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.
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.
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.
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.
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!