Fungal sentences are slightly more complex than English, slightly less complex than Russian.
It really depends on how you define “intelligence”. If they have the ability to receive and process information from their environment and respond I’d call that “intelligence”. All living things possess some degree of intelligence. Cephalopods lack a centralized “brain”, having multiple distributed “lobes” throughout their bodies, but I doubt anyone would dispute that octopi are “intelligent.”
If they have the ability to receive and process information from their environment
It really depends on how you define “process”. Plants arguably receive and process information. I wouldn’t call that intelligence though.
i mean at a certain point you gotta make an obvious comparison and define limits. if ants or lowly insects are bad to eat, is a fungus on the same level of intelligence as one?
If ants or lowly insects are bad to eat
They aren’t bad to eat, besides maybe not tasting great.
plants for sure do take in and process information, and perform some computations, but yeah i think the key thing is whether or not their way of processing information results in an experience of being alive, and i don’t think it does. while i think the set of possible experiences is much more diverse than the subset that looks like our own and has familiar elements like “a sense of self” or “a sense of the present moment” i still find it unlikely that plants experience much of anything. i just don’t think they have enough interconnectivity. maybe a mycorrhizal network joining a bunch of plants would get there.
i still find it unlikely that plants experience much of anything
Yes, but insects might not either. It’s a super fuzzy line that could be drawn just about anywhere.
The ability to receive and process information can even be done by non-living things, particularly since information here is environmental stimulus and processing is just responding to one stimulus differently from another. A crystal can do that as it grows.
There’s definitely a more familiar dynamic at play that we appreciate, where a living thing creates for itself complex and dynamic responses and spits out signals of its own, but single cells do this all the time. Viruses do as well. I personally wouldn’t categorize a bacterium stochastically swimming towards a chemical gradient using a couple-step chemical process to be intelligence.
As we all know, the true mark of intelligence is being an articulate primate with a keyboard who spends their weekend deciding which other creatures are worthy of being called intelligent :kubrick-stare:
It’s not really about “worthiness”. I’m skeptical of the idea because assholes weaponize this idea to justify eating clearly sentient, intelligent animals. Plants and fungi aren’t the same, they don’t have an equivalent to a central nervous system, and all these cynics are out here talking about well maybe they are sentient too based on these lukewarm studies, so I guess it doesn’t matter what we eat. No motherfucker, go vegan.
