6 ms·

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 particula

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
      I'd think it is something like a ratio of bitrate to entropy. How quickly is information being processed relative to how quickly it is being lost?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - alan-hn 5y ago
        Do we know if it's being lost at all?
        idiotsecant 5y ago
        Yes. That's thermodynamics.
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?

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
    I'd think it is something like a ratio of bitrate to entropy. How quickly is information being processed relative to how quickly it is being lost?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - alan-hn 5y ago
      Do we know if it's being lost at all?
      - idiotsecant 5y ago
        Yes. That's thermodynamics.

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?