I like fungi as much as the next guy, but I can't help but feel like this might be attributing more meaning than is really there. Wouldn't the whole result also be described by chemical gradients in food and water availability? Maybe this is addressed in the full paper, but it feels like that would be a simpler model that gives the same end result?
Looks more to me like self identification, and natural selection.
That’s not a lot of wood for 120 days. This fungus is trying to maximize its chances by reaching out as far as it can to find more wood before it dies of starvation. Away from where it has already searched.
How do tree roots know whether they should fuse with other roots or not? How do plant leaves know to grow opposite of other leaves? How do stripes form on a tiger? Chemical gradients.
> ... arises due to the interplay between differential diffusion (i.e., different values of diffusion coefficients) of chemical species and chemical reaction.
There’s an old bonsai trick to force a branch to appear by cutting or bruising the wood above the point so that the cells that differentiate into buds can no longer see the signal from the apical bud, which in species that have them, is telling the rest of the tree to give it all of the energy so it can outcompete other trees reaching for the canopy.
Meanwhile if you prune the apical bud to try to keep the tree small, it will just elect another leader and keep growing on a side branch.
I have a tree in my yard that got nibbled by insects when it was chest high. Killed the crown bud but not its two siblings. One of them won, then stood up straight and two years later you can barely tell.
This is fascinating. Where could I learn more about these sorts of bonsai techniques? Is there a book or website that you would particularly recommend? I’ve always been intrigued by bonsai but if you do a basic web search it’s just people selling trash.
The main findings seems to be on how it stabilizes.
The blocks are pre-populated, so at the start there's the same amount of fungus in every blocks. But as time goes by, the fungus moves away from the central block to concentrate on the terminal ones in the X shaped configuration for instance.
Or we can see they don't grow towards the inner side of the circle to a degree that doesn't look accidental.
Wow, stealing my own comment from last week’s Grokking at the edge of linear separability because it applies here even more so: this paper is so simple, dumb, and absolutely breathtakingly interesting. Thanks for sharing! Never would I have thought that “mycelium doesn’t explore the center of a circle” would hold such profound insight…
1. Based on my silly American reading of citation names, it seems Japanese researchers have been leading the charge on basal cognition - a great cultural diversity win! Obviously American and European cognitive scientists are involved, but I get the impression most would dismiss this as misguided.
2. The intro has some of the best philosophy I’ve ever seen in an empirical paper. No citations to philosophers of course because they’d be laughed at, but it’s spot on:
This evidence led to a formal framework called “basal cognition” for reframing the definition of cognition as “fundamental processes, such as memory, learning, decision-making, and anticipation, and mechanisms that enabled organisms to track some environmental states and act appropriately to ensure survival and reproduction” which existed long before nervous systems evolved. On the contrary, recent studies considering neuroscience hypothesize that the cognition of humans, as a brained animal, emerges from the patterns of interconnections and information transfer across numerous neurons…
In this context, the brain exhibits at least two levels of cognition. One is the basal cognition at the cellular level of each neuron, and the other is the classical means of cognition, which emerges from the activities and interconnections of the neural networks. This classical cognition is crucial for brained organisms to “recognize” the external world.
Preach! I’ll do them the favor of providing IMO the clearest exploration of this idea from premodern cogsci (aka philosophy), Schopenhauer’s “fourfold” theory of life:
Thus causality, this director of each and every change, now appears in nature in three different forms, namely *as cause* in the narrowest sense, *as stimulus*, and *as motive*. It is precisely on this difference that the true and essential distinction is based between inorganic bodies, plants, and animals, and not on external anatomical, or even chemical characteristics.
The cause in the narrowest sense is that according to which alone changes ensue in the inorganic kingdom… Newton's third fundamental law: "Action and reaction are equal to each other." applies exclusively to cause…
The second form of causality is the stimulus; it governs organic life as such and hence the life of plant, and the vegetative and thus unconscious part of animal life, which is in fact just a plant life. This second form is characterized by the absence of the distinctive signs of the first. Thus here action and reaction are not equal to each other, and the intensity of the effect through all its degrees by no means corresponds to the intensity of the cause: on the contrary, by intensifying the cause the effect may even be turned into its opposite.
The third form of causality is the motive. In this form causality controls animal life proper and hence conduct, that is, the external, consciously performed actions of all animals. The medium of motives is knowledge.
I think this is a direct rephrasing of the above, putting fungus/“basal cognition” in the “vegetative” category.
