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.
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.
People tend to underestimate the ability of very simple systems to result in complex behavior. It is entirely possible that this ant hijacking is entirely done though a few very simple manipulations of the existing ant nervous system and more likely than a much more complex fungal brain replacement.
> It is entirely possible that this ant hijacking is entirely done though a few very simple manipulations of the existing ant nervous system
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.
> It is entirely possible that this ant hijacking is entirely done though a few very simple manipulations
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.
> 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.
The complex conscious and unconscious behavior can indeed be manipulated by quite simple things (hunger, stimulants, alcohol) but the complexity does not come from the lever that made the change, it's just pushing levers all over the place of your existing feedback cycles which results in much different outcomes.
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.
Something like in Toxoplasmosa. It's just a random product of evolution, nothing computational.
> 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...
Agree with above statement. Occam's razor. Tons of examples of complex behavioral changes centered around exposure to single substance.
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.
Armchair theorist as well, but all consciousness aside, it could also be that there's just a simple chemical that makes ants want to climb up (just like some hormones make the human brain want things), so that there's no computation involved, the mushroom might just happen to excrete the right chemical in the right place
Getting the ant to clamp onto the underside of a branch or leaf and then stay there until it dies is a bit harder to explain. However I am also inclined to believe there is a localized mechanism at play, such as locating the jaw actuation through connective tissue RNA. Even so, there must be some basic signaling and state detection at play. It's probably the biological equivalent of a music box that just plays the notes it's been fixed to play, but still interesting.
That seems more likely to me too. Imagine a fungus that could provide dopamine directly to the brain when a human host meets a certain condition (e.g. a certain amount of direct sunlight, humidity, wind).
Eh, I'd say that's a point for debate, but I would argue stochastic survival probability under some prior conditions that haven't changed enough to force further competition.
If fungus has a language, it means we can 'talk' to it.
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.
It's not quite "computation", but apparently you can wire a mushroom up to a modular synthesizer and get something resembling music out of it.
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".
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).
Use of the word conscious here is interesting. Is there any doubt that fungi are conscious of what they are conscious of?
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!
Maybe this is closer to spirituality than science, but I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle and he explains in a few of his books that the whole idea of “I” or “My self” is an illusion that’s created by the ego. This is also the message from a lot of Eastern philosophy.
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.
Yeah, but panpsychists don't have any mechanism for it. It's just, "Well, if there's an emergent phenomena, it must have emerged from some critical mass of something, therefore your table is conscious."
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.
It's literally the opposite of that. The criticism you are levelling is precisely what makes the idea of the strong emergence of consciousness such a joke.
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.
This goes to the age old debate between vitalists and materialists.
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.
Am I reading the abstract correctly that the spike duration is measured in hours though? That's an odd change of scale compared to neurons, especially as the scale of the actual entities (fungal networks vs networks of neuron cells) don't seem that different
mushrooms are certainly not conscious. The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. That particular box is a little small for consciousness to be hiding in. A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.
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.
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 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...
I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales? If an alien lived for one second but its brain processed information billions of times faster than ours, would they be right to consider us non-conscious?
That's an interesting point! I suppose the definition of 'consciousness' implies a certain timescale in my internally unexamined definition but there's no reason that need be the case!
If I understand your initial argument as implicitly revised here, it's basically "whatever consciousness is, it doesn't happen at the scale of some small number of bits". But some fungi are among the largest organisms on the planet. If this kind of signaling is going on within them, imagine the throughput, even if the individual signaling rates are low.
>>I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales?
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.
That's incredible, thanks for sharing that! I've only ever seen videos of neurons stained like that and they sure don't seem to be doing the same thing, though I think I remember what I saw had something to do with genetically engineering the kinases to clump together so they could actually be seen
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.
Bitrate is a total red herring here. What matters is what computation is performed, not the rate at which it is performed. That's like saying a 4-bit microcontroller isn't a computer because it can't run Doom.
> A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.
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?
> My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds.
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 bits per hour do solitary animals like cougars or hawks convey? I agree that whales sing endless, perhaps even annoying other whales with their wails. But many animals don't seem to even hit one bit per day.
What do you mean? There is an extremely information dense processing network inside each of those animals. I wasn't making a comment on the information density of their interface, but their processing itself
I think the paper measures the communication through the electric field. So it's fair to compare that to the amount of communication from the solitary animals, right? I'm not measuring their overall computation that they apply going through their day. And I also submit it may be hard to know just how much computation the fungus does when it's not communicating.
Complaining about bitrate and comparing that to animals that a motive with complex sensory organs is pretty weird. There’s certainly no evolutionary pressure to develop a high speed computational system, but that doesn’t mean a slow speed one couldn’t work.
Your statement “mushrooms are certainly not conscious” cannot be proven.
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.
We already know that trees communicate with each other using the underground network of mushrooms. The more we learn about them the more fascinated I am by mushrooms.
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.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential