Joseph Needham : Full Mechanical Biologist

Following on from my fortuitous discovery of Joseph Needham, I want to take a little look at an essay of his I read at the back of a seminar room while enduring some really boring seminars about stars and crap. The piece I picked is called Mechanistic Biology in a volume entitled Science Religion and Reality. You can read the entire thing here in a variety of formats; Mechanistic Biology runs from pages 219-257. 

Specialisation is not a slippery slope

Reading essays from earlier periods is a fascinating way to discovery what people were actively concerned with - what was front-and-centre research at the time and what alternatives were they grappling with. In Needham's day (1925) it seems they were facing an unpleasant renaissance of interest in vitalism, the idea that there is some supernatural force that acts to animate living matter. As Needham describes it, a vocal minority with some popular appeal but absolutely no traction whatever within the genuine scientific community, they feel very much like the modern fringe opposed to the standard model of cosmology. They have enough populist sway to have some clout in the outreach department, but nowhere near enough evidence to be convincing to any serious researcher. This is extremely annoying to have to deal with, because then we have to refute things that are largely just bollocks. It's gratifying to see that we won't be stuck with this forever.

(Note : I am not talking about all ideas that run contrary to expectations, no, not even ones I regard as wrong-headed like planes of satellites and the masses of giant clusters. I'm talking about notions like plasma cosmology and deliberately contrarian nonsense about the Big Bang never happening.)

It's also interesting to hear from Needham, a great polymath, worrying about the dangers of over-specialisation while also not really having any clue how to ensure this doesn't happen :

However good those old days were, it is no use regretting the past without facing the future. One is sometimes struck with horror at the thought of what human beings will become if the process goes on at the rate at which it has  gone on in the last hundred years. But the tendency is quite inevitable and can only be partially controlled. It is no bad thing that men should learn caution in speaking of matters which they themselves have not studied. But the ever-rising tide of specialisation has obscured the fact that there are not a few problems, especially in the fields of pure knowledge, which cannot be understood in the terms of one subject.

One can almost feel the anguish of wrestling with a contradiction : no, people shouldn't pronounce expertise on fields on which they know nothing, but at the same time, specialisation will ultimately lead to a lack of knowledge and understanding. And the more we learn, the worse this gets.

Have we remedied this in the intervening century ? Possibly it has been alleviated somewhat. The internet means a specialist can now more readily search out relevant knowledge from other fields as and when required. But perhaps more generally we continue to stand on the shoulders of giants people of about average height : that is, we build on top of what's gone before, not from it. There is enough redundancy in the system, it seems, which each incremental advance being extremely hard-won, that we can take for granted the findings of others to advance our own. 

For example, I have a a decent enough working knowledge of how to process and analyse data from a radio telescope, but I have not much chance of ever understanding how the damn thing works at any serious level of technical detail*. Only by assuming the telescope is basically functional do I have any chance of doing any data analysis. Of course, I'm very much aware that "the telescope going wrong" is a perfectly valid source of error, which is all I really need to know - if I spot something seriously awry, I contact another specialist.

* For a scary example of just how complicated something as mundane as electricity is, see this.

And perhaps also we simply have more specialists. You can afford to divide a field into smaller segments, provided each has at least a little overlap with their neighbours. Most of us try to keep aware of at least the major developments in other fields. We do, from time to time, try to step back and make sure the whole edifice isn't creaking too much before continuing in our narrower interests. So the dangers of over-specialisation may be a somewhat Malthusian fallacy, or like the concerns that London would eventually be knee-deep in horse manure as the population increased... not unfounded, but hardly inevitable either. Specialisation does increase, but this isn't the only variable in play : the number of specialists also increases, there's always an an element of chance at work, each preceding discovery is increasingly well-tested, and in order to reach a deep level of specialisation, you cannot avoid having at least some broad level of background knowledge. So I think it's nothing really much to worry about.

Vitalism wasn't always stupid

Life, says Needham, is one area where over-specialisation is especially dangerous, there being no unifying theory behind biology. But he sees vitalism as more of a problem for philosophers than any meaningful difficulty for biologists. The theory of evolution certainly helped hammer several large nails in vitalism's coffin, but Needham looked towards a more general case of fully mechanistic biology, explaining not just evolution but life itself in terms of purely natural, predictable forces. He also, delightfully, rejects this.

