The fungal mind: on the evidence for mushroom intelligence
psyche.co
psyche.co
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
>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):
Pet Rock Remote Control:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHo...
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!"
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.
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).
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.
chemoreception
> They are so smart that they find the shortest paths between nodes arranged as Japanese cities
survivor bias
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaD7AwPC5Pw&ab_channel=Sesam...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtb2EKGBNr8&ab_channel=Sesam...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulDC1w1ydLI&ab_channel=ErinS...
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.
https://www.catalogs.com/library/top-10-drum-solos-of-all-ti...
Spacetime is a springy substrate filled with quantum noise :-)
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'.
Regarding descriptive species names, I present the following:
Han solo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_(trilobite)
Spongiforma squarepantsii (please tell us the proper Latin pronunciation for this one)
Heerz lukenatcha / Heerz tooya (what do these describe, without looking them up?)
And finally, plants named after people, letters A-C. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_plant_genera_named_f...
I'm talking about the binomial system of classification that definitely was created to be universal
> Pronounce however you want.
And then it stops being universally understood and we can't use anymore to communicate except as a written language. Can you see the problem?
Spongiforma is a straightforward name to pronounce in fact.
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.
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)
https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2014/11/05/zombie-...
I mean wtf?
That sounds an awful lot like a human being.
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.
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?
Yes we do. There's a whole continuum from prions through viruses to cells.
Thank you for not ending your comment with "read up".
You clearly have read up based on your other posts but being a jerk to people who aren't as read up as you won't make you any happier.
Thought experiment: could you rigorously define and determine the nanosecond in which life begins and ends for a mammal?
How about a nanometer precise surface boundary between a single living organism and its nonliving environment?
In your opinion, what organisms are intelligent?
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.
s/mushrooms/computers/
re: incessant "AI" hype
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.
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.
I googled and found related quotes:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/05/21/berkeley-talks-transcri...
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...".
Cheers
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.
Mushrooms are amazing to me - I think that humans are a fungus as well - like the most advanced mushroom.
It's a badge of honor. As it should be.
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’ve got some wood in my garage structure that has biodegraded (aka “rotted”) and it’s now a project I need to deal with.
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.
I tried my best Google Fu and couldn't find any references to this. Do you have any? Sounds fascinating.
They’re studying whether they can trick the bacteria to switch on sooner or block the receptors to keep them from quorum sensing.
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.
It’s been used to assess the problem solving capacities of a variety of organisms.
Not that it means much. But it should be acknowledged, that all.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[2] https://www.instagram.com/everymanbio/
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#Psilocybin_pan...
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.
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.
If anyone is interested, this afterword where he covers some criticisms of his ideas is a good entry point: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/JaynesOriginsConsciousne...
And thanks for the link!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4&ab_channel=Crime...
Strange how threads tend to grow wild.
I always wanted to experiment with Physarum polycephalum in my garden, since I saw a documentary about them about 25-30 years ago.
But alas, I have a watch, they have the time. So I guess I talk to them and their brethren six feet under somewhere in my future.
As a primer:
Advances in Physarum Machines, Adamatzky, Andrew (Ed.)
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319266619
Physarum polycephalum is quite bright for a mold.
Speaking of mold, there is a growing body of artists working with it.
https://mothertreeproject.org/about-mother-trees-in-the-fore...
(Just kidding about editing the title, of course.)
Video related, happy labor day!
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
This seems like a stretch. As a kid, I liked Pokemons because they were Pokemons, not because of some weird associations with biology.
[Citation Needed]
The current mainstream understanding is that fungii pass electrical signals along mycelium networks to communicate.
Every cell in this network is essentially a nerve cell. Connected in a network spanning multiple organisms, genders and species.
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.