful, but not required.
For well a very well articulated argument for fungal intelligence, look up Paul Stamets, the mycologist on YouTube and elsewhere.
He's a serious scientist but he shows up in popular culture, too. For example, Lieutenant Commander Paul Stamets, a astromycologist serving on the USS Discover, was named after the real Paul Stamets.
For a less articulated argument Terence McKenna also speculated that psilocybin is some kind of intelligent substance that came to earth via meteors and consciously played a role in humanity's self awareness.
I think where people get caught up is that there’s a lot of confusion on definitions (partly since consciousness is almost certainly a spectrum). But a lot of people confuse human sapience with a requirement of consciousness which is not really the case. When looked at in that light, conscious fungus makes a lot more intuitive sense.
My favorite description of the difference was from the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. He gave the example of a dog sitting in the sun. When we see our dog sitting in the sunshine looking content, it is almost certainly enjoying the warmth, and we are probably correct in assuming the dog is feeling content in a way that we can relate to. The difference with a human, is that we can reflect on that state; we can contemplate the experience itself (sapience) rather than just sensing it (sentience).
So complex mycelial networks probably allow some level of sentience (experience states of sense, awareness of the environment), but we shouldn’t think of it as something that is contemplating it’s existence on a higher level. Would we define that as consciousness? Perhaps the difficulty of that assessment is just in applying a single word to represent reality.
Dennett was also influenced by the (controversial) theory from Julian Jaynes that consciousness is possibly something that emerged in humans much more recently in human history. I’ve had a copy of the book on my shelf unread for a couple of years so I probably won’t speak to it accurately, but I find it a fascinating idea.
Main idea is that human brain has two halves, abs consciousness arrived from auditory hallucinations formed in one half of the brain, and acted on by the other half.
I think one of the arguments here is how humans centuries ago heard voices of gods/angels etc. He argues that this was the bicameral mind in action. I think he has another linguistic analysis that argues that human consciousness emerged around the time the Iliad was composed.
I’ve almost read the Julian Jaynes book a couple times. Richard Dawkins once said something along the lines of its either complete genius or complete rubbish. I think that’s always a good type of book to read. :)
Lots of comments here about Fantastic Fungi. If you enjoy that I also recommend The Creeping Garden which is about slime molds which have a lot going for them that makes them closer to animals than mold or plants or even fungi. Fascinating and well done.
There's a very good documentary about the theme: "Fantastic Fungi". It exposes a theory that the trees can "talk" with it other through the the Fungi network.
It’s more than theory, it’s backed by solid evidence. Suzanne Simard has shown not just communication but resource sharing, preferential treatment for family members, inter species cooperation. I don’t recall if she was in that documentary or not. She discovered this starting in 1995, which means there’s a lot left to learn about the implications.
"Mycoid intelligence" would be a fancier way of phrasing "mushroom intelligence" in the title, and also feels a little more natural to me given that "mushroom" isn't typically used as an adjective.
Permaculture designed systems sequester high carbon wood chips naturally via Fungi Mycelium networks which break down tree lignin over 5-15 years & mix with native soils to produce a perfect Food Forest Growing medium. Forest grow on top of dead trees, after all!
They were able to move here and there quite quickly, adjusted trajectory in the most efficient way possible. They commonly gather together in large groups. They are...dried up leaves blowing in the wind. Now if you think dried up leaves are smart, wait till you hear about mushrooms...
This article seems to be conflating sentience with consciousness. Much of that complex interaction with the external world they describe can still be achieved by humans while asleep, yet we all accept that while asleep we are not conscious. So there's more to consciousness than what they are describing in fungi.
The logical result of an entire generation that interacted with Biology mainly through Pokemons.
Animals can show some degree of intelligence because they have brains feeded by biological sensors. Brains are made of nerve cells.
Fungi, plants or rocks don't have nerve cells, never had nerve cells and never will have nerve cells, so they can not have a brain. Not. They don't have it. I don't care about if bulbasaur is half plant and your favorite. This things are not real...
Now fill the gaps:
A creature without a nervous system can't have ...
Pseudoscientific attention grabbers are becoming a plague
Not. This is the lowest level of knowledge in biology. It is taken for granted that everybody here has studied basic histology at the school. This are true facts, proven since hundreds of years by thousands of researchers. I can't lose any time explaining that 2+2=4.
We can't change the truth just to make somebody feel better with their ideas. If you want to modify the entire field of life sciences, okay, perfect... but it is your duty to show me the proofs, not mine to prove you that something does not exist.
And metaphysical opinions or science fiction films aren't proofs. There are lots of inert things able to conduct electricity. I dare you to show me neuron cells, dendrites, neuroglial cells, ganglions or something remotely similar to an animal brain in an histological preparation of a fungus tissue.
Calling mushrooms intelligent appeals to a certain sort of person and publishing articles like this are just taking advantage of those people for their attention.
The behavior of fungi is interesting without having to project intelligence on to it.