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Comment by bognition | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I think that means we didn't have a good definition or understanding to begin with

Yep, that's what I'm saying. But what's more important is why are we trying to find the meaning of it in the first place?

I guess the idea is that if 2 beings are conscious there may exist some mechanism to transfer information between them?

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.

Yeah I guess you can even say at what point is "communication" actual communication vs a response to stimulus? We can communicate with humans through speech. We can partially communicate to animals like dogs through speech. Is exerting a force on an insect an act of communication? How about excreting some chemical near an amoeba? Then back to mycelium, does stepping on a forest mycelium carpet constitute communication and thus consciousness?

It's all very fascinating but it seems to break down very quickly as the definitions mean nothing.

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...

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