[HN Gopher] Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-...
___________________________________________________________________
Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like
hallucinations
Author : astronads
Score : 237 points
Date : 2025-12-26 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nhmu.utah.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (nhmu.utah.edu)
| astronads wrote:
| It is interesting how the hallucinations consistently represent
| tiny people/elves to the mushroom consumer, even across
| geography/culture.
|
| I wonder what the brain is doing...
| nospice wrote:
| Could be that the mushroom just temporarily interferes with the
| substances the elves put in our water supply to keep us in the
| dark?
| egypturnash wrote:
| s/elves/government
| joe8756438 wrote:
| exactly, the real question is what the elves are doing while
| they're unseen.
| ok_dad wrote:
| They keep the universe running.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Making toys, caring for reindeer, sleight maintenance, ...
|
| And spook work for His Jolliness' Secret Service, to keep
| their Naughty and Nice databases current.
| johnea wrote:
| We should've asked Terence McKenna...
|
| It could be a subspecies of the "machine elves"...
| amarant wrote:
| I can answer the what, that parts easy!
|
| The real question is WHY they keep stealing my underwear
| and left-foot socks?
| eykanal wrote:
| This is some real antimemetics stuff here :) (https://scp-
| wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub if you're not
| familiar)
| Tempatio wrote:
| Yeah the mushrooms are obviously an amnestic that lets you
| see the elves which are usually antimimetically cloaked.
| treetalker wrote:
| Would be interesting if the chemical mechanism is related or
| similar to the DMT one that creates the "machine elves"
| experience.
| astronads wrote:
| Yeah, the machine elves rabbit hole is interesting for sure.
| I hope a lot more rigorous science delves into both mushrooms
| and DMT
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Someone has to support consciousness and reality I guess,
| thanks to the elves I say...
| flir wrote:
| These mushrooms are small, these elves are far away.
| seg_lol wrote:
| You will get a kick out of
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVUuoXAkuUg a Corridor Crew
| video on in-camera forced perspective effects.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Occam's razor would say they're real.
| tokai wrote:
| Lilliputian hallucinations are also common in mental illnesses
| with hallucinations. Definitely some kind of physical
| foundation for it in the human brain.
| adzm wrote:
| I imagine it is something similar to pareidolia.
| newman8r wrote:
| reminds me of trip reports from people trying Salvia Divinorum
| - there's even a name for these tiny people, 'Smelves'
| akka47 wrote:
| Since we're in the topic of elves and common hallucinations, I
| want to share these Salvia trip replicas that some say are
| extremely accurate:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2IRKuS3sSE
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XfIpJdlEY
| ceroxylon wrote:
| It gets the visuals accurate, but the experience includes a
| lot of physical sensation that is very difficult to convey,
| e.g. the 'wind' that pushes you back and the discomfort of
| going into a chaotic dissociated state. You see those things
| but it feels very 'real'.
| pea wrote:
| I think it makes sense given the following:
|
| - Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces /
| people. Even very small babies can do this.
|
| - Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and
| sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards
| face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in
| shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect
| more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
|
| - The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have
| some form of small magical person.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| SWIM would like to know how to get paid as (instead of paying to
| be) "an expert who explores new mushrooms".
| neogodless wrote:
| Someone Who Isn't Me?
| MrDrone wrote:
| Yes, this was a common phrase in early psychedelic and other
| drug experience sharing forums. Like a verbal talisman people
| believe kept them from incriminating themselves. I haven't
| thought about it in years. Delightful.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Yeah - I was going to ask... for a friend
| mistersquid wrote:
| > Someone Who Isn't Me?
|
| Funny, I saw "SWIM" and reasoned "Someone Who Is Me",
| thinking "is not" would be represented as "Is Not" instead of
| the contraction. :)
| Aurornis wrote:
| In some online drug forums it was believed that if you used
| SWIM instead of I for all of your posts, the government was
| powerless to use any of the posts against you. You can still
| find threads on forums where everyone is saying SWIM did this
| and SWIM experienced that as if they have discovered a
| loophole to protect themselves from the law.
