[HN Gopher] Do Fungi Recognize Shapes?
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Do Fungi Recognize Shapes?
Author : svilches
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-10-17 17:54 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tohoku.ac.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tohoku.ac.jp)
| 9dev wrote:
| Is it really decision making if the fungus moves to the nearest
| block of wood, then on to the next, and so on?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The main findings seems to be on how it stabilizes.
|
| The blocks are pre-populated, so at the start there's the same
| amount of fungus in every blocks. But as time goes by, the
| fungus moves away from the central block to concentrate on the
| terminal ones in the X shaped configuration for instance.
|
| Or we can see they don't grow towards the inner side of the
| circle to a degree that doesn't look accidental.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| A bit more details
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175450482...
| bbor wrote:
| Wow, stealing my own comment from last week's _Grokking at the
| edge of linear separability_ because it applies here even more
| so: this paper is so simple, dumb, and absolutely breathtakingly
| interesting. Thanks for sharing! Never would I have thought that
| "mycelium doesn't explore the center of a circle" would hold such
| profound insight...
|
| For those interested, heres the paper itself:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175450482...
| two interesting things to me:
|
| 1. Based on my silly American reading of citation names, it seems
| Japanese researchers have been leading the charge on basal
| cognition - a great cultural diversity win! Obviously American
| and European cognitive scientists are involved, but I get the
| impression most would dismiss this as misguided.
|
| 2. The intro has some of the best philosophy I've ever seen in an
| empirical paper. No citations to philosophers of course because
| they'd be laughed at, but it's spot on: This
| evidence led to a formal framework called "basal cognition" for
| reframing the definition of cognition as "fundamental processes,
| such as memory, learning, decision-making, and anticipation, and
| mechanisms that enabled organisms to track some environmental
| states and act appropriately to ensure survival and reproduction"
| which existed long before nervous systems evolved. On the
| contrary, recent studies considering neuroscience hypothesize
| that the cognition of humans, as a brained animal, emerges from
| the patterns of interconnections and information transfer across
| numerous neurons... In this context, the brain exhibits at
| least two levels of cognition. One is the basal cognition at the
| cellular level of each neuron, and the other is the classical
| means of cognition, which emerges from the activities and
| interconnections of the neural networks. This classical cognition
| is crucial for brained organisms to "recognize" the external
| world.
|
| Preach! I'll do them the favor of providing IMO the clearest
| exploration of this idea from premodern cogsci (aka philosophy),
| Schopenhauer's "fourfold" theory of life: Thus
| causality, this director of each and every change, now appears in
| nature in three different forms, namely *as cause* in the
| narrowest sense, *as stimulus*, and *as motive*. It is precisely
| on this difference that the true and essential distinction is
| based between inorganic bodies, plants, and animals, and not on
| external anatomical, or even chemical characteristics. The
| cause in the narrowest sense is that according to which alone
| changes ensue in the inorganic kingdom... Newton's third
| fundamental law: "Action and reaction are equal to each other."
| applies exclusively to cause... The second form of
| causality is the stimulus; it governs organic life as such and
| hence the life of plant, and the vegetative and thus unconscious
| part of animal life, which is in fact just a plant life. This
| second form is characterized by the absence of the distinctive
| signs of the first. Thus here action and reaction are not equal
| to each other, and the intensity of the effect through all its
| degrees by no means corresponds to the intensity of the cause: on
| the contrary, by intensifying the cause the effect may even be
| turned into its opposite. The third form of causality is
| the motive. In this form causality controls animal life proper
| and hence conduct, that is, the external, consciously performed
| actions of all animals. The medium of motives is knowledge.
|
| I think this is a direct rephrasing of the above, putting
| fungus/"basal cognition" in the "vegetative" category.
|
| As Cladistics slowly erodes all of our taxonomic distinctions, I
| think we could all stand to incorporate more of similarly
| functional divisions in our intuitive
| paradigms/standpoints/worldviews. Schopenhauer doesn't mention
| "fungus" or "mushrooms" once (much less "slime molds"!), but I
| think he would happily call them "vegetative" nonetheless, and be
| thrilled to see this paper!
|
| _TL;DR:_ cognition is graduated, which means it's neither
| uniquely homogenous nor uniformly gradual.
| carapace wrote:
| In re: your point #1, I wonder how much might Shinto figures
| into this?
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| In re: your point #2, it's meaningless word salad. Even the
| most diligent parser of the text will come up with absolutely
| nothing sensible.
| hinkley wrote:
| Looks more to me like self identification, and natural selection.
|
| That's not a lot of wood for 120 days. This fungus is trying to
| maximize its chances by reaching out as far as it can to find
| more wood before it dies of starvation. Away from where it has
| already searched.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| And where, exactly, does it store the information that it has
| already searched an area? and how does it avoid dedicating
| resources to re-searching it?
| hinkley wrote:
| How do tree roots know whether they should fuse with other
| roots or not? How do plant leaves know to grow opposite of
| other leaves? How do stripes form on a tiger? Chemical
| gradients.
| interestica wrote:
| I was at a fungus event yesterday (really) and they spoke a
| bit about patterns in nature and how they are similar to
| Turing Patterns.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern
|
| > ... arises due to the interplay between differential
| diffusion (i.e., different values of diffusion
| coefficients) of chemical species and chemical reaction.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's an old bonsai trick to force a branch to appear
| by cutting or bruising the wood above the point so that
| the cells that differentiate into buds can no longer see
| the signal from the apical bud, which in species that
| have them, is telling the rest of the tree to give it all
| of the energy so it can outcompete other trees reaching
| for the canopy.
|
| Meanwhile if you prune the apical bud to try to keep the
| tree small, it will just elect another leader and keep
| growing on a side branch.
|
| I have a tree in my yard that got nibbled by insects when
| it was chest high. Killed the crown bud but not its two
| siblings. One of them won, then stood up straight and two
| years later you can barely tell.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| This is fascinating. Where could I learn more about these
| sorts of bonsai techniques? Is there a book or website
| that you would particularly recommend? I've always been
| intrigued by bonsai but if you do a basic web search it's
| just people selling trash.
| hinkley wrote:
| Try Heron Bonsai on YouTube. I'm actually out of the
| hobby because I kill trees unless they're in the ground.
| asveikau wrote:
| When you describe the fungus as trying to do something, you
| just ascribed intelligence to it.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I like fungi as much as the next guy, but I can't help but feel
| like this might be attributing more meaning than is really there.
| Wouldn't the whole result also be described by chemical gradients
| in food and water availability? Maybe this is addressed in the
| full paper, but it feels like that would be a simpler model that
| gives the same end result?
| yzydserd wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. The paper leaves mushroom for doubt.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think you can argue that humans are only searching for
| "chemical gradients in food and water availability"
| einpoklum wrote:
| I invited some people to Yu Fukusawa, and after it was over they
| all said you're a real fungi to be with.
|
| ...
|
| thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week.
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