[HN Gopher] Language of fungi derived from their electrical spik...
___________________________________________________________________
Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity
Author : T-A
Score : 168 points
Date : 2022-04-06 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (royalsocietypublishing.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (royalsocietypublishing.org)
| reality_inspctr wrote:
| This is wild.
|
| "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?
| AyyWS wrote:
| The wind is talking to us. Chicago confirmed as having the most
| talkative wind.
|
| They are consuming too much of their subject matter.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| They don't appear to literally be claiming that this is a
| language, a less click-baity title would be 'Calcium wave
| communication in networks of fungi mycelium'. This is not a
| newly discovered phenomenon - we've known that fungi use
| calcium derived electrical potentials to signal the mass to do
| things for a long time. There's no evidence this is any more
| complex than hormonal communication in plants, just a different
| media.
| mario143 wrote:
| vmoore wrote:
| I always wondered if certain fungi reached earth via an asteroid
| that hit earth and was from a fertile exoplanet, and somehow
| reached here. I like the idea of panspermia[0]. I always imagined
| psilocybin-containing mushrooms as somewhat alien and almost
| designed to alter consciousness, as if from another planet.
| McKenna's 'stoned ape' theory, if true, would explain much of the
| 'missing link' problem.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
| pvarangot wrote:
| The missing link is already explained by wild discontinuities
| in evolution, which are pretty much a given on the evolutionary
| chain of any species on earth given for how long life that
| evolves has been present on the planet. There's records of
| tribes with click based languages that can arrange very
| effective and powerful hunting squads using spears an overpower
| even herds or packs of the most dangerous animals in their
| regions. Yeah they look wildly different than apes, but imagine
| what they were doing to the other kinda differently looking
| apes that didn't understand their clicks but understood "pointy
| stick good", and that happened for thousands of years.
|
| 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.
| kuprel wrote:
| Aztecs and European-Americans only separated about 40k years
| ago, which is more recently than when East Asians and
| Europeans separated. Would be confusing for future
| civilizations to figure that one out
| contingo wrote:
| Psilocybin-producing mushrooms are widely dispersed across the
| clade of all other true mushrooms and their genomes clearly
| show there is no great mystery about their evolutionary history
| or relationships to other fungi. Modern phylogenetics
| completely discredits panspermia as an origin for particular
| species or groups of fungi: they all share a single common
| ancestor and they are all connected to our single Tree of Life
| as with every other known lifeform on Earth.
| rini17 wrote:
| If we ever get viable neural interface available, I definitely
| want to wire myself to my garden. The first thing I did on bare
| plot was to put in rotten wood and cartons for fungi to grow.
| sn00tz00t wrote:
| Really impressive considering the setup. Would love to see them
| grow fungi around a lattice to have input and output in a
| controlled manner.
| bitwize wrote:
| And when we translate these fungal sentences...
|
| "Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is
| unfulfilled Void."
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I don't have anywhere near the scientific background to even
| consider whether this is a report on "fungi are intelligent" or
| "just some random electrical signals". If the former, it's
| absolutely hilarious, because Terrance McKenna was possibly right
| after all:
| https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-...
|
| Of course, if this were "true" and "proven", I would imagine it
| would be all over front-page news for every major publication.
| vga805 wrote:
| How would "intelligent" fungi have any bearing on the stoned
| ape theory? The former seems neither necessary nor sufficient
| for the latter.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| You are absolutely right - the underlying premise is that
| "fungi is intelligent, and it passes some of that
| intelligence to the apes, when consumed". This makes no
| sense. Just came to mind since McKenna also rants about fungi
| networks being the largest intelligent being on the planet,
| etc.
| tazjin wrote:
| I wouldn't state "makes no sense" about something like
| that. For example, in sci-fi terms, psychedelic molecules
| could be akin to a 'protomolecule' that attaches to self-
| replicating entities and attempts to induce
| ??consciousness??
|
| We don't know any of this for sure.
| xg15 wrote:
| It's absolutely an interesting paper, but just to note: Their
| finding is _not_ that the spike activity is a language. They just
| propose it _might_ be a language and then derive a number of
| statistics by treating it _like a language_ for the sake of the
| argument.
|
| ... at least that was my understanding from the abstract and
| introduction.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Seems so.
|
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Wow this is really cool. I wonder if this can be harnessed to
| charge a very small battery, which in turn can power a small LED.
| Might be a unique variation on the potato powered light bulb
| science fair project. I have quite a few blocks of mycelium
| sitting around...
| yosito wrote:
| Maybe my anecdotal experience of taking mushrooms and feeling
| like I can communicate with plants is not completely far fetched
| nonsense.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| Book recommendation: "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake [0].
|
| 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?...
| doodlebugging wrote:
| It would be interesting to see an experiment like this run on a
| large fungal colony in the wild like one of those huge organisms
| that you find in old-growth forests. You may be able to fine-tune
| your understanding of their "language" syntax and format if you
| could deploy a grid of sensors to track a message as it spreads
| through the organism to see how efficiently it is delivered to
| distant parts of the colony.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bob55 wrote:
| samaman wrote:
| Adamatzky is a GOAT in biocomputing. Hes the sort of researcher
| who really makes me question why we spend so much money on
| developing quantum computers and other new ways of modeling
| biosystems when using other biosystems as analogs seems far
| cheaper and more fruitful.