|
| It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days
| of the internet that had big warning banners declaring the
| law enforcement was not allowed to connect.
| culi wrote:
| I feel like most people didn't actually believe it would
| somehow grant them legal protection but still used it kinda
| tongue-in-cheek. I think it's kinda cute and still use "my
| friend Swim..." in a joking way when talking about legally
| dubious escapades
| airstrike wrote:
| I always feel like they should bring along an artist for the
| trip so we can get a visual depiction of what it was like
| optimalsolver wrote:
| And a poet.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Exploring new mushrooms is more likely to end in agonizing
| death than piercing the veil of reality.
| dekhn wrote:
| Major in biology, do a grad program in medicinal chemistry,
| join a lab that already studies this.
|
| (I know folks who read PiHKAL and thought "Hmm, this would be a
| nice ML training/prediction exercise")
| rolph wrote:
| some breadcrumbs for your SWIM
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Morris
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Incredible! A mushroom that bruises blue, but the visions are
| seemingly unlike traditional tryptamines, and there's no
| psilocybin found in the mushroom. Also no muscimol present (the
| thing in Fly Agaric, the 'other' type of hallucinogenic mushroom
| compound) yet there's definitely a consistent syndrome of
| hallucinations if you eat it undercooked.
|
| Could this mean we're on the brink of discovering an entirely new
| class of hallucinogens?
| culi wrote:
| From the Wikipedia
|
| > In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media
| attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was
| reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an
| official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been
| thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects
| (hallucinations).
|
| It seems _Rubroboletus sinicus_ , another bolete, is also
| suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms
| are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China.
|
| They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the
| Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work
| in English is just not really there.
|
| It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine
| class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page
| has more info
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
| renewiltord wrote:
| xiao ren ren? Like "small people"? Okay, if the mushrooms are
| literally _called_ little guy mushroom and you see little
| guys running around then surely this is an old discovery.
| culi wrote:
| Well yes ofc this is an old "discovery". Boletes are known
| choice edibles around the world so ofc people would
| discover that if they undercook this mushroom they would
| trip. We even have some written history about it:
|
| > The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong wrote in Baopuzi (The Master
| Who Embraces Simplicity) around 300 CE that eating a
| certain wild mushroom raw would result in attainment of
| transcendence immediately, suggesting that the mushrooms
| may have been known for thousands of years.
| cess11 wrote:
| It doesn't count until an occidental university has written
| some stories about it and claimed to be the real discoverer
| due to having put some stuff in one of their taxonomies.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| That's not true at all.
|
| _Today 's_ occidental universities would have to pay
| faux homage to "the poor helpless natives" who were the
| original custodians of the discovery but were too
| uncomplicated to do much with it, so with their wonderful
| generosity these kindly westerners did them the great
| service of elevating their voices, etc.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It doesn't look like Xiao Ren Ren refers to the mushrooms.
| It refers to the hallucinations, and is not expected to
| include visions of people:
|
| > "No!," she said, most emphatically, "They are _real_. I
| have seen them myself! "
|
| > Miss Oh clearly remembered the hallucinations that began
| that evening and continued into the next day. The walls
| moved and shifted in geometrical patterns and strange
| shapes appeared.
|
| > "I'm sleepy all day," she said in English. "I see them.
| And I see flies bigger than the actual one, perhaps two
| times big. I see little insects. Not all the time, but when
| the water splashed out." She apparently became fascinated
| by the dripping kitchen faucet, for each drop would, upon
| hitting the sink, sprout wings and legs and crawl away. And
| she remembered, very clearly, staring intently at the bows
| of her shoelaces until they turned into butterflies and
| fluttered off.
