Fungi are really interesting, though at least in terms of eating them many folks in the US are strangely reluctant. But this article does seem to be at pains to tease apart 'intelligence' from 'consciousness' - so I think it's not unreasonable for them to claim fungi can be intelligent without being very similar to us (in the same way we could say that of an ant colony, for example).

Michael Pollan talks about this in a few of his books. Some cultures are more mycophobic (USA), and some are more mycophilic (Russians, I would say Chinese as well). I think you can attribute some of it to whether there are many poisonous mushrooms in that culture's land area!

I googled and found related quotes:

https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/05/21/berkeley-talks-transcri...

Knowing your local species is super important. Apparently lots of poisoning cases in the (western?) US is because one of the toxic species looks a lot like an edible species in Asia.

Im literally sitting here with "THE AUDUBON SOCIETY FIELD GUIDE TO NORTH AMERICAN MUSHROOMS" - And I am still terrified and amazed with them.

I am not sure "strangely" is a good adjective for the reluctance. Many people do not like the taste of various mushrooms. Additionally, for collecting in the wild, there's a lot of These Will Kill You. Meanwhile, a carrot is easy to identify and tasty.

This is not quite a misconception, but there’s some nuance that’s worth writing about.

A lot of plants will harm or kill you if you eat them too. The difference is that plants are less ephemeral, so we see more of them more often, and some of the more dangerous ones (e.g. poison ivy) are introduced to most people pretty early. There’s very little education about fungi at all, unless it’s self-directed, so the knowledge on how to ID safe species is just not as present in US culture.

I have read (no links, sorry) that the deadly ratio of wild plants is higher than that of wild mushrooms. Most plants like most mushrooms are considered to be “inedible,” meaning they won’t kill you but you won’t want to try and eat them either (flavor, texture). We don’t go around trying to eat maple leaves or grass because they don’t taste good and we just learned early to not try to eat them. This knowledge about mushrooms is lacking.

A carrot is easy to identify because it’s generally found on a store shelf, or was grown from a labeled seed packet. Try to find them in the wild, and you’re met with the deadliest common plant in the USA, Water Hemlock.

There are a number of safe mushroom species with good ID characteristics and no dangerous lookalikes, and a good number of them are considered to be choice edibles. If you can ID a particular pre-determined leafy green in the wild (which might be harder than you think) then you can do the same for a particular pre-determined mushroom species.

Carrots were naturally white. They were bred to be orange for reasons you can Google.

And wild carrots (Queen Anne's lace) look remarkably like poison-hemlock. Some people also have a dermal reaction to wild carrot as well.

Still easy to identify and safe to nibble on, like strawberries.

Yeah, I don't think the term intelligence helps define the novel behavior of fungus in this article. The better way to describe their behavior is adaptive. Fungus adapt in a way that's more like a resilient network than as a conscious being or organism. And that's really something we ought to focus on especially when it comes to engineering them for better use cases. I've seen one case of fungus being used for making insulation bricks for houses (non-load bearing) and it looks quite impressive considering it's cheaper and biodegradable.

If I think about the qualities I want in insulation, it’s not clear to me that “biodegradable” is highly prized.

I’ve got some wood in my garage structure that has biodegraded (aka “rotted”) and it’s now a project I need to deal with.

> I don't think the term intelligence helps define the novel behavior of fungus in this article.

Maybe you are right, but I think humans are blind to any behavior that happens at a frequency either too low or too high.

If an organism responds too far out of our frequency band (on the order of hundreds of milliseconds), especially on the extreme low end, we seem unable to consider it 'intelligent' or even purposeful.

We barely even notice it and if any behaviour that unfolds over days seasons or even years.

It also doesn't help fungi that mycelial networks are almost all underground where they are literally invisible to us.

Reminds me of this sentence in this post about ‘Elvish technology’ https://essays.georgestrakhov.com/elvish/

> The Elves do not imitate nature, they let nature do its magic and try to help it as best as they can. Allowing nature to solve a problem is extremely effective and efficient. The only downside is that it usually takes a lot of time - precisely the thing that the immortals have plenty of.

I'm a techie vegan too, and think about the fungi kingdom too, especially after watching Fantastic Fungi and some other personal experiences!

I'd like to video chat with you about this if you are ever up for it (and any others as well). If so, please send me an email at [email protected] with a subject of "Video chat...".

Cheers

I'm not a vegan, but I think about fungusamongus all the time. I'm not a vegan, and I make concious decisions about my meals too. Why are we adding vegan like it's 'special' in this case?

I'm just trying to meet other vegans. It is a lonely world for vegans, a very underrepresented group, so when I see there is another vegan in tech, I get excited, and HN doesn't provide a way to contact others so leaving a comment was my only option at creating this connection.

I think a vegan has a significantly different relationship with non-human life than non-vegans do. It’s quite the leap to avoid an exploitative relationship with animals.