Not that he has much sympathy at all towards vitalism :

Since the sixteenth century, the mechanistic theory in biology has been able to point to experimental successes in its support, and indeed, from position to position, sometimes slowly and sometimes with greater rapidity, it has marched forward until it has achieved in the last fifty years its most amazing triumphs. And all through its history it has evoked the condemnation of the theologians, the mystics, and the idealist philosophers. With remarkable unanimity they have refused to have anything to do with a biology which makes man's body the equal of those of the animals, and his spiritual part a functionless shadow without importance. 

He begins with a history of the development of mechanistic biology, noting that each experimental step reduced the possible hiding places for any animating vital force. To be fair, in earlier times there were indeed problems that simply could not be solved by available empirical data. Only improved instrumentation and experimental techniques were able to manage that. It may be easy to point to the views of sixteenth century physicians as evidence of their backward, superstitious beliefs, but this would be a mistake : at that time, the leap of faith would have been required to say that there wasn't a vital force rather than that there was one. As late as the very end of the 19th century (!), it was necessary to demonstrate experimentally that such a force was nowhere to be found :

In 1897 Atwater and Rosa constructed a large and exceedingly delicate calorimeter by the aid of which  they were enabled to determine the total amount of energy entering an animal or a man and the total amount leaving him. The error was exceedingly small and their result was that the amount taken in was exactly balanced by the amount going out. Accordingly not only was it found that the chemical compounds of which the body is made up were all such as could be studied and synthesised in the laboratory, but also there was no doubt that the law of the conservation of energy held as rigidly for the animal body as it did for inorganic nature.

Needham doesn't have much sympathy for his contemporary neo-vitalists, seeking to breathe the animating force back into their own dead data. His rebuttal is a model of good argumentation, addressing plainly and concisely the arguments and only the arguments, with not a word said about the character of the proponents themselves. He also gives credit where credit is due, noting that some of them felt compelled by experimental evidence and not ideology :

Haldane*, on the other hand, was led to neo-vitalism entirely by experiments on the adult animal. Haldane also considers quite impossible the mechanistic theory of heredity. " On the mechanistic theory," he says, " the cell nucleus must carry within its substance a mechanism which by reaction with the environment not only produces the millions of complex and delicately balanced mechanisms which constitute the adult organism, but provides for their orderly arrangement into tissues and organs, and for their orderly development in a certain perfectly specific manner. The mind recoils from such a stupendous conception ! " 

* He's another fascinating chap. A Marxist atheist who taught biology without a degree, he came up with the idea of "primordial soup" and served as a captain in WWI. He is not, however, to be confused with the Haldane who gave his name to the principle by which research should be separated from politics.

To the modern reader this probably seems very strange. We're all familiar with massive levels of data compression, but we also know that, as Needham pointed out, there is no need for some continuous centralised directive given to every single cell. The DNA can just encode a set of general rules, not the absolute final, detailed body plan.

So I shall pass over the rest of the critique of vitalism; the argument is as utterly dead as worship of Zeus and Poseidon. What is not dead, however, is materialism. 

Mind out for materialism 

Vitalism has a deeply unsatisfactory tendency of being continuously pried-out from its hiding-places, being used as sort-of placeholder to explain any and all mysteries only for them to be continuously found to be explicable by perfectly ordinary, comprehensible physical phenomena. But materialism, the more general assertion that everything around us can be explained entirely by observables, is a routine assumption in science.

I have taken some pains to explain my position on this. In brief, we make this assumption when doing science because if we were to plug every gap with God, we would never explain anything. There are always gaps in science. But we don't have to hold this to be true in all things. Science, that is, measurable, empirical observation, does not hold sway over everything. Not everything can be quantified or measured. No amount of improvements to measuring equipment will ever allow us to observe guilt or anger or ennui; we can observe the effects of these, we can experience them - but that is all we can do. They are to be found nowhere in physical reality whatever. So I am quite comfortable with anyone who says that God is a way of understanding, rather than explaining, reality. Conversely, anyone trying to say, "God literally decides where every atom goes and He can choose to turn you into a large angry duck at any moment if He so chooses" is, in all probability, mad.

