Per the article, a fungus can somehow remember where it previously found food. That degree of spatial awareness/memory is surprising.
Thus, in the way that biologists use the word "intelligence", fungi are intelligent. They'd be pretty dumb on any intelligence scale, but they have intelligence.
Yeah, hippies get a little too excited about the mind of the fungus or whatever when they hear the word "intelligence" applied to fungi. Who cares.
I care about the inflation of terms like intelligence and the selling of science as "woah dude" to get clicks. A professor of biology isn't necessarily an expert in what should be called "intelligence" or immune to writing things worth criticism.
People are constantly amazed that things that are alive aren't as inert as a rock, yes life is cool, but you don't need to thing that everything which interacts with the environment has an experience like "thinking".
>Thus, in the way that biologists use the word "intelligence", fungi are intelligent
In the way that this biologist is using the word, but it is well worth questioning that use of the word. Saying everything in the world is intelligent sort of makes the term not have any meaning. Is my mechanical thermostat intelligent?
Really simple systems can have complex behavior when you don't understand how they work, and when you do figure the system out you can be impressed by how something simple can accomplish but simple machines aren't intelligent, intelligence is something different and much more special.
All multicellular living things seem to do some information processing. We would not agree to call a fungus intelligent, but would agree to call a human intelligent.
OK, from human we can descend to an ape, a dog, a crow, a sparrow, a crocodile, a goldfish, a flatworm, a jellyfish. Jellyfish don't have a dedicated nervous system and probably can't be called "intelligent". But can you determine where in the sequence there is a cliff, an abrupt enough change that delimits "intelligence"? I have trouble doing that in a meaningful, non-arbitrary way.
Intelligence has degrees that begins with any abstraction and ends with arbitrary conscious theorizing and decision making (and a metric of how effective this ability is).
But isn't that what one of the studied fungi did? To make a decision to grow into the direction where it found food the last time instead of every direction like it did before, it needs to have some sort of model of its environment in its memory, and needs to be able to make decisions based on that model.
chemoreception
> They are so smart that they find the shortest paths between nodes arranged as Japanese cities
survivor bias
Even unicellular ones has to do it, that is what a complex adaptive system that wants to sustain its life-state has to do. But none of this is symbolic processing the way humans are capable of. Reducing intelligence to mere adaptivity simply makes it a useless term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaD7AwPC5Pw&ab_channel=Sesam...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtb2EKGBNr8&ab_channel=Sesam...
Living systems seem to. Even bacteria. Information theory seems too applicable when I look at DNA. All living systems seem intelligent, to varying degrees, as they are storing, duplicating and conditionally applying patterns to various biochemical problems in the task of propagating the rulebook of solutions further, the same task that the intelligence of the brain was evolved for. I worry this is more pseudospiritual woo rather than philosophy, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
>Sailing stones (also called sliding rocks, walking rocks, rolling stones, and moving rocks) are part of the geological phenomenon in which rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without animal intervention. The movement of the rocks occurs when large sheets of ice a few millimeters thick and floating in an ephemeral winter pond break up on sunny days. Frozen during cold winter nights, these thin, floating ice panels are driven by wind and shove rocks at speeds up to 5 meters per minute.
The three types of pet rocks are: ingenius, sentimentalary, and anthropomorphic.
I invented and implemented a pie menu remote control touch screen interface on the PocketPC for sending commands to pet rocks (and it also works with many feral rocks):
Pet Rock Remote Control:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHo...
The essential key to successfully training happy and obedient pet rocks is to repeatedly and consistently give them commands they can perform well, like "Sit", "Stay", "Play Dead", "Roll Over", "Gather Moss", and lots of positive reinforcement immediately after they obey what you tell them to do: "Good Rock!"
"alive" and "intelligent" shouldn't by synonyms. We should reserve the word "intelligent" for a certain considerably higher level of ability and complexity than can be ascribed to most anything living. When you say every living system is intelligent, the word ceases to add any information and you might as well just say "alive" and drop "intelligent".
https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2014/11/05/zombie-...
I mean wtf?
Diseases very often modify the behavior of the host to help them spread. They don't do it "intelligently" they do it on accident by hitting on a modification of the host which results in better transmission of the disease.
Covid makes you cough to spread little droplets filled with virii, rabies makes mammals violent so they'll bite to spread infection through saliva. It isn't through intense manipulation, it's by pulling a few levers. One species taking advantage of another species through biochemistry is extremely common. Every psychoactive drug, poison, etc. are all manipulations through chemistry.
That sounds an awful lot like a human being.
True dat. However since there is not a single valid definition for intelligence, I started to speak and think of heuristics when others are referring to intelligence. As long as any traits can be learned and trained their testing has nothing to do with what I'd call intelligence.
s/mushrooms/computers/
re: incessant "AI" hype
And to me, this universe is (at least metaphorically) a man eater, and it constantly has reminders for us [2]. And if you subscribe to any sort of notion of morality, it seems like the things that do scare us, like regret, do make us live our lives in better ways.
Most people are afraid of psychedelics because even those of us who do them, find them to be jarring. They show us the shitty things we've done, who we really are, and how we really think subconsciously. They wake us up from the slog of our usual comfortable lives. The motivational speakers of time and time again have always said that comfort is the enemy. I find this is why even near death experiences are life-renewing. Anything that makes us afraid, reminds us how short our lives are, and how important every detail, every moment, every butterfly effect is. So the man eater must scare us, if it is to help us do what is expedient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulDC1w1ydLI&ab_channel=ErinS...