Vegans are special, in all cases. They have made a superior moral decision (whether by moral grounds or not) to contribute less to global warming (and thus the destruction of our habitat) than other, non-vegan members of their species.

It's a badge of honor. As it should be.

Not a full and consistent vegan, but what sentient becomes more important because it has practical implications for your diet choices. Should I eat fungi or not? I'm sticking with eating them but this topic is more relevant because of the diet impact

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of a fungal mycelium. Fungal intelligence (if it exists) is quite distributed, and exists mostly in the mycelial structure, since that’s where it eats and grows. It only puts up mushrooms when there are favorable conditions.

This is not to dismiss your concerns about sentience; it is an interesting topic. Compare with a raspberry, for example. That is the fruiting body of a plant. It has the capability to produce many other plants from its seeds. Part of the plant’s strategy is to be eaten by birds and then shat out, and so dispersed much more widely than it would be by wind.

Mushrooms are different in that you can take a piece of one, stick it into some growth medium, and get more mycelial growth from it, unlike the plant material around a seed. They are maybe roughly analogous to pluripotent stem cells in that respect. But a mushroom’s main reason for being is to send out spores, not to act as a central part of the organism’s “mind.” If it was essential, it wouldn’t rot after a few days.[0]

If we ignore for a moment the question of sentience, then it is clearly more ethical to eat a mushroom than a carrot, or any other root vegetable. Pulling a carrot kills the whole plant, while picking a mushroom does not kill the organism.

They’re just…weird. That’s part of why I love them. Somewhere between plant and animal, hard to map our notions of existence and intelligence onto, a mysterious form of existence, etc.

[0] Some species have very hardy mushrooms, so this reasoning doesn’t necessarily apply to them, but they are also inedible.

That was a really dope comment. Thank you.

Mushrooms are amazing to me - I think that humans are a fungus as well - like the most advanced mushroom.

I personally draw the line at “I don’t want to form an exploitative relationship with another life-form with a central nervous system.” I’m open to expanding the line to include explorative relationships with fungus, but given the current science I haven’t found any reason to believe any fungus is more intelligent than a goldfish.

OP never claimed to be special but simply above average, which I think is fair since most vegans transitioned to that stage by starting to think much more about what they consume than they ever did before.

Your question reminded me of this meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1031973-urinal-etiquette

I think “I’m a vegan” is important information when describing my philosophy with non-human life, and I was talking about my views on fungus.

Did your philosophy on non-human life lead you to choosing to be vegan, or because you were vegan led you to learn about non-human life? I ask, because you can have the same learning of non-human life and still choose to not be vegan. They are not exclusive. (I ask as curiosity not a challenge to you)

I’m not sure I agree. If I were to hire a Personal Trainer and they were in terrible shape I’d be doubtful of their skill. What shape the person is in _shouldnt_ matter for their ability to do the job, but because they haven’t gone through the process themselves I’d have initial doubts about their skills. Your actions say a lot about your values and thoughts.

I've seen that with "I do crossfit"

I wonder if "mammal-level intelligence" isn't a bugaboo. Crows are smarter than some humans I've known.

no they're really not

I wonder if they can detect a joke, because you clearly can't therefore, smarter than you if they can.

What joke would that be?

Might be more accurate to come at it from the other side: Humans are capable of higher levels of stupidity than cows.

This seems a good approach. We should examine the fungi for stupidity. If it doesn't have that I think it is safe to say it's smarter than we are.

maybe you just need to get to know cows better

Well...

you didn't grow up in one of the 'fly over' states did you

We can stop saying it when the crows complain.

Have you met a crow? They complain all the time.

Unless there's an accipiter around. Then they get very quiet and very watchful.

I guess you also mock meat eaters by saying let's all eat humans too? Or do you only waste your great talent at hyperbole on vegans?

I would never eat a human. Too worried about prion diseases. I feed humans to my dogs. /sarcasm

Good take. Vegans are so silly. So hilarious and worthy of criticism when people take the time to consider the ethical ramifications of their actions and move their moral bar without descending into absurd reductionism. /s

It's so weird how uptight some people get at the concept of... not eating meat.

I think it's something like "if your ethics != my ethics, I must preemptively discredit and attack you to prevent you from criticizing me". A very natural xenophobic reaction when you look at it like that.

"Meat is murder".

Not eating meat is a simple decision. But feeling morally superior to those eating meat is a problem. Especially when the meatless lifestyle is defended by saying to save other creatures' life, yet the same lifestyle is heavily supported by products which were grown in large monocultures, destroying the natural habitat of countless critters in an otherwise rich flora and fauna all over the globe.

Both lifestyles require monocultures. One more than the other actually, and that same one also requires more water and land, and creates more pollution. I'm not a vegan, or even a vegetarian, but I think it's objectively true that those diets are morally superior even with animal rights aside.