9.5 KiB
what would a sapient fungi species be like?
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Author: u/Sailor_Vulcan Champion of Justice and Reason*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3aqra3/what_would_a_sapient_fungi_species_be_like/
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Score: 13
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Created: 2015-06-22T19:17:08
Post:
I was talking to one of my friends the other day, and they talked about how fungi think. I think they said they actually do have central nervous systems. How would a sapient fungi species think if they existed? Would it even make sense?
I heard that there's a sentient fungi species in the Halo videogames. Are their minds basically human with some modifications, like most sentient being are written in fiction? Or are they actually genuinely alien?
What do you think?
Comments:
u/BestCaseSurvival [+11] (2 hours later)
In existing fiction, we have the Warhemmer 40,000 orks, the Alpha Centauri Planetmind, and the Flood.
I think a pertinent question is - what force in the ancestral environment would drive a fungus to develop intelligence. Sapience seems to be fairly expensive with non-obvious payoffs, as far as the blind idiot god of Evolution is concerned. What selection pressures might benefit a fungus for diverting energy from spore production to electrochemical computing?
u/artifex0 [+8] (3 hours later)
It might make sense for the spores themselves to have some sort of intelligence- if only a distributed, hive-mind kind of intelligence- in order to find somewhere to germinate more quickly than competitors.
You could imagine a desert setting where plants and animals were very large and rich in energy, but also few and far between- maybe even separated by dangerous weather- requiring spores to do more than drift on the wind to efficiently find the valuable dead matter.
Such a fungal intelligence would have vastly different motivations from those of animals. The primary motivation would be germination, not self-propagation and family. If the intelligence arose from a distributed processing of millions of spores, personal identity might be extremely fluid, and certain memories might be very old.
Maybe they could use tools and engage in agriculture by forming the spores into complicated structures, like swarms of nano-machines. A civilization built by such beings likely wouldn't have recognizable buildings or vehicles, though they'd build structures to protect the fungal growths from the weather and might construct machines of some sort for transporting spores (pipes and pumps?). With enough spore density, most of the planet might become one very intelligent mind, though with only a theoretical understanding of war and compromise.
Upon encountering humans, both sides would find the other very easy to lie to. Humans would have an initial large advantage both militarily and diplomatically due to past experience, though with greater intelligence, the fungal civilization might quickly catch up. Transhumans or post-humans could find more common ground.
u/nerdguy1138 [+1] GNU Terry Pratchett (7 hours later)
The flood are basically co-opted brains, that all wake up into a Gravemind at some critical threshold.
u/None [+2] (3 days later)
And were originally an entirely different species to begin with, so the flood really didn't evolve in any way as is; they came to be that way after some things went very wrong. I'm not certain if "fungus" really describes them well or if that was just the best term for something too alien to comprehend.
u/superliminaldude [+11] (3 hours later)
No, no they definitely don’t have central nervous systems. In some ways they’re simpler than plants but they have a different set of behavior. I’d look at what’s unique about fungi and move from there. The mycelium, the non-fruiting body of the fungi, can grow to be quite huge. In fact, the largest organism in the world is a fungus. There was an excellent X-Files episode with several mile large fungus luring people to their deaths and consuming them for nutrients.
Also interesting are the cordyceps species that hijack insect brains. An interesting take would be a similar parasitic species that actually parlays the intelligence of its host for its own purposes.
u/None [+1] (6 years later)
Cordyceps does not take over insect brains. They take over the insects body specifically for locomotion. The brain is destroyed and plays no part after initial infection.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (15 minutes later)
The Flood exist in two basic forms. The first is basically just a fast-moving zombie in a few varieties, which is nothing new or interesting (and essentially mindless). The second is the Gravemind, their leader, which is more or less human in terms of thinking. Its goal is to consume all life in the galaxy, and it uses intelligence to do that. It also speaks in an odd meter to seem more "alien", but its way of thinking isn't actually that strange.
As for fungal species more generally ... I think the interesting mode of cognition would be having a diffuse locus of consciousness. Fungal colonies can stretch over several square miles, and might do its thinking in slow, iterative hops that incorporate a lot of multi-tasking. It observes something at one end of its being, and that stimulus propagates slowly by human standards as it travels miles across the organism.
u/IomKg [+4] (an hour later)
observes something at one end of its being, and that stimulus propagates slowly by human standards as it travels miles across the organism.
so similar to how human communities\groups react? :P
u/ThatDamnSJW [+3] (4 hours later)
It'd actually be really interesting to have to deal with every colony as if it's a group of people instead of individuals, since that's the closest analogue we can model well.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+1] (6 hours later)
its way of thinking isn't actually that strange
What makes you say that? Is it that it's sophisticated enough to be generally rational? Perhaps a true alien would have to be quite primitive?
Did we ever get a detailed impression of its goals?
u/Solonarv [+1] Chaos Legion (20 hours later)
If you haven't already, you should probably read Three Worlds Collide by EY. I find it does a pretty good job of transmitting how you can have true aliens that are still (reasonably, i.e. about as much as you could expect humans to be) rational.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (9 minutes later)
I don't think there are any fungi with a central nervous system.
They would probably have harsh words about us plucking their fruiting bodies. I mean, think about it. Ow!
u/MugaSofer [+2] (a day later)
Nervous systems evolve to react to things. (Apparently, there are jellyfish that independently evolved them, so we do know that much.) Intelligence, of the kind that eventually becomes what we call sapience, seems to evolve as a result of complicated intra-species social interaction and conflict.
So if sapient fungi evolved, it would probably be because they had spent billions of years in an environment with no animals, some species had expanded to fill that niche and developed nervous systems useful for moving around, and eventually some of those species developed complex social behaviors (like primates, elephants, dolphins, some birds...)
I'd guess they'd be recognisably animal, in some sense, probably even with vaguely-recognisable eyes, skin, and bony (woody?) limbs. Although for all I know they'd be small enough, or have a different enough environment, to have developed from exoskeletal creatures and ave their limbs work on entirely different principles to ours.
Certainly, their blood, bones, stomachs etc would be very different if you looked closely; but in practice, beyond the question of diet, probably functionally very similar.
However! The Flood from Halo suggest another possible path to fungal intelligence. Fungi often infect animals, even intelligent ones; and some of them are capable of altering their brains to pursue goals more useful to the fungus (often drastically so), or of coexisting with the host as long-term parasites. (Though I've never actually heard of both happening at same time, and definitely not in humans, it is possible.)
If they existed right now, then a sapient fungal species would probably be vampires or werewolves.
u/Frommerman [+1] (16 days later)
I had a theory a while back that Pandora, from Avatar, was a sentient fungus. Essentially, the glowing bits in every single living thing on Pandora are part of a mycorrhizal network which acts as a massive neural structure regulating all life on the moon in order to rapidly react to sudden shifts in the radiation belts which inevitably exist around the blue gas giant Pandora orbits.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+0] Roll the Dice on Fate (a day later)
Well, if you killed off everything that wasn't fungi you could have fungi become the base lifeform on earth, basically a step above primordial soup. From there you'd need to give it a somewhere between a few hundred million years and a few billion and cross your fingers. After all that time you'd probably end up with something that looks a lot like life as we know it, but with a rather different internal cellular structure and that would probably count as fungi maybe.