12 ms·

Neuro PhD here. I haven't read the entire paper but this citations stands out: > Fungi also exhibit trains of action-potential-like spikes, detectable by intra

Neuro PhD here. I haven't read the entire paper but this citations stands out: > Fungi also exhibit trains of action-potential-like spikes, detectable by intracellular and extracellular recordings Action potentials are the fundamental signaling mechanism used by neurons [1]. Think of them as an electrical signal that a cell actively propagates. Lots of cells use electrical potentials for signaling; however, most of them spread gradually or passively. Action potentials on the other hand the cell actively expends energy to send information quickly. Really cool to see convergent biology (my personal guess) here. I can only imagine what new things we're going to learn about fungi and mycelium in the next few decades. In all seriousness mushrooms COULD be conscious. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential

lubujackson 5y ago
We already know that trees communicate with each other using the underground network of mushrooms. The more we learn about them the more fascinated I am by mushrooms.
idiotsecant 5y ago
mushrooms are certainly not conscious. The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. That particular box is a little small for consciousness to be hiding in. A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  Complaining about bitrate and comparing that to animals that a motive with complex sensory organs is pretty weird. There’s certainly no evolutionary pressure to develop a high speed computational system, but that doesn’t mean a slow speed one couldn’t work.
- shak3zz 5y ago
  But if you have enough time and size... Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts
- mellosouls 5y ago
  mushrooms are certainly not conscious Considering we don't understand consciousness it might be wiser not to claim limits with certainty.
  - ianai 5y ago
    Agree. A more interesting question would be how to interact with this channel in some meaningful way. Ie can we steer some fungus activity in some way with introducing some stimulus. Not exactly to “test for conscious” but just “can we get repeatable output for a controlled input.” I do though think it should be allowable to ponder out loud things like “could this be conscious?” If only because it’s a much more fruitful and less self serving premise than how science has conducted itself to this point. But also because humans have something of a vested interest in not having to admit that wide industrial processes harm sentient life, for instance.
  - jamal-kumar 5y ago
    I liked Max Tegmark's remark on how "consciousness is the way information feels when it's being processed". I think that it's safe to pretty roughly define it in those terms if we're going to come to a better understanding of what it might ultimately entail given more understandings like the experiments in this research here indicate for deserving more attention.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    At that bitrate we'd have to include a light switch in our consciousness search. Which I am not willing to do.
    - maxbond 5y ago
      Bitrate is a total red herring here. What matters is what computation is performed, not the rate at which it is performed. That's like saying a 4-bit microcontroller isn't a computer because it can't run Doom.
      - floober 5y ago
- bognition 5y ago
  Thats all going to depend the constraints you place on consciousness. Hell in the animal kingdom we struggle to define which animals are conscious and they all have very similar compute hardware. Mushrooms are so different than anything we know it's hard to rule out what they are or are not doing. There are mycelium networks that span massive spaces, 10s of square kilometers. There is a lot of mass, a tightly interconnected network that senses, computes, and changes its environment. So its hard to really rule anything out yet. Honestly, I think there is a lot of complexity happening on this planet that we are missing, especially if we open ourselves up to larger timescales.
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    If a small mass has this much complexity, interacting small masses should be vastly more complex. And by moving slowly I bet a lot would be time based as well. I think it's pretty likely a collection 10x the size would have much more than 10x the complexity due to the interactions. In the same way as a quantum computer, the state of each collection of cells is not quantized because it has many analog values at different ratios and interacts in complex ways with the surroundings. Of course by this logic a collection of phytoplankton is complex because I'm sure they all have chemicals they excrete. But I also kind of honestly think a rock is conscious by any reasonable definition, so I know I'm not the one who should be drawing the line...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - polishdude20 5y ago
    At some point the word "consciousness" loses its already muddled meaning. Humans are conscious, dogs are conscious, fish are conscious, mollusks are conscious, insects are conscious, bacteria is conscious, fungi is conscious etc. We don't even have a concrete definition for what conscious means but we use that classification as a means to make rules about what we can and can't do to certain entities. Can we destroy an ecosystem that has been found to be full of conscious mycelium? Is that worse than if we determined it was not conscious after all? Without a concrete definition of what consciousness is, we assign consciousness to things based on feeling and on what we want to signal to other humans about these entities.
- djitz 5y ago
  Well, that settles it. Let’s pack it up, team.
- fjabre 5y ago