|
| The paper devotes quite a bit of text to explaining that
| the mushrooms bearing this quality have no specific name,
| and in fact are not distinguished from non-hallucinogenic
| mushrooms at all. They are referred to by their property of
| turning blue when handled, which is a property not
| exclusive to the hallucinogenic ones.
|
| https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > mushroom sized > blue when bruised > make see small fairy
| people
|
| did they found the schtroumpf village ?
| consp wrote:
| Is any of the variants called gargamel or a latin variant of
| it in the scientific name 'by accident'?
| decimalenough wrote:
| Aka the Smurfs in English.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Or a new reality...
| ipsum2 wrote:
| These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it
| really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific
| compound does.
| ericmay wrote:
| I don't think the article was insinuating that these
| mushrooms were a new discovery, they've been known not just
| in the region but to scientists for some time, though they
| did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been
| sequenced.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in
| psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification
| the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely
| new class of chemicals.
|
| The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through
| systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine
| backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive,
| mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes
| of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an
| entirely new category of molecular compounds.
|
| Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the
| effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty
| tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what
| tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.
|
| It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or
| mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as
| of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly
| active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres
| relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical
| class.
| culi wrote:
| I think the point GP was making was to take issue with
| framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new
| class of chemicals."
|
| More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described
| class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated
| and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy
| pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being
| the most common bread mold). Even Otzi the iceman was found
| to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to
| kill parasitic worms.
|
| While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines
| as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware
| of their effects. Sometimes intimately so.
|
| All that aside though, there are bolete species documented
| to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised
| if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also
| tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna
| hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e.
| Datura alkaloids)
| anthk wrote:
| You would love the readings from Mckenna and the DMT, and
| the concept of Fractal Time.
|
| https://serendipity.li/trypt.html
|
| List:
|
| https://serendipity.li/dmt/dmtart00.html
|
| Yeah, I know, pseudoscience and the like, but biology it's
| _weird_ and with the current scientific discoveries (and
| even reusing quantum mechanics for profit, such as
| chlorofilla with leafs and photons), Nature itself it 's
| 'magical'. Not actually something from fairy tales, but
| from weird mechanics we are actually grasping a little
| today.
|
| Instead of my comment from I-Ching being taken as
| numerology, I would think of the universe as something
| being 'computed over', kinda like numeric towers under
| Lisp. Because in the end nothing exists per se; it's just
| fields generating matter, waves, energy and probably,
| information. Thus, the Mckenna theory on Fractal Time (and
| the Chinese paper from Vixra) might be related to
| hypercubic equations (because of Hamming distance between
| changes) that we aren't fully aware.
| throw310822 wrote:
| I was disappointed that the article doesn't contain pictures of
| these little people.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It does but the liliputians are invisible on photographs unless
| you've eaten the undercooked mushroom.
| dekhn wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg
| felubra wrote:
| Strangely enough, I just finished listening today to this
| podcast episode on the Cottingley Fairies (it's a great
| listen):: https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-
| harford/phot...
| pjerem wrote:
| Easy, eat another well known species of uncooked mushrooms so
| that your camera is now able to eat the mushroom.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Common Side Effects anyone?
| spjt wrote:
| Let's ban it before anyone finds out if it's useful
| culi wrote:
| Just need a minority in America to associate it with
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It appears there are several blue staining boletes in the same
| genus that grow in the US. Seems like a fertile area for study.
| tartoran wrote:
| It's Elves all the way down.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I wish it were another dimension, or breaking through the Matrix.
| I never had the chance to experience such items but look forward
| to doing so.
| memming wrote:
| Aparently Jian Shou Qing is mildly toxic yet commonly consumed
| in Yunan.
| culi wrote:
| Spinach too is mildly toxic because of its oxalate content yet
| we eat it all the time. Some of those toxic saponins even have
| certain health benefits. There are plenty other examples of
| toxic foods we regularly consume: legumes contain deadly
| saponins, beets contain oxalates, and potatoes contain
| glycoalkaloids
|
| From what I read _Suillellus luridus_ (Jian Shou Qing ) is
| completely fine when cooked
| jumperabg wrote:
| If used can we hallucinate and predict the HN news of
| tomorrow(especially any acquisition related news)?