As Cladistics slowly erodes all of our taxonomic distinctions, I think we could all stand to incorporate more of similarly functional divisions in our intuitive paradigms/standpoints/worldviews. Schopenhauer doesn’t mention “fungus” or “mushrooms” once (much less “slime molds”!), but I think he would happily call them “vegetative” nonetheless, and be thrilled to see this paper!
TL;DR: cognition is graduated, which means it’s neither uniquely homogenous nor uniformly gradual.
I like fungi as much as the next guy, but I can't help but feel like this might be attributing more meaning than is really there. Wouldn't the whole result also be described by chemical gradients in food and water availability? Maybe this is addressed in the full paper, but it feels like that would be a simpler model that gives the same end result?
I couldn’t agree more. The paper leaves mushroom for doubt.
I think you can argue that humans are only searching for "chemical gradients in food and water availability"
Looks more to me like self identification, and natural selection.
That’s not a lot of wood for 120 days. This fungus is trying to maximize its chances by reaching out as far as it can to find more wood before it dies of starvation. Away from where it has already searched.
When you describe the fungus as trying to do something, you just ascribed intelligence to it.
And where, exactly, does it store the information that it has already searched an area? and how does it avoid dedicating resources to re-searching it?
How do tree roots know whether they should fuse with other roots or not? How do plant leaves know to grow opposite of other leaves? How do stripes form on a tiger? Chemical gradients.
I was at a fungus event yesterday (really) and they spoke a bit about patterns in nature and how they are similar to Turing Patterns.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern
> ... arises due to the interplay between differential diffusion (i.e., different values of diffusion coefficients) of chemical species and chemical reaction.
There’s an old bonsai trick to force a branch to appear by cutting or bruising the wood above the point so that the cells that differentiate into buds can no longer see the signal from the apical bud, which in species that have them, is telling the rest of the tree to give it all of the energy so it can outcompete other trees reaching for the canopy.
Meanwhile if you prune the apical bud to try to keep the tree small, it will just elect another leader and keep growing on a side branch.
I have a tree in my yard that got nibbled by insects when it was chest high. Killed the crown bud but not its two siblings. One of them won, then stood up straight and two years later you can barely tell.
This is fascinating. Where could I learn more about these sorts of bonsai techniques? Is there a book or website that you would particularly recommend? I’ve always been intrigued by bonsai but if you do a basic web search it’s just people selling trash.
Try Heron Bonsai on YouTube. I’m actually out of the hobby because I kill trees unless they’re in the ground.
A bit more details
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175450482...
Is it really decision making if the fungus moves to the nearest block of wood, then on to the next, and so on?
The main findings seems to be on how it stabilizes.
The blocks are pre-populated, so at the start there's the same amount of fungus in every blocks. But as time goes by, the fungus moves away from the central block to concentrate on the terminal ones in the X shaped configuration for instance.
Or we can see they don't grow towards the inner side of the circle to a degree that doesn't look accidental.
Wow, stealing my own comment from last week’s Grokking at the edge of linear separability because it applies here even more so: this paper is so simple, dumb, and absolutely breathtakingly interesting. Thanks for sharing! Never would I have thought that “mycelium doesn’t explore the center of a circle” would hold such profound insight…
For those interested, heres the paper itself: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175450482... two interesting things to me:
1. Based on my silly American reading of citation names, it seems Japanese researchers have been leading the charge on basal cognition - a great cultural diversity win! Obviously American and European cognitive scientists are involved, but I get the impression most would dismiss this as misguided.
2. The intro has some of the best philosophy I’ve ever seen in an empirical paper. No citations to philosophers of course because they’d be laughed at, but it’s spot on:
Preach! I’ll do them the favor of providing IMO the clearest exploration of this idea from premodern cogsci (aka philosophy), Schopenhauer’s “fourfold” theory of life: I think this is a direct rephrasing of the above, putting fungus/“basal cognition” in the “vegetative” category.As Cladistics slowly erodes all of our taxonomic distinctions, I think we could all stand to incorporate more of similarly functional divisions in our intuitive paradigms/standpoints/worldviews. Schopenhauer doesn’t mention “fungus” or “mushrooms” once (much less “slime molds”!), but I think he would happily call them “vegetative” nonetheless, and be thrilled to see this paper!
TL;DR: cognition is graduated, which means it’s neither uniquely homogenous nor uniformly gradual.
In re: your point #1, I wonder how much might Shinto figures into this?
In re: your point #2, it's meaningless word salad. Even the most diligent parser of the text will come up with absolutely nothing sensible.
I invited some people to Yu Fukusawa, and after it was over they all said you're a real fungi to be with.
...
thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week.