  Your statement “mushrooms are certainly not conscious” cannot be proven. It also makes the assumption that consciousness is something we understand. This is certainly not the case. As science still doesn’t have a clue as to what it really is.
- wonderwasp 5y ago
  I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales? If an alien lived for one second but its brain processed information billions of times faster than ours, would they be right to consider us non-conscious?
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    That's an interesting point! I suppose the definition of 'consciousness' implies a certain timescale in my internally unexamined definition but there's no reason that need be the case!
    - buescher 5y ago
      If I understand your initial argument as implicitly revised here, it's basically "whatever consciousness is, it doesn't happen at the scale of some small number of bits". But some fungi are among the largest organisms on the planet. If this kind of signaling is going on within them, imagine the throughput, even if the individual signaling rates are low.
  - kadonoishi 5y ago
    I wonder if there could be conscious life inside neutron stars, organized through nuclear reactions not chemical and therefore going much faster.
    - idiotsecant 5y ago
      There is a book about this! It's Dragons Egg by R. Forward and it's pretty good!
  - Vox_Leone 5y ago
    >>I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales? I think you are correct in this insight. I also think that the perceived [or relative] rhythm of the passage of time would have huge implications here in this case: from the fungal perspective, "our" world would be "seen" at very high speed, which would prevent any form of interaction. It would even prevent reciprocal detection. This "perceived time rate" difference could happen on an astronomical scale and might contain the explanation of informational paradoxes such as Fermi's.
- voldacar 5y ago
  There is no way to prove the statement "x is conscious". You are just stating your opinion.
- xhkkffbf 5y ago
  How many bits per hour do solitary animals like cougars or hawks convey? I agree that whales sing endless, perhaps even annoying other whales with their wails. But many animals don't seem to even hit one bit per day.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    What do you mean? There is an extremely information dense processing network inside each of those animals. I wasn't making a comment on the information density of their interface, but their processing itself
    - xhkkffbf 5y ago
      I think the paper measures the communication through the electric field. So it's fair to compare that to the amount of communication from the solitary animals, right? I'm not measuring their overall computation that they apply going through their day. And I also submit it may be hard to know just how much computation the fungus does when it's not communicating.
      - idiotsecant 5y ago
        The analogue here is a neural network, not a bird squawk.
- timschmidt 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-s Fungi expertly transport material around themselves. This time-lapse shows traffic through a fungal network. DNA-containing nuclei are stained green. Pulses of nuclei – ‘nuclear comets’ – travel in hordes through the mycelium (of Neurospora crassa). The role of nuclear comets is unclear. The most plausible hypothesis is that the fungus uses comets to supply growing spores with nuclei, although how the fungus is able to shuttle the nuclei so quickly remains a puzzle. Nuclear comets travel faster than material transported by microtubule ‘motors’ (dynamic filaments that behave like a cross between scaffolding and escalators). Comets are followed closely by flocks of energy-producing mitochondria, which might play a role in their rapid transport. Video was made using laser scanning confocal microscopy of Neurospora crassa. The field of view is approximately 0.6 mm. Video © Patrick Hickey
  - jamal-kumar 5y ago
    That's incredible, thanks for sharing that! I've only ever seen videos of neurons stained like that and they sure don't seem to be doing the same thing, though I think I remember what I saw had something to do with genetically engineering the kinases to clump together so they could actually be seen
- RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
  > A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude. My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. Can you please explain to me the relationship between processing power and consciousness?
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    Let me answer your question with a question - what is the processing power of your brain if you're so sure it's less than your laptop?
  - joshmarlow 5y ago
    > My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. The classic counter-point to the speed difference here is that biological brains are massively parallel - no synchronized system clock, every logical element acting async and in parallel - so that the number of operations per second per element may be tiny (say 10s per second) while the throughput of the entire system is massive. It's similar logic to deeply pipe-lined processor architectures - pipelining may slow down execution of a particular instruction but allow greater global throughput. Also, the logical operations performed by neurons (I believe neuron behavior is modeled using differential equations) appear significantly more complex than the boolean switching behavior of the logic gates in CPUs. So the amount of computation may be significantly larger than it appears.
  - beambot 5y ago
    I doubt that. Ignoring confounding algorithmic factors, the very rough consensus for human brain appears to be 10^16 FLOPS. A modern RTX3090 GPU has 10^13 FLOPS. I doubt your laptop has 1000x the compute of a high-end desktop GPU.
- shironineja 5y ago
  no offense but I think you should consider 5g of cubensis and report back after a few hours.
