Out of sight, 'dark fungi' run the world from the shadows
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It's not just fungi that are difficult to culture. The (vast?) majority of bacteria, virus, and archae species are undocumented because we don't know how to grow them in a laboratory or even stain them so that they're visible on a microscope slide. Except for the occasional glimpse on an electron microscope slide, most of them are completely invisible to science.
We mostly behave like we have our basic every-day experience pretty much covered - yet, there are such vast areas - across basically all of sciences - that we just utterly don't understand, and who knows how much more additionally that we don't even know is there.
Not to mention what is outside the domain of science. Sadly, this area is essentially culturally off limits so I expect it to remain as is in the short to medium term, perhaps forever.
You have a method to prove nonexistence do you?
Then why did you mention it? And, you made a claim in response to my question...so what gives? This technique seems a bit unfair.
Regardless: is relevance objective? How is it measured?
Also: note that "are" is a conjugation of "is". This creates a bit of an epistemic problem does it not (considering your comment above)?
> No human can observe unobservable things by definition.
Religion is a classic counterpoint to this. Nonexistence is another. Relevance is another. Omniscience another. There are tons of examples, with new ones coming online every day!
Plus: does defining reality to be a certain way necessarily mean it takes on that form, or might it only cause it to appear to have taken on that form?
Then what's this?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nonexistent
I found several others that don't match your the definition as well if you don't find this convincing.
What in tarnation is going on here eh? It's almost like we're in some sort of a simulation.
It also means it's nonsense and doesn't exist.
Science claims totality. Anything that affects reality in any way, is in domain of science.
This depends on which meaning of "is" you are using, as well as "means".
Did you know they are rendered local to the observer, but in a way that appears to be global?
I'm going to go waaaaay out on a limb here and make a guess: you have no proof for this claim of fact?
I am endlessly fascinated how science is held up by its fan base as superior because it is evidenced based, yet when defending challenges to it, any "fact" can be deployed effortlessly, with no evidence required.
> It's not about culture
I strongly believe that thinking is downstream from culture.
> science makes everything its domain
It certainly rhetorically extends ownership to all of "reality" (identical to The Universe, dontcha know), but they certainly do not investigate all that can be.
Here's a nice discussion:
The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist
https://youtu.be/pLbSlC0Pucw?si=hFdhJ1U5pbFP6BEf
Note that the gloves remain on, as always. (Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with why humans are perpetually wandering around confused, without knowing it.)
It's a slick technique, especially if it is done intuitively:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
Furthermore: do you consider scientists to be a part of science?
If so: how do you know if everything important is actively being worked on by at least one scientist (never mind a near optimal number)? (See also: [1])
If not: how does science accomplish anything? How can only ideas interact with the physical realm, if not through human bodies engaging in work?
> Scientific method is generally applicable
"generally", "applicable"
I am also fascinated at the loose language science fans use when describing their ideology, that is so great because it deals in precision.
> it's a universal tool for identifying any kind of pattern that we can possibly identify.
"identifying"
Here is a pattern, Humans.
Well done, Scientists!
Can you point me to science's study of war, and their strategies for ending it in the near future? It's a pretty important topic, they surely have thousands of the very best minds on it I would think, since it is their domain (in that it is a part of everything).
> Everything else is, in practice if not theory, completely random...
Present a proof.
Just because your ideology is sitting in the throne right now doesn't mean you get beliefs = facts freebies like this, especially when shit talking competing ideologies for that very same behavior is a core component of your marketing/indoctrination strategy.
These conversations remind me of one of my favorite sayings:
"People don't have ideas. Ideas have people."
- Carl Jung
I'd recommend him, but he is a peddler of "woo woo".
[1] From foolswison's link:
"Plenty of scientists are theists. But the ones that do good science leave their theism at the door and try to explain things in naturalistic terms (even if theism is the reason they entered that door in the first place)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
I don't keep detailed records, but I have had easily hundreds of science fans tell me with absolute sincerity and good faith that any scientists that don't behave the way they describe (say, if I was to link them to articles) don't count, because they aren't scientists. (Actual scientists only behave perfectly, of course.) I wonder if science not studying such things (ontology, etc) and thus not constantly tooting their horn about it in the media [2] might have something to do with why their fans have utterly no knowledge of it, and thus believe that it doesn't exist[3].
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+train+a+neural+networ...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze
Apologies for any negative vibes, I just think it's a fascinating phenomenon, and fun to discuss. Curiosity used to be so popular!
You probably aren't telling this to 1 person 100x, but rather 100 persons just once.
Do you think I may have overreacted?
Not really, but the length might be a problem.
I've had to really shorten my HN comments. Otherwise people generally ignore or misunderstand what I'm trying to say.
Regarding your comment I have the same issue with how badly engineers simplifies science, but they usually have a to noble view of themselves being ignorant of what they ignore. Having discussions which offends people needs to be done in a trustfull way even then it is hard, I usually sound like a dimwit or a twat.
Belief in science as an all-encompassing ideology is a minority view among scientists. Scientists are usually careful to stipulate that it's not. My parents were both scientists. They're the ones who took my brothers and me to art museums and concerts, exposed us to religions, literature, the love of the outdoors, and so forth.
Maybe 90% of the public have never met a scientist, making it easy to turn us into the bogeyman.
I believe that if this was studied carefully (with temporal detail), the reality of the situation would be revealed to be much more interesting than your intuition indicates.
