Fungal sentences are slightly more complex than English, slightly less complex than Russian.
me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU
This site has taught me about many bizarre memes I had never heard of before. I remain entirely unsure whether this is a good or bad thing.
vegans in shambles
Chives, yes.
Yeah you’re just eating the penises, essentially. They are ejaculating reproductive parts. If there is a conscious part of a fungus, it’s the complex underground mycelium network.
Mushrooms smarter than Anglos confirmed
They don’t have brains. They have no level of intelligence. I read way too much of the study, seems very speculative
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.”
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:
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?
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.
Probably they do in some form, just based on biological structures different from our own. Like flowers will turn to follow the sun over the course of a day, and then there’s that plant that can react to something touching it by curling in its leaves.
I have a friend who studied cognitive science and he says that while there is science to support various theories, the whole “consciousness” thing is very much stuck as metaphysics and philosophy right now. There’s no clear consensus as to what it is or why it happens.
For my conjecture, I’ve always figured that memory is significantly more responsible for our perception of individual personhood than any actual continuity of a single consciousness is. That it’s an emergent property of certain recursive systems. The split brain experiments are pretty eye-opening in that regard
The golden age of silk road psychedelics has come and gone. You’d order them safe and sound from a computer somewhere and a week later they’d come in the mail disguised as junk credit card ads… good times.
i usually don’t eat trees and weeds and mosses, so having melted into the soil network didn’t stop me from eating plants. i probably shouldn’t drop acid at a chickpea plantation, tho.