- e12e 5y ago
  > The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. How many hours, though?
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
Man just wait till you hear about plasmodesma..
dilippkumar 5y ago
> In all seriousness mushrooms COULD be conscious There is a fungus [0]. that takes over a carpenter ant's brain and makes it climb up plants and clutch on to a leaf with it's jaw and hang down from it. The fungus then sprouts the fruiting body from the dangling ant and spreads its spores. As an armchair theorist, anything that can interface with a brain and coordinate a nervous system to produce complicated movement has to be capable of computation at some level. [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Natural_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Na...
- uoaei 5y ago
  Premise 1: Any arbitrary 4D volume in spacetime (i.e., one connected component wrt physical interactions) can be considered a system. Premise 2: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ Conclusion: Every system, open or closed, is computational in a certain rigorous sense of implementing dynamics along the space dimensions (versus inputs, via transformations, into outputs) and demonstrating dynamics along the time dimension (flux of the energy+information carried through its constituent parts). If we can create a "computer" using rocks in a binary-ish encoding, surely we can implement "computers" in more efficient encodings that utilize certain properties of physical reality. We as humans began to approach this with mechanical computers using complex linkages, but only got so far before we decided on digital (binary) encoding and then enshrined that in silicon. To be sure, binary is a very effective way of organizing computation given our physical implementation(s), but most likely there are way more efficient ways of doing things. One fascinating direction we are beginning to explore to achieve more efficient computation is marrying machine learning with materials engineering![1] In fact, by this conclusion, we can only believe that the universe is merely the most efficient way to simulate itself, but this by no means precludes the possibility of simulating it in any other medium (encoding). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04223-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04223-6
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Aardwolf 5y ago
  Armchair theorist as well, but all consciousness aside, it could also be that there's just a simple chemical that makes ants want to climb up (just like some hormones make the human brain want things), so that there's no computation involved, the mushroom might just happen to excrete the right chemical in the right place
antattack 5y ago
Brings to mind this TED talk: Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw
xg15 5y ago
Am I reading the abstract correctly that the spike duration is measured in hours though? That's an odd change of scale compared to neurons, especially as the scale of the actual entities (fungal networks vs networks of neuron cells) don't seem that different
- trenchgun 5y ago
  Scale is quite different. Consider the density.
tehchromic 5y ago
Use of the word conscious here is interesting. Is there any doubt that fungi are conscious of what they are conscious of? I think that we have to be careful. Speaking philosophically it's safe to say that we do not yet have a clear, definitive definition of "consciousness" in scientific terms such that we can safely assess what is or isn't conscious. Some believe consciousness is what distinguishes humans from lower beasts. Others believe it is an emergent phenomenon of some higher order macroorganisms, dolphins but not cows, monkeys but not fish. Still others believe that plants, fungi, bacteria, and all living things display some level of consciousness. And some weird folks believe consciousness is a property of the universe expressed in all things, which happens to manifest in forms that we understand and relate to in living organisms due to the inherent bias of observing through the lense of being a biological organism ourselves. It appears difficult if not impossible to prove which of these definitions is correct! What seems clear is that the idea of consciousness cuts to the very core of the modern scientific paradigm and world view, such that the inherent assumptions made in building our scientific realism allow us only a very narrow understanding of what is consciousness accompanied by a certainty that what we do understand must be all there is. That's to say, if you've ever questioned the fundamental axioms of scientific truth you've inevitably bumped into the philosophical problem of consciousness relative to the institution of scientific realism. So to say, when someone says "we now have proof that X may in fact be conscious!" the statement comes across to some ears as most definitely vague and exactingly inordinate!
- mountainboy 5y ago
  This goes to the age old debate between vitalists and materialists. In other words, does conciousness/spirit precede and shape matter, or does matter precede and shape conciousness/spirit? Modern/western science is pretty firmly entrenched in a materialist view. Although it seems more are questioning that these days. Personally I think that the brain is probably closer to a radio than a CPU. In other words, it is the bridge that enables our ethereal spirit/conciousness to experience and interact with the material world. Just as hackernews does not exist in my laptop, neither does my "self" exist in my brain. Rather my laptop and my brain are each providing a terminal to a remote realm. No amount of examining and dissecting my computer will reveal the code that runs hackernews, youtube, google, etc. It would be foolish to suggest it. Yet that is exactly what neurologists try to do... with predictably miserable results.