| metalman wrote:
| yes,but you wont care.
| czzprr wrote:
| I have a friend who gave up taking regular magic mushrooms
| because he always hallucinated tiny Power Rangers.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _When mice are given chemical extracts of Lanmaoa asiatica, their
| behavior shifts noticeably compared to controls._
|
| Doesn't say how, for some reason. I presume they are shocked to
| see tiny mice, but I would like to know what behaviors they
| exhibited.
| Ccecil wrote:
| Are they seeing tiny mice...or are they seeing the same 2cm
| tall "people"?
| Aurornis wrote:
| The Wikipedia page (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom )
| talks about effects lasting for days, even in animal studies.
| Some of the historical records claimed effects lasting even
| longer, from months to years, though this sounds like triggered
| psychosis.
|
| So perhaps not very recreational as might be assumed given the
| topic.
| why-o-why wrote:
| "Days"?!? Hard pass. My experiments with shrooms in college was
| fun, but I couldn't deal with the 8-12 hours of hallucinating.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Sorry to use a reddit-ism, but "this should be at the top" -
| for safety.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| The next step should be to send enthusiasts there, get samples of
| this mushroom from that market, and introduce it to the
| underground for personal research. That's normally what happens
| when something interesting is discovered.
|
| For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed
| for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris
| Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other
| mushrooms became popular this way as well -- for example,
| Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now
| famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus
| Cyanescens that's widely cultivated at home.
|
| So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up
| gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
| RickS wrote:
| The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was
| growing what they _thought_ was natalensis for many years,
| until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that
| what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science.
| At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its
| proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then
| had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only
| just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano).
| I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely
| distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd
| heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of
| thing.
| contingencies wrote:
| Lived in Yunnan for over a decade, primarily as a vegetarian.
| Mushrooms there are indeed many and varied and quite tasty. Many
| poisonings annually but the government are pretty good at helping
| people to ID with warning posters. Personally ate many mushrooms
| that looked like this and never had hallucinations. Did have some
| others which made me feel a little ill, however. I suspect locals
| are unduly relaxed about types science would avoid due to
| hepatoxicity.
|
| While occasionally FOAFs would get hallucinogenic effects from
| dining, I don't recall explicitly hearing of anyone seeing little
| people, or hearing the term he details in this writing. As such,
| I wonder where this guy gets his info from. Certainly, most
| Yunnanese would describe these mushrooms as Niu Gan Jun
| ("bolete") and more specific Chinese common names for similar
| reddish species would include Tao Hong Niu Gan Jun ("peach-
| colored bolete"). As a general type, they are _very common_ in
| markets across much of Yunnan.
|
| Given the claims, the clearly infrequent effects, and the
| personal experience I can trust, I would conclude with three
| theories: perhaps either the compounds are rapidly degraded when
| non-fresh, safely broken down when cooking (traditionally these
| mushrooms are cut thinly before sauteeing or boiling in hotpot),
| or there are one or two "look alike" species which are more
| rarely found and contain additional compounds which are
| responsible for the occasional effects.
| reissbaker wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the Yunnan mushrooms indeed have their
| hallucinogens broken down after cooking:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
|
| Good guess!
|
| Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations
| can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great
| idea to go looking for them...