If I withhold the truth I will go straight to hell where I will eat not but burning hot coals and drink not but burning hot cola. Where fiery demons will punch me in the back. Where my soul will be chopped into confetti and strewn upon a parade of murderers and single mothers. Where my tongue will be torn out by ravenous birds.
Edit: I'm not mocking you: I just SWORE TO GOD that I was telling the truth! How much more sincerity and evidence do you want from me? A Wikipedia citation? ;)
>When the inebriated Ingle then played the song for Bushy, who wrote down the lyrics for him, he was slurring his words so badly that what was supposed to be "in the Garden of Eden" was interpreted by Bushy as "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".[11][12]
[11] Dave Thompson (2014). Iron Butterfly: Live at the Galaxy 1967 (Liner notes). Purple Pyramid Records.
[12] "Top 10 Drum Solos of All Time". Catalogs.com. October 24, 2011. Retrieved June 6, 2017.
https://www.catalogs.com/library/top-10-drum-solos-of-all-ti...
Spacetime is a springy substrate filled with quantum noise :-)
Muscaria is a latin name, not english, so ideally should be pronounced respecting how the taxonomist used it instead to mess with the sounds for no purpose apart of introducing a lot of noise to distort a language that was created to be universal.
Muscaria means relative to flies (musca in latin). Musca should be pronounced as moos (like in moon) and ca (like in California). Not like 'must scare'.
Regarding descriptive species names, I present the following:
Han solo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_(trilobite)
Spongiforma squarepantsii (please tell us the proper Latin pronunciation for this one)
Heerz lukenatcha / Heerz tooya (what do these describe, without looking them up?)
And finally, plants named after people, letters A-C. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_plant_genera_named_f...
I'm talking about the binomial system of classification that definitely was created to be universal
> Pronounce however you want.
And then it stops being universally understood and we can't use anymore to communicate except as a written language. Can you see the problem?
Spongiforma is a straightforward name to pronounce in fact.
Fair point, I misunderstood. This is quite salient when talking about fungi and plants, where different species can share common names but which have different chemical properties, perhaps including edibility. Yes, the taxonomic identifiers are important.
> Can you see the problem?
No. The variations in how people speak these names do not tend to diverge much more significantly than word pronunciations with different regional accents. “Funj-eye” vs “fun-guy” vs “fun-jee” vs “fun-geeh” are all readily understood as the same thing. The same goes for “seye-loss-eye-bee” and “sill-o-sibe”.
> Spongiforma is a straightforward name to pronounce in fact.
I was more focused on learning the proper Latin pronunciation of “squarepantsii”. Should it not be “squa-ray-“ instead of the cognate “square-”? Doesn’t adding cognates throw the whole thing off?
I have never heard “Cordyceps” pronounced with a hard C in the second position, nor any hard Cs pronounced in “Cetacea”, even though Latin rules have no soft C. So the Latin pronunciation rules are already not strictly followed by most in the field and have not been for many decades, and the quest to keep the Kæsar’s Latin is quixotic.
You just need to travel more then. Millions of people pronounce it exactly like that, including me. Cetacea, Cordiceps; one character, one sound. The easy, old and reliable way to do it that worked really, really well for 200 years.
Scientific language uses basically Greek and Latin, but also other languages and names of famous people. There are specific exceptions for this cases.
Believe it or not, Squarepantsii is a latin name.
Is a collage of english names of course, BUT the final ii is not english; It cames directly from latin, so is a "neolatinism". A new name latinised (Built using latin grammar rules). Therefore should be pronounced as any other latin word. It has 13 sounds.
If we think about it, Latin is a dead language that is "so dead" that is still growing and including new words. And of course there is still people alive that speak it routinely (In the Vatican, for example).
I'm aware that this is not a popular opinion, but the anglosphere is just doing simple things much more difficult for everybody (including them), and shooting themselves in the foot. To remember the scientific names [1] is much more difficult for them than for us.
[1] (i.e Metasequoia glyptostroboides, yep, easy. Just a couple of traps here. Everything else is clear and obvious)
Once the smoke cleared, the HNer realized their screen was also black. They hastily smacked their computer's power button, quickly realizing it had also died. A sickly black billowy puff of smoke then emanated from their once neon-lit PC case. They thought of that dumb joke from grade school about being punched so hard that their grandma felt it. Had they really done that to their PC by hitting their mouse so hard? "Impossible!" they thought, "Coincidences are ALWAYS just improbable events!"
All of a sudden the PC speaker inside the case started rattling. Then a voice echoed from it: "You kicked the Llama's ass!"
The HNer fell down on their knees. They couldn't believe that a Winamp loving entity ruled the universe. Was life a musical thing? "Things will never be the same." they muttered angrily as they downvoted yet another post by /u/carljung via their iPhone 47 Pro Max Plus Platinum Collector's Edition.
Rocks, road signs and tables are not alive. Humans, pigs and fungi are alive. That is a useful distinction but it disregards differences in the latter group.
Fungi are reacting to stimuli with more complex behaviors than a single-celled organism can. We can't say fungi are more alive than the single celled organisms, so what are they?
Where does one draw the line with intelligence? In your opinion, what organisms can appropriately be considered intelligent?
Yes we do. There's a whole continuum from prions through viruses to cells.
Thank you for not ending your comment with "read up".
Thought experiment: could you rigorously define and determine the nanosecond in which life begins and ends for a mammal?
How about a nanometer precise surface boundary between a single living organism and its nonliving environment?
In your opinion, what organisms are intelligent?
You clearly have read up based on your other posts but being a jerk to people who aren't as read up as you won't make you any happier.
Calling mushrooms intelligent appeals to a certain sort of person and publishing articles like this are just taking advantage of those people for their attention.
The behavior of fungi is interesting without having to project intelligence on to it.