lubujackson 5y ago

We already know that trees communicate with each other using the underground network of mushrooms. The more we learn about them the more fascinated I am by mushrooms.

idiotsecant 5y ago

mushrooms are certainly not conscious. The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. That particular box is a little small for consciousness to be hiding in. A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.

jonathankoren 5y ago
Complaining about bitrate and comparing that to animals that a motive with complex sensory organs is pretty weird. There’s certainly no evolutionary pressure to develop a high speed computational system, but that doesn’t mean a slow speed one couldn’t work.
shak3zz 5y ago
But if you have enough time and size... Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts
mellosouls 5y ago
mushrooms are certainly not conscious Considering we don't understand consciousness it might be wiser not to claim limits with certainty.
- ianai 5y ago
  Agree. A more interesting question would be how to interact with this channel in some meaningful way. Ie can we steer some fungus activity in some way with introducing some stimulus. Not exactly to “test for conscious” but just “can we get repeatable output for a controlled input.” I do though think it should be allowable to ponder out loud things like “could this be conscious?” If only because it’s a much more fruitful and less self serving premise than how science has conducted itself to this point. But also because humans have something of a vested interest in not having to admit that wide industrial processes harm sentient life, for instance.
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  I liked Max Tegmark's remark on how "consciousness is the way information feels when it's being processed". I think that it's safe to pretty roughly define it in those terms if we're going to come to a better understanding of what it might ultimately entail given more understandings like the experiments in this research here indicate for deserving more attention.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  At that bitrate we'd have to include a light switch in our consciousness search. Which I am not willing to do.
  - maxbond 5y ago
    Bitrate is a total red herring here. What matters is what computation is performed, not the rate at which it is performed. That's like saying a 4-bit microcontroller isn't a computer because it can't run Doom.
    - floober 5y ago
bognition 5y ago
Thats all going to depend the constraints you place on consciousness. Hell in the animal kingdom we struggle to define which animals are conscious and they all have very similar compute hardware. Mushrooms are so different than anything we know it's hard to rule out what they are or are not doing. There are mycelium networks that span massive spaces, 10s of square kilometers. There is a lot of mass, a tightly interconnected network that senses, computes, and changes its environment. So its hard to really rule anything out yet. Honestly, I think there is a lot of complexity happening on this planet that we are missing, especially if we open ourselves up to larger timescales.
- neltnerb 5y ago
  If a small mass has this much complexity, interacting small masses should be vastly more complex. And by moving slowly I bet a lot would be time based as well. I think it's pretty likely a collection 10x the size would have much more than 10x the complexity due to the interactions. In the same way as a quantum computer, the state of each collection of cells is not quantized because it has many analog values at different ratios and interacts in complex ways with the surroundings. Of course by this logic a collection of phytoplankton is complex because I'm sure they all have chemicals they excrete. But I also kind of honestly think a rock is conscious by any reasonable definition, so I know I'm not the one who should be drawing the line...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- polishdude20 5y ago
  At some point the word "consciousness" loses its already muddled meaning. Humans are conscious, dogs are conscious, fish are conscious, mollusks are conscious, insects are conscious, bacteria is conscious, fungi is conscious etc. We don't even have a concrete definition for what conscious means but we use that classification as a means to make rules about what we can and can't do to certain entities. Can we destroy an ecosystem that has been found to be full of conscious mycelium? Is that worse than if we determined it was not conscious after all? Without a concrete definition of what consciousness is, we assign consciousness to things based on feeling and on what we want to signal to other humans about these entities.
djitz 5y ago
Well, that settles it. Let’s pack it up, team.
fjabre 5y ago
Your statement “mushrooms are certainly not conscious” cannot be proven. It also makes the assumption that consciousness is something we understand. This is certainly not the case. As science still doesn’t have a clue as to what it really is.
wonderwasp 5y ago
I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales? If an alien lived for one second but its brain processed information billions of times faster than ours, would they be right to consider us non-conscious?
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  That's an interesting point! I suppose the definition of 'consciousness' implies a certain timescale in my internally unexamined definition but there's no reason that need be the case!
