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.

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.

At that bitrate we'd have to include a light switch in our consciousness search. Which I am not willing to do.