| card_zero wrote:
| So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the
| ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-
| shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones
| apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell
| all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects,
| like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover
| worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest species seemed to need
| their toxin (amanitin) so much that they picked it up through
| _horizontal gene transfer._ Why did just _those_ ones need to be
| deadly? In addition to which we have these species that don 't
| even make you sick, just make you trip out, a function which
| looks to have evolved three times over in different ways. What
| kind of half-assed evolutionary strategies are these? What do
| mushrooms _want?_
| tirant wrote:
| That's also my thought. The seem to be inside some type of
| evolutionary gray area or dead-end, where mutations in the
| edibility axis do not seem to matter much for the survival of
| the specifies. So we end up getting species of all extremes:
| extremely poisonous, highly valuable for coursing, trippy, non-
| trippy, mildly poisonous, etc.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Metastatic cancer where our organs and cells grow every
| direction forever until resources expire is extremely
| counterproductive and doesn't matter for the survival of our
| species because it usually occurs after reproductive age and
| the reproduction happened. Perpetuating the flawed genes in
| the next generation.
|
| Its the same with mushrooms, the difference being that not
| only do the spores exist in high numbers, a mushroom getting
| eaten does nothing to the mycelium that spawns the mushroom
| choilive wrote:
| Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through.
|
| Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through
| the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to
| spread.
|
| Other mushrooms developed toxins to protect their fruiting
| bodies - often the biggest threat isn't larger animals, but
| insects. Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems,
| happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our
| brains. Other toxin mechanisms happen to be deadly to both
| insects and humans.
|
| As proof of this evolutionary arms race, there are fruit flies
| that have developed resistance to amatoxins.
| observationist wrote:
| They want the same thing as every other organism wants -
| maximal exploitation of a niche by a lineage. Each adaptation
| that survives overwhelmingly tends toward advantage in the
| exploitation of a niche - fending off predation, establishing
| control over resources, symbiotic support, parasitic drain, and
| a myriad other capabilities that are highly environment
| dependent.
|
| Just look at antelope in north america - they evolved
| incredible speed and agility in order to outrun and evade
| megafauna predators, but there's nothing left nearly fast
| enough to be a threat to them. Environments can change, and
| leave an organism with features that are no longer necessary or
| even beneficial in terms of overall quality of life and energy
| efficiency. The slightest noise can disturb a herd of antelope
| into bolting as if there were prairie lions or sabertooth
| tigers on the prowl. They don't need to be hypervigilant in the
| same way, and it burns a lot of calories to move the way they
| do, so whitetail deer and other slower species that aren't
| quite as reactive or fast are better at exploiting the
| ecosystem as it is.
|
| With mushrooms that have mysterious chemistry, there will be a
| lot of those sorts of vestigial features. Extinct species of
| insects and animals and plants will have been the target of
| specific features, or they might end up in novel environments
| where other features are particularly suitable, but some become
| completely counterproductive in practice.
|
| As far as psilocybe mushrooms go, in lower quantities, they
| actually provide a cognitive advantage sufficient to make a
| symbiotic relationship plausible between mammals and the
| mushrooms, albeit indirect. Animals under low levels of
| psilocybin influence have better spatial perception, can better
| spot movement in low light conditions, and there's a slight
| reduction in the neural influence of trauma inspired networks.
| Large quantities can be beneficial in a number of abstract
| ways. Any animal that sought those mushrooms out could thereby
| gain adaptive advantage over competitors that didn't partake.
|
| Having an extremely toxic substance might be useful for killing
| large organisms and their decomposition either feeding the
| fungi directly, or feeding the organisms beneficial to the
| fungi. This can be plants, other fungi, or the feces of
| scavengers. Horizontal transfer might occur if there's an
| initial beneficial relationship, animals like the smell and
| taste of a thing, and then the fungi picks up the killing
| poison, and the consequences are sufficiently beneficial to
| outbreed the safe ones.
|
| If too many become deadly, animals get killed off, and the non-
| deadly ones tend to gain the upper ground, since they aren't
| spending any resources on producing any poisons. Where there's
| a balance of intermittent similar but poisonous mushrooms, they
| take down enough animals to optimize their niche.
|
| There are dozens of such indirect webs of influences and
| consequences that spread from seemingly simple adaptations, and
| it's amazing that things seem so balanced and stable as they
| do. It's a constant arms race of attacks and temptations and
| strategies.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Two things:
|
| 0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very
| recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time
| our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we
| started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process.
| Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what
| might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to
| us (like the nightshade family) or even be _sought after_ for
| other reasons, like capsaicin.
|
| 1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution
| doesn't _want_ anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It 's
| just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it
| doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y
| steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take
| anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the
| time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.
|
| So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to
| think of evolution as _intelligent_. It 's obviously not. But
| every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the
| fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution
| is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"
| malux85 wrote:
| Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us
| could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is
| operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))
| VanshPatel99 wrote:
| I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be
| common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X
| animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active,
| thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation
| happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while
| other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than
| conscious one.
| uh_uh wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely
| blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations
| is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is
| run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really
| save the argument as it takes some specimen years to
| develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to
| believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".
|
| I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be
| some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.
| yes_man wrote:
| Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the
| comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have
| heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of
| your genome, but are a result of feedback from the
| environment (and not random mutations, viability of which
| natural selection will judge over future generations)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| As a general rule of thumb:
|
| truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm
| $1.");
|
| Then again this is a discussion about "Experts explore
| new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations"
| so maybe woo is appropriate, and you should embrace it.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
|
| Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed
| at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to
| emerge with an intelligence far superior from other
| living things.
|
| > Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale
| over billions of years
|
| It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of
| planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have
| resulted in intelligence.
|
| > It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-
| flips".
|
| Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can
| be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| While your objection is technically correct it can still be
| useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in
| terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent
| being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind
| process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In
| other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not
| being true in a literal sense.
|
| Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term
| "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
| IanCal wrote:
| It's a useful start to move away from "it's just random"
| but it's just so different it doesn't help in many cases.
| It's not approximately the same.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| No.
|
| "Optimization pressure" makes it sound as if there is a
| single metric for optimization, whereas there are a
| constantly shifting set of different metrics. Worse (or
| more precisely, more complex) there are frequently multiple
| different "solutions" for a given metric, and evolution
| doesn't care. Put a little differently, there is no
| "optimization" pressure at all: evolution is not attempting
| to optimize anything ( _).
|
| Trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process that
| is absolutely the opposite of that in every way (no intent,
| multiple outcomes, no optimization) just leads people to
| not think clearly about this sort of thing.
|
| (_) no, not even "reproductive fitness" - rates of
| reproduction are subject to massive amounts of
| environmental "noise", to the degree that minor
| improvements in offspring survivability will often be
| invisible over anything other than the very long term.
| Further, the most desirable rates of reproduction will also
| vary over time, leading to what once may have appeared to
| be an improvement into a liability (and vice versa, of
| course).
| gary_0 wrote:
| A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's
| invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens
| when people talk about computers/software as well ("it
| thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't
| get a response", etc). Outside of formal
| writing/presentations, using only technical terminology
| seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both
| speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing
| (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets
| the wrong idea).
| Sharlin wrote:
| 0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only
| animals eating mushrooms.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Some are _saying_ : "Don't come anywhere near me". Others are
| are _saying_ : "Take a little, I'll show you a good time. Take
| too much... I will make you end your own life."
| bdangubic wrote:
| what others are saying works for hotdogs too :)
| RajT88 wrote:
| > And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a
| warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the
| poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people
| diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse".
|
| Some of the poisonous ones even taste really good, and don't
| start making you sick for a day or two (and then you die
| horribly). You hear about it from time to time, where people
| have the best dinner of their life and then are dead.
| decimalenough wrote:
| You're likely referring to the death cap (Amanita
| phalloides), which is reportedly quite tasty. But there's
| also a mushroom that's both deadly poisonous and a sought-
| after, commercially sold delicacy, the only difference being
| the method of preparation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyromitra_esculenta
|
| Although recent research suggests that some poison remains
| even after careful preparation, and that consumption may even
| be linked to ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).
| sans_souse wrote:
| I dig your style, you sound like my inner monologue :D
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Natural selection cuts both ways.