  - buescher 5y ago
    If I understand your initial argument as implicitly revised here, it's basically "whatever consciousness is, it doesn't happen at the scale of some small number of bits". But some fungi are among the largest organisms on the planet. If this kind of signaling is going on within them, imagine the throughput, even if the individual signaling rates are low.
- kadonoishi 5y ago
  I wonder if there could be conscious life inside neutron stars, organized through nuclear reactions not chemical and therefore going much faster.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    There is a book about this! It's Dragons Egg by R. Forward and it's pretty good!
- Vox_Leone 5y ago
  >>I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales? I think you are correct in this insight. I also think that the perceived [or relative] rhythm of the passage of time would have huge implications here in this case: from the fungal perspective, "our" world would be "seen" at very high speed, which would prevent any form of interaction. It would even prevent reciprocal detection. This "perceived time rate" difference could happen on an astronomical scale and might contain the explanation of informational paradoxes such as Fermi's.
voldacar 5y ago
There is no way to prove the statement "x is conscious". You are just stating your opinion.
xhkkffbf 5y ago
How many bits per hour do solitary animals like cougars or hawks convey? I agree that whales sing endless, perhaps even annoying other whales with their wails. But many animals don't seem to even hit one bit per day.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  What do you mean? There is an extremely information dense processing network inside each of those animals. I wasn't making a comment on the information density of their interface, but their processing itself
  - xhkkffbf 5y ago
    I think the paper measures the communication through the electric field. So it's fair to compare that to the amount of communication from the solitary animals, right? I'm not measuring their overall computation that they apply going through their day. And I also submit it may be hard to know just how much computation the fungus does when it's not communicating.
    - idiotsecant 5y ago
      The analogue here is a neural network, not a bird squawk.
timschmidt 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-s Fungi expertly transport material around themselves. This time-lapse shows traffic through a fungal network. DNA-containing nuclei are stained green. Pulses of nuclei – ‘nuclear comets’ – travel in hordes through the mycelium (of Neurospora crassa). The role of nuclear comets is unclear. The most plausible hypothesis is that the fungus uses comets to supply growing spores with nuclei, although how the fungus is able to shuttle the nuclei so quickly remains a puzzle. Nuclear comets travel faster than material transported by microtubule ‘motors’ (dynamic filaments that behave like a cross between scaffolding and escalators). Comets are followed closely by flocks of energy-producing mitochondria, which might play a role in their rapid transport. Video was made using laser scanning confocal microscopy of Neurospora crassa. The field of view is approximately 0.6 mm. Video © Patrick Hickey
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  That's incredible, thanks for sharing that! I've only ever seen videos of neurons stained like that and they sure don't seem to be doing the same thing, though I think I remember what I saw had something to do with genetically engineering the kinases to clump together so they could actually be seen
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
> A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude. My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. Can you please explain to me the relationship between processing power and consciousness?
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Let me answer your question with a question - what is the processing power of your brain if you're so sure it's less than your laptop?
- joshmarlow 5y ago
  > My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. The classic counter-point to the speed difference here is that biological brains are massively parallel - no synchronized system clock, every logical element acting async and in parallel - so that the number of operations per second per element may be tiny (say 10s per second) while the throughput of the entire system is massive. It's similar logic to deeply pipe-lined processor architectures - pipelining may slow down execution of a particular instruction but allow greater global throughput. Also, the logical operations performed by neurons (I believe neuron behavior is modeled using differential equations) appear significantly more complex than the boolean switching behavior of the logic gates in CPUs. So the amount of computation may be significantly larger than it appears.
- beambot 5y ago
  I doubt that. Ignoring confounding algorithmic factors, the very rough consensus for human brain appears to be 10^16 FLOPS. A modern RTX3090 GPU has 10^13 FLOPS. I doubt your laptop has 1000x the compute of a high-end desktop GPU.
shironineja 5y ago
no offense but I think you should consider 5g of cubensis and report back after a few hours.
e12e 5y ago
> The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. How many hours, though?

