Fungal sentences are slightly more complex than English, slightly less complex than Russian.
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.
I believe that all these things are sentient and also factory farming is bad. How are those beliefs incompatible?
