Hasn't that been ruled out by now though?
(Content warning: Zombie ant fungus details)
I read articles about that fungus and I believe for a long time it was assumed that the fungus rewires something inside the ant's brain that makes it want to climb to the top of a grass blade etc. - so it would "only" manipulate the high-level goals of the ant but not control the more complex and dynamic low-level operations (such as walking or navigating) directly.
However, a few months ago there was a paper about more detailed research on the molecular mechanisms the fungus uses for the takeover. Turns out, the former hypothesis was wrong and in fact it does control the ant's arms/legs directly. If that's true, then the fungus itself must somehow actively steer the ant towards the grass.
This seems to be the referenced paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1711673114
I was wrong about it being from a few months ago though. It was released in 2017 already.
It is entirely possible that human motivations and reasoning are driven by similarly simple mechanisms. The best example I can think of is how much of an asshole I can be to my family when I'm hangry.
Where it gets interesting is it might not even be “you” that is hungry, rather it’s the collective microbiome that sends signals from your gut to your brain telling it to eat for their benefit.
I don't think the logistic map is conscious, but it is very complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map
What I'm talking about re: ants is a few chemical signals specifically targeting ant behaviors resulting in the infected behavior. I don't think the fungus is any more conscious than a handful of pills.
> The life cycle of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii goes like this: Toxoplasma reproduces inside the intestine of a cat, which sheds the parasite in its feces. Rats then ingest the parasite when they consume food or water contaminated with cat feces. The parasite takes up residence in the rat’s brain and, once the rat gets eaten by a cat, it starts the cycle all over again. > Researchers have known for a few years that a rat infected with Toxoplasma loses its natural response to cat urine and no longer fears the smell. And they know that the parasite settles in the rat’s amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and emotions. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-parasite-t...
THC --> munchies! Alcohol --> saying dumb things at parties.
I'll bet there is a fungal chemical that disrupts the ant's spacial orientation, and absent of other stimuli, it may have a default program that causes it to seek higher ground.
So long as we can put electricity in, and get different electric signals out, we have a sort of interface.
If they're sentient, then wow, great. If not, we can probably work out the right signals and species to use in growing a mushroom-based Turing machine.
Someone has a very entertaining YouTube channel full of this content: https://www.youtube.com/c/MycoLyco. The titles are great too, like "Reishi Talks To Lions Mane About Life In a Bag" (posted 4 days ago).
Unfortunately that term applies to basically everything... computation at every classical level we know only requires "maybe have state, maybe update state in response to environment, maybe move to new environment based on new state, maybe repeat".
Premise 2: https://xkcd.com/505/
Conclusion: Every system, open or closed, is computational in a certain rigorous sense of implementing dynamics along the space dimensions (versus inputs, via transformations, into outputs) and demonstrating dynamics along the time dimension (flux of the energy+information carried through its constituent parts).
If we can create a "computer" using rocks in a binary-ish encoding, surely we can implement "computers" in more efficient encodings that utilize certain properties of physical reality.
We as humans began to approach this with mechanical computers using complex linkages, but only got so far before we decided on digital (binary) encoding and then enshrined that in silicon. To be sure, binary is a very effective way of organizing computation given our physical implementation(s), but most likely there are way more efficient ways of doing things.
One fascinating direction we are beginning to explore to achieve more efficient computation is marrying machine learning with materials engineering![1]
In fact, by this conclusion, we can only believe that the universe is merely the most efficient way to simulate itself, but this by no means precludes the possibility of simulating it in any other medium (encoding).
There is a fungus [0]. that takes over a carpenter ant's brain and makes it climb up plants and clutch on to a leaf with it's jaw and hang down from it. The fungus then sprouts the fruiting body from the dangling ant and spreads its spores.
As an armchair theorist, anything that can interface with a brain and coordinate a nervous system to produce complicated movement has to be capable of computation at some level.
[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Na...