RosanaAnaDana 5y ago

Man just wait till you hear about plasmodesma..

dilippkumar 5y ago

> In all seriousness mushrooms COULD be conscious There is a fungus [0]. that takes over a carpenter ant's brain and makes it climb up plants and clutch on to a leaf with it's jaw and hang down from it. The fungus then sprouts the fruiting body from the dangling ant and spreads its spores. As an armchair theorist, anything that can interface with a brain and coordinate a nervous system to produce complicated movement has to be capable of computation at some level. [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Natural_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Na...

uoaei 5y ago
Premise 1: Any arbitrary 4D volume in spacetime (i.e., one connected component wrt physical interactions) can be considered a system. Premise 2: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ Conclusion: Every system, open or closed, is computational in a certain rigorous sense of implementing dynamics along the space dimensions (versus inputs, via transformations, into outputs) and demonstrating dynamics along the time dimension (flux of the energy+information carried through its constituent parts). If we can create a "computer" using rocks in a binary-ish encoding, surely we can implement "computers" in more efficient encodings that utilize certain properties of physical reality. We as humans began to approach this with mechanical computers using complex linkages, but only got so far before we decided on digital (binary) encoding and then enshrined that in silicon. To be sure, binary is a very effective way of organizing computation given our physical implementation(s), but most likely there are way more efficient ways of doing things. One fascinating direction we are beginning to explore to achieve more efficient computation is marrying machine learning with materials engineering![1] In fact, by this conclusion, we can only believe that the universe is merely the most efficient way to simulate itself, but this by no means precludes the possibility of simulating it in any other medium (encoding). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04223-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04223-6
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Aardwolf 5y ago
Armchair theorist as well, but all consciousness aside, it could also be that there's just a simple chemical that makes ants want to climb up (just like some hormones make the human brain want things), so that there's no computation involved, the mushroom might just happen to excrete the right chemical in the right place

antattack 5y ago

Brings to mind this TED talk: Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw

xg15 5y ago

Am I reading the abstract correctly that the spike duration is measured in hours though? That's an odd change of scale compared to neurons, especially as the scale of the actual entities (fungal networks vs networks of neuron cells) don't seem that different

trenchgun 5y ago
Scale is quite different. Consider the density.

tehchromic 5y ago

Use of the word conscious here is interesting. Is there any doubt that fungi are conscious of what they are conscious of? I think that we have to be careful. Speaking philosophically it's safe to say that we do not yet have a clear, definitive definition of "consciousness" in scientific terms such that we can safely assess what is or isn't conscious. Some believe consciousness is what distinguishes humans from lower beasts. Others believe it is an emergent phenomenon of some higher order macroorganisms, dolphins but not cows, monkeys but not fish. Still others believe that plants, fungi, bacteria, and all living things display some level of consciousness. And some weird folks believe consciousness is a property of the universe expressed in all things, which happens to manifest in forms that we understand and relate to in living organisms due to the inherent bias of observing through the lense of being a biological organism ourselves. It appears difficult if not impossible to prove which of these definitions is correct! What seems clear is that the idea of consciousness cuts to the very core of the modern scientific paradigm and world view, such that the inherent assumptions made in building our scientific realism allow us only a very narrow understanding of what is consciousness accompanied by a certainty that what we do understand must be all there is. That's to say, if you've ever questioned the fundamental axioms of scientific truth you've inevitably bumped into the philosophical problem of consciousness relative to the institution of scientific realism. So to say, when someone says "we now have proof that X may in fact be conscious!" the statement comes across to some ears as most definitely vague and exactingly inordinate!

mountainboy 5y ago
This goes to the age old debate between vitalists and materialists. In other words, does conciousness/spirit precede and shape matter, or does matter precede and shape conciousness/spirit? Modern/western science is pretty firmly entrenched in a materialist view. Although it seems more are questioning that these days. Personally I think that the brain is probably closer to a radio than a CPU. In other words, it is the bridge that enables our ethereal spirit/conciousness to experience and interact with the material world. Just as hackernews does not exist in my laptop, neither does my "self" exist in my brain. Rather my laptop and my brain are each providing a terminal to a remote realm. No amount of examining and dissecting my computer will reveal the code that runs hackernews, youtube, google, etc. It would be foolish to suggest it. Yet that is exactly what neurologists try to do... with predictably miserable results.