Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity
royalsocietypublishing.org
royalsocietypublishing.org
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.
Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts
Considering we don't understand consciousness it might be wiser not to claim limits with certainty.
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.
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.
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.
Understanding what is conscious is and how it comes about seems interesting. I think currently it falls more into the philosophical sphere of science rather then biological or physics. Maybe once more is understood about human consciousness we will be able to categorize and add other life forms and consciousness types to this list.
It's all very fascinating but it seems to break down very quickly as the definitions mean nothing.
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...
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
How many hours, though?
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#Na...
I don't think the logistic map is conscious, but it is very complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map
What I'm talking about re: ants is a few chemical signals specifically targeting ant behaviors resulting in the infected behavior. I don't think the fungus is any more conscious than a handful of pills.
It is entirely possible that human motivations and reasoning are driven by similarly simple mechanisms. The best example I can think of is how much of an asshole I can be to my family when I'm hangry.
Where it gets interesting is it might not even be “you” that is hungry, rather it’s the collective microbiome that sends signals from your gut to your brain telling it to eat for their benefit.
Hasn't that been ruled out by now though?
(Content warning: Zombie ant fungus details)
I read articles about that fungus and I believe for a long time it was assumed that the fungus rewires something inside the ant's brain that makes it want to climb to the top of a grass blade etc. - so it would "only" manipulate the high-level goals of the ant but not control the more complex and dynamic low-level operations (such as walking or navigating) directly.
However, a few months ago there was a paper about more detailed research on the molecular mechanisms the fungus uses for the takeover. Turns out, the former hypothesis was wrong and in fact it does control the ant's arms/legs directly. If that's true, then the fungus itself must somehow actively steer the ant towards the grass.
This seems to be the referenced paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1711673114
I was wrong about it being from a few months ago though. It was released in 2017 already.
THC --> munchies! Alcohol --> saying dumb things at parties.
I'll bet there is a fungal chemical that disrupts the ant's spacial orientation, and absent of other stimuli, it may have a default program that causes it to seek higher ground.
> The life cycle of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii goes like this: Toxoplasma reproduces inside the intestine of a cat, which sheds the parasite in its feces. Rats then ingest the parasite when they consume food or water contaminated with cat feces. The parasite takes up residence in the rat’s brain and, once the rat gets eaten by a cat, it starts the cycle all over again. > Researchers have known for a few years that a rat infected with Toxoplasma loses its natural response to cat urine and no longer fears the smell. And they know that the parasite settles in the rat’s amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and emotions. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-parasite-t...
So long as we can put electricity in, and get different electric signals out, we have a sort of interface.
If they're sentient, then wow, great. If not, we can probably work out the right signals and species to use in growing a mushroom-based Turing machine.
Someone has a very entertaining YouTube channel full of this content: https://www.youtube.com/c/MycoLyco. The titles are great too, like "Reishi Talks To Lions Mane About Life In a Bag" (posted 4 days ago).
Unfortunately that term applies to basically everything... computation at every classical level we know only requires "maybe have state, maybe update state in response to environment, maybe move to new environment based on new state, maybe repeat".
Premise 2: 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).
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!
It's fine for magical world building, but it doesn't really make much sense, and when pressed on it, they just throw up their hands and cry "It's logical!" It's specious. It feels like Descartes and others trying to elevate the pineal gland to be mechacockpit for the soul, or Plato assuming that everything is a projection from some metaphysical form outside of reality.
It's fancy talk, that is pointed -- and sometimes proudly -- unfalsifiable.
Panpsychists say that consciousness always exists, all the way down, not that it emerges. It is a view born out of the rejection of the kind of emergence you are describing.
I would hazard to guess that individual consciousness doesn’t actually exist, so of course a tree can’t be individually conscious because neither can a human. We (both the tree and the human) are part of a collective “consciousness” that is life itself.
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.
The author discusses the possibility of intricately connected subterranean mycelium networks electrically signaling each other acting as a giant nervous system. He stops himself from calling it a giant brain, but admits that the possibility isn't really far fetched given everything else that we know about fungi.
It's a fantastic book. Strong recommend.
[0]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ84V9B/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
... at least that was my understanding from the abstract and introduction.
Tangentially, I think it's unfortunate that "hope" can't help form the frame here. I mean, it's an elephant in the room, but I think it's friendly.
Then Fungi evolved and started breaking all that down and eventually a long time later we get animals.
Half remembered from first chapter of Entangled Life.
Apparently much of worlds coal was also from this period.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-...
Of course, if this were "true" and "proven", I would imagine it would be all over front-page news for every major publication.
We don't know any of this for sure.
Intelligence and creativity didn’t arise because protohumans became fungal hybrids, but rather the psychedelic mushrooms not only provided sustainance, but also provided behavioral changes like better visual acuity (I believe this claim is proven), sexual arrousal. This mean mushroom eaters were more likely to reproduce. As a sideffect, the psyliopsybin either promoted neural placticity, or novel wirings.
Protohumans that didn’t eat mushrooms died out, and the most successful eaters were the most clever protohumans. (Perhaps behavior became the dominate sexual selection criteria, rather than say meer physical features.)
He says a lot of other weird stuff like, mushrooms are from space, are conscious, or maybe are communication devices, or maybe prerecorded messages from alien “self transforming machine elves”, or maybe they are the elves?
Oh well. All will become clear when universe hits maximum novelty in 2012.
"Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is unfulfilled Void."
It would also give an opportunity to see whether fungi play the telephone game and how that affects those at the other end of the "conversation".
Thanks for this article. For me it confirms the notion that all things alive need a method of communication that allows them to use the resources in their environments to greatest effect. Whether that involves chemical signaling, electrical signaling, disapproving glances, the spoken word, etc. is irrelevant. It appears that no matter how deeply you dig, there is a sense of community in most living things and most things find ways to work together with their environments to guarantee survival. Humans could probably learn a few things from their steak toppings about how best to utilize the bullshit many of us find ourselves wallowing in.
"We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune generate the most complex sentences."
Is this the first time a non-animal species has exhibited such behavior under verifiable conditions?
They are consuming too much of their subject matter.
Whole indigenous languages went exting in the late 20th century in places like Bolivia or Australia and even during the 21st century native languages are going extinct in California. In thousands and thousands of years someone trying to re-walk Darwins path may wonder were is the missing link in evolution between something like Aztec and European remains found in the West Coast, when there's none. Species can evolve in isolation and then obliterate each other leaving a discontinuity or clique within the genus, it happens all the time, and it's puzzling but natural.
i.e. neurons are made from ectoderm germ cells (not endoderm --inside, nor mesoderm -- middle, but outer layer)