| tomcat27 wrote:
| The goal of people doing basic research in math and science is
| not producing more economic value. They really do it just for
| fun. If what they do happen to be useful for others outside
| their club, great, but that's never the goal. They might twist
| words a little to get grants. Historically, their work has been
| useful. ;)
| bognition wrote:
| Neuro PhD here.
|
| 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
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| fjabre wrote:
| 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.
| wonderwasp wrote:
| 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?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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!
| buescher wrote:
| 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.
| kadonoishi wrote:
| I wonder if there could be conscious life inside neutron
| stars, organized through nuclear reactions not chemical and
| therefore going much faster.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| There is a book about this! It's Dragons Egg by R.
| Forward and it's pretty good!
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| >>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.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| > 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?
| beambot wrote:
| I doubt that.
|
| 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Let me answer your question with a question - what is the
| processing power of your brain if you're so sure it's less
| than your laptop?
| joshmarlow wrote:
| > 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.
| shironineja wrote:
| no offense but I think you should consider 5g of cubensis and
| report back after a few hours.
| shak3zz wrote:
| But if you have enough time and size...
|
| Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts
| voldacar wrote:
| There is no way to prove the statement "x is conscious". You
| are just stating your opinion.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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.
| e12e wrote:
| > The information conveyed over the whole of the network by
| this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour.
|
| How many hours, though?
| mellosouls wrote:
| _mushrooms are certainly not conscious_
|
| Considering we don't understand consciousness it might be
| wiser not to claim limits with certainty.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| At that bitrate we'd have to include a light switch in our
| consciousness search. Which I am not willing to do.
| maxbond wrote:
| 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.
| floober wrote:
| I'd think it is something like a ratio of bitrate to
| entropy. How quickly is information being processed
| relative to how quickly it is being lost?
| alan-hn wrote:
| Do we know if it's being lost at all?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Yes. That's thermodynamics.
| [deleted]
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| 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.
| ianai wrote:
| 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.
| timschmidt wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-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 (c) Patrick Hickey
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| 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
| bognition wrote:
| 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.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| 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.
| alan-hn wrote:
| I think that means we didn't have a good definition or
| understanding to begin with
| [deleted]
| djitz wrote:
| Well, that settles it. Let's pack it up, team.
| antattack wrote:
| Brings to mind this TED talk: Electrical experiments with
| plants that count and communicate
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw
| xg15 wrote:
| 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
| trenchgun wrote:
| Scale is quite different. Consider the density.
| tehchromic wrote:
| 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!
| plutonorm wrote:
| I object to being called weird. It's quite a logical position
| to hold, many modern philosophers hold a panpsychist or
| similar view.
| tehchromic wrote:
| Others feel that weird is the greatest compliment.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Man just wait till you hear about plasmodesma..
| dilippkumar wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [0].
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Na...
| meetups323 wrote:
| > computation at some level
|
| 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".
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| We have quite a bit of evidence that our gut bacteria
| influence our long term actions and behaviour through
| neurotransmitter precursors.
| [deleted]
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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
| arrosenberg wrote:
| 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).
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Like toxoplasmosis?
| dunefox wrote:
| I mean, apparently toxoplasmosis or something like it can
| result in personality changes even in humans.
| everhard_ wrote:
| Agree, it's more like they're responding to stimuli,
| could we derive somehow that their genes have evolved
| some degree of ... intelligence?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| 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.
| stadium wrote:
| Not exactly this scenario, but the psilocybe genus
| produces chemicals very similar to serotonin.
| bdamm wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _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.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Link please?
| xg15 wrote:
| This is the article I got the info from:
| http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how-
| the-z...
|
| 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.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Could we be underestimating the ability of very simple
| systems to result in consciousness?
| colechristensen wrote:
| No.
|
| 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.
| yosito wrote:
| > 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Don't know if you did that on purpose, but "hangry" is
| such a beautiful word.
| bdamm wrote:
| "Hangry" is now a widespread term. It's even in Merriam-
| Webster: https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/hangry
| axiom92 wrote:
| Cool video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vijGdWn5-h8
| gigaflop wrote:
| 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.
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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).
| williamsmj wrote:
| Here to recommend Sue Burke's Semiosis/Interference sci-fi
| duology about first contact with a intelligent plant life.
| Melatonic wrote:
| People do not realize just how important Fungi are - there was a
| point at which _Trees_ were the new hotness and Fungi had not
| evolved yet - prehistoric trees basically took over the entire
| planet and there was nothing to break down all of the leftover
| dead wood on the ground. We are talking layers and layers of dead
| trees everywhere.
|
| Then Fungi evolved and started breaking all that down and
| eventually a long time later we get animals.
| citruscomputing wrote:
| Fungi were on land before trees (they broke down rocks to make
| soil, and were the OG roots). It took them a while to learn to
| digest.. I think lignin was it?
|
| Half remembered from first chapter of Entangled Life.
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