Even the best scientists still have heuristics based consciousness, layers of culture, etc. Consciousness is way more complicated than it reveals to itself (which is what people here are describing, technically / architecturally).
It's a great meme, but all capabilities in existence have not been brought to bear, not even close.
> We all wrestle with the limitations of our mental apparatus.
Agreed, but to very different degrees, and in very different ways (as in positive wrestling vs negative).
> Also, reality is always more complicated than any concise description of it. No experienced scientist would claim otherwise.
a) You 2nd sentence is subject to your first.
b) You have no way to know this. I on the other hand do: I talk to scientists on the regular who make unsound claims. There is nothing about science that renders its practitioners immune to culture, propaganda, ideological blindness, heuristics, etc (despite it being an extremely popular, faith based belief).
"culturally off limits" means it can't be cultured in a lab, which is the entire point of this article.
"I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content." ― Robert E. Howard, Queen of the Black Coast
Later qualified by: "that we can possibly identify". You seem to forget at least one basic circumstance here: that the scientific method is but one narrative. It may be universally applicable, but it is not the only interesting thing that can be said (and what it says is more often than not "we don't know"). The current cultural paradigm (in some quarters), which seem to think that only "scientific truth" is worthwhile, everything else is just random noise is likely precisely what the parent objected to, and that you stepped in to defend.
Incidentally, you seem to agree that there are indeed things outside the domain of science, those things that we can not possibly identify. This is also the reason I'm not as pessimistic as the parent when it comes to the longevity of the current, scientismically informed paradigm: The insight that the things we can possibly identify are but a fraction of the infinite will surely land sooner or later. It doesn't make the scientific method wrong by any stretch of the imagination, but it will always be just mapping local phenomena (that we can notice), not everything.
Not in my experience. I just got back from a week of playing music in the woods with a bunch of folk musicians. Sometimes we talked about science, but music is for all intents and purposes an orthogonal way of exploring reality. Likewise for many areas of art, literature, etc.
Disclosure: Scientist and musician.
If you like it, the next level is growing your own mycelium in liquid culture (basically in honey water).
If that works out will, use it to colonize your own substrate.
Then, you can produce your own (storable) spore prints from harvested mushrooms. Which you can use to create new mycelium liquid cultures. And the cycle can be repeated indefinitely, with tons of harvest!
I often see amateur mycologists that are very excited about their hobby. This kind of enthusiasm is exactly what I would expect from a fungus or at least someone who is under fungal control.
I’m onto you, mushrooms!
A flow hood or air box helps but you can do it without. I'd recommend using mycellium to make a liquid culture vs. a spore solution, though. Less chance of contamination and faster colonization of your grain spawn.
"" It’s a comparison to the equally elusive dark matter and dark energy that make up 95 percent of our universe and exert tremendous influence on, well, everything. ""
Then in my ignorance I googled it, and it appears to be true.
How in the world can the dominant theory for the universe be based on it being 95% filled with mystical shit that we cant prove, but makes our math happy.
That sounds insane, like religion.
Clearly examining models of the universe that dont depend upon 95% mystical stuff may be an avenue worth exploring.
Here is our set of equations for how the universe works.
Now let us observe this galaxy far away. It does not do what it should according to our equations. Our equations are accurate so how can this be?
Well they do work if we insert 95% of mystical stuff into the the universe
Good that is solved then.
I think this article presents dark matter as much more of a resolved question than it actually is. It's an unconfirmed hypothesis to explain observed reality. That's not mysticism, it's science in progress.
Perhaps one day a physical experiment will support or invalidate the hypothesis, or a competing one. Until then, we simply don't know the answer, so we think about it. If you don't like that, I guess you should stop thinking about it?
If you’d like to learn about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, here’s a 12 hour pop sci lecture series I can recommend: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjBulz4rXhBohsOjohoYDC2hS...
You're far from the first person to suggest such an idea. And far from it being a new idea. There have been a whole lot of people who have tried to come up with an alternative solution, and the problem is, they're all universally significantly worse.
I don't mean to disparage you, but this is pretty much universally the reaction people have when they first learn about the scale of dark matter, and that has resulted in significant research efforts to put forward a different solution... but dark matter is still a superior answer to the question.
One thing that isn't immediately obvious is that we have a wide variety of ways to estimate the mass of things. Just for galaxies, we can look at their radial velocities, x-ray spectrum and flux, and gravitational lensing. These approach the measurement from very different methods, yet all of them strongly align with dark matter. Modifying our theory of gravity to alternative explanations has yet to be able to account for just these three methods, and they're just a subset of the observations we have that support dark matter's existence.
> How in the world can the dominant theory for the universe be based on it being 95% filled with mystical shit that we cant prove, but makes our math happy.
We could write a library's worth of books about things that math has predicted before we could experimentally prove it or otherwise observe it. Dark matter makes a whole bunch of math in a whole bunch of places work, including in areas where MOND and its derivatives and other alternative solutions fall down. LIGO and gravitational waves have also blown big holes in alternative theories like TeVeS.
Basically, the more data we get, the more it supports dark matter. Providing a viable alternative explanation that can answer the same questions and would match our observations would instantly shortlist you for the nobel prize in physics. A whole lot of incredibly intelligent people have tried and failed. And it's not like physicists "like" dark matter - no one is more frustrated by the fact that something so hugely important to the makeup of the universe is damn near invisible to us than the physicists who work in these areas.
If they want to move forward shouldnt thry do boring full sequencing? Then they can make real comparisons, not estimates?