|
| Sure, many things evolved to be less edible. But humans
| themselves are hunter-gatherer omnivores - who evolved to be
| very good at eating a lot of very different things. There are
| adaptations in play on both ends.
|
| There are, in fact, many countermeasures that would deter other
| animals, but fail to deter humans. In part due to some liver
| adaptations, in part due to sheer body mass, and in part due to
| human-specific tricks like using heat to cook food.
|
| If your countermeasures just so happen to get denaturated by
| being heated to 75C, good luck getting humans with them. It's
| why a lot of grains or legumes are edible once cooked but
| inedible raw. The same is true for many "mildly poisonous"
| mushrooms - they lose their toxicity if cooked properly.
|
| Those countermeasures don't have to be lethal to deter
| consumption! If something causes pain, diarrhea or indigestion,
| or some weirder effects, or just can't be spotted or reached
| easily, that can work well enough. So the evolutionary pressure
| to always go for highly lethal defenses isn't there. It's just
| one pathway to take, out of many, and evolution will roll with
| whatever happens to work best at the moment.
|
| Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and
| humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to _a lot_ of
| things. So you get all of those weird situations - where
| sometimes, humans just blast through natural defenses without
| even realizing they 're there, and sometimes, the defenses work
| but don't work very well because they evolved to counter
| something that's not a human, and sometimes, the defenses don't
| exist at all because the plant's environment never pressured it
| to deter consumption by large mammals at all.
|
| And with the level of control humans attained over nature now?
| The ongoing selection pressure is often shaped less like "how
| to deter humans" and more like "how to attract humans", because
| humans will go out of their way to preserve and spread things
| they happen to like.
| anthk wrote:
| That reminds me of Mckenna/Peter Meyer and the fractal time.
|
| https://www.fractal-timewave.com/articles.php
|
| You can get a free-libre Unix timewave generator there:
|
| https://github.com/kl4yfd/timewave_z3r0
|
| It's a bit pseudo-science but some Chinese wrote an article on
| the I-Ching and patterns and it can have a bit of truth on it.
|
| https://vixra.org/abs/2409.0093 [ Chinese, use whatever tool you
| like to translate it]
|
| I said this because both Mckenna and Peter did writtings about
| DMT and the experiences under it:
|
| https://scribe.rip/illumination/terence-mckenna-explores-the...
|
| >Terence had symbolically left a single mushroom standing in the
| middle of the hut. As they sat there, for a fleeting moment
| Terence saw "not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth,
| lustrous and alive, blue and tan and dazzling white." Dennis saw
| the exact same image and concluded the experiment had been a
| success. Terence was not convinced.
|
| I saw this in a dream too; but I remember descending uber fast
| from space to home, as if I were in a amusement ride, that one
| where you are dropped at high speeds from a fair height, but with
| far more vertigo. Also, I was in space in some kind of a capsule
| before the jump.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Author flies around the world to find a shroom that makes reality
| feel like Super Mario and didn't even bite into one... lost
| opportunity
| oytis wrote:
| Experts
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Hmm... having trouble getting _that_ URL. Archive.org has a
| recent snapshot at
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251226204255/https://nhmu.utah...
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| I'm sure there's some boring neuro-chemical explanation for this,
| and I won't doubt or deny the neuro-chemical explanation, but the
| fact that there's a mushroom that consistently brings about
| hallucinations of tiny people is so bizarre that I kind of want
| to indulge in equally bizarre explanations. Maybe it's not a
| hallucination and this mushroom simply allows us to see the tiny
| people all around us. Maybe mushrooms are intelligent and are
| intentionally making us hallucinate tiny people.
|
| It's a little bit crazy, I know, but it's odd to me that
| evolutionary forces would produce a mushroom that makes you have
| some specific hallucinations, rather than simply make things
| swirl together or simply produce intense feelings of euphoria or
| dread. I mean, marijuana just gets you high and that's that.
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