Needham, despite refuting vitalism proper, has some strongly dualistic tendencies, to the point I'd like to invite him round for a beer with John Locke. Quoting Bergson and others, he notes that all of our models are really just models of our observations, which are not direct measures of reality. The difference is crucial.

"The forceps of our mind are crude and they crush the delicacy of reality when we attempt to hold it." Scientific descriptions, mechanistic descriptions, according to Mach, are "quite fictitious, though still valuable modes of describing phenomena, and to place the laws of physics actually in external nature is to hypostatise an abstraction of purely human origin.

The very name of " fact," says LeRoy, should put us on our guard against believing that it is something outside ourselves — on the contrary, that which has been made, factum est, cannot be made an immediate datum. There is no such thing as an isolated fact, but everything flows into everything else, and to dissect out facts from the body of reality is a proceeding that may be very useful but cannot be ultimately valid. Isolation, fragmentation, analysis, these are the real watchwords of the scientific method. 

The important part of his philosophy for us is that there is a profoundly subjective factor in science — quite unrealised by men such as Huxley and Tyndall. The scientific man plays an active part in the selection of the facts before him, and his selection of those facts is determined by the construction of his mind. 

Now this is enormously important in its own right. Followers of scientism, holding that only scientific knowledge is of any validity whatsoever, easily fall into the trap of thinking that science is a purely objective project devoid of the concerns of mere mortals (and on these grounds are often, though by no means always, wont to justify a horrendous immorality). It isn't. It has never been so and never will be, because it can't. True enough that you can, say, weigh a fish and find that it weighs 1.53 kg. You can make repeat measurements and prove this. Facts exist. You can, as I said, use them as evidence to support or a detract from a theory. But selecting which facts are relevant, deciding how to use them to construct a model - that is always far more subjective. To quote another article : it’s the fallacy of believing that all the facts you know are all the facts there are. You may be able to test your model objectively, but you can't construct it without being subject to your own biased perspective.

But I digress. To return to materialism, Needham is saying that our observations are ultimately mental constructs. This is not to say that they are meaningless, but they are only representations of some deeper reality which we can never fully access. Needham takes this to a logical extreme that in my view absolutely torpedoes materialism :

If we accept the view that the scientific method does not give an absolutely true picture of reality, and that the form of scientific theories is almost entirely the creation of our own minds, then we cannot possibly extend the sway of physics and chemistry to mind, for their essence is mechanistic and we should then be describing mind in terms of an emanation from itself. It is as if we followed the practice of patients suffering from certain types of mental diseases who are so much bound up with the happenings of their dreams and fantasies that they interpret all their fully waking experience in terms of their imaginary life. The creature would thus sit in judgement upon the creator, and the substance would be interpreted in the language of the shadow.

That is, the representations themselves cannot be the absolute truth of reality, because how our senses render the world is largely arbitrary (I will expand on this point in a forthcoming review of Eagleman's Livewired). Just as we can choose to render data from a telescope as images or audio or even tactile, printed surfaces, so our brain decides how best to present incoming data to our minds. So our notion of, say, an atom, is a mental construct based on data rendered by our subjective and changeable brain. We do not have any absolute knowledge of the thing that gave rise our observation of an atom, we have only knowledge of our observations. And that's not the same thing at all.

Materialism in the sense of, "it's all atoms bashing about" is thus shown to be fatally self-contradictory. It makes no difference at all how detailed and careful our observations are : ultimately, everything is just a mental construct of our senses. And you cannot explain mental constructs (the mind itself) by saying that they are due to atoms when you have to admit that atoms themselves are mental constructs !

Crucially, this is not to say that we have to accept idealism. We do not have to concede that everything is a subjective mental rendering, just all of our observations. We can still legitimately posit that those observations are induced by something external, we just have to remember how privileged our position is : just because we render the world largely in a visual way does not mean that blind animals have a less valid perspective... while we may look down on them, animals which have senses beyond our own would think that we are severely handicapped, living in an altogether more limited and incomplete reality. As, in fact, we are.

It's helpful to occasionally remember throughout the day that what you're seeing is a rendering constructed by the brain - there are no images in reality at all, only in your mind. Helpful, but it could easily drive one quite mad.

Looks like dualism's back on the menu, boys ?

Needham continues this line of thought :

Moreover, the mechanistic conception of the universe is almost patently stamped with the evidences of mental origin. The more one thinks about it the more one feels that whatever may be the objective substrates of external things, it is only due to the configuration of our minds that we conceive of matter and energy in mechanistic fashion. Our minds are like templates in engineering, they necessitate the corresponding flexion of the universe, and before we can understand any set of phenomena they have to be made to fit. " In a sense we are always anthropomorphic," says James Ward, " since we can never divest ourselves of our consciousness ; hence not only spiritualistic intuition but the very mechanical interpretation of the Universe, which in the last analysis derives its concepts from our human experience, is of an anthropomorphic nature."

Mind, therefore, and all mental processes cannot possibly receive explanation or description in physico-chemical terms, for that would amount to explaining something by an instrument itself the product of the thing explained. 

But he also reaffirms his dismissal of vitalism :

The triumph of mechanistic biology has indeed been a real one, for it has succeeded in abolishing the vital force in living things which so unnecessarily complicated the whole question. We are back again with the concept of the undivided anima, and the ground is perfectly clear for philosophical and psychological discussion as to the psychophysical problem. It is in this that the achievement of physico-chemical biology is to be found.

Mental processes, however, are different. They are not observable. So vitalism can be disregarded because we can almost certainly explain life as a result of physical processes, but consciousness and the mind are not the same thing at all. This leaves Needham striving to find an acceptable form of dualism :

But if we adopt this view, that living matter is the result of the impact of mind into the world of mechanics, we shall not be able to go the whole way with Descartes. For he would have said that nothing was produced by that impact, rather bodies acting mechanically were produced by necessity in the world of mechanics and into one type of them and one only " God breathed a living soul." Descartes was led to this position by various now obsolete arguments... Comparative psychology of the present day would not admit his conclusions for a moment.

We may agree with James Drever, who in a recent paper said, " The behaviour of the living organism as such it is not the physiologist's business to study. His task begins and ends with the functioning of the individual mechanisms." 

According to this theory, then, it is the physical functions of life that physics and chemistry are competent to explain... It will have been observed that, however we phrase it, we are left with a complete dualism of matter and spirit. Whether we remain at that point or proceed further by the adoption of a relative dualism will depend upon our personal philosophical predilections. 

For my part I prefer to adopt a relative dualism the way to which was shown by Merz. It is a modification of Spinoza's. If we do take this step we may also think it possible that laws may some day be discovered capable of explaining both the mechanistic world of physics and chemistry and that other world of mental phenomena which is studied by the psychologist.

Needham goes on to reject the "phenomoenalistic parellism" of Kant and Spinoza. This sounds an awful lot like neutral monism to me, the idea that there is only one sort of substance but we can never know the true nature of it. There are no "things" in that tables, spoons and giraffes are just labels for some unknown, more fundamental "stuff". As in, there is no real distinction between a planet and and asteroid - they are both just collections of atoms, except we extend this line of reasoning considerably further : yes, spoons and planets are made of atoms, but again, an atom is ultimately a mental construct - the true "stuff" that induces all this, that we cannot know.

Needham doesn't say why he rejects this, except to say that there are "unanswerable arguments". He prefers that there is an interaction between the mental and material. This is my instinct too. Numbers don't exist, neither does justice or all the rest, but our physical behaviour depends on us counting or evaluating whether other people are being fair or not - things which are ultimately only mental constructs. Needham concludes with a mystery, which I think any dualist would have to accept - that we cannot explain how this interaction actually works :

The biochemist and the biophysicist, therefore, can and must be thorough-going mechanists, but they need not on that account hesitate to say with Sir Thomas Browne, " Thus there is something in us that can be without us and will be after us though indeed it hath no history what it was before us and cannot tell how it entered into us." 

For my part, I would say that traditional materialism is unviable. You cannot explain that mental constructs (say, numbers) arise as a result of other things you can demonstrably prove, by your own theory, are themselves other mental constructs (e.g. atoms), that's circular and silly. You can say that there's some other deeper, unknown thing which produces the representations, but then you're clearly in neutral monism territory. Though it doesn't seem to me that neutral monism must inevitably deny any interaction between the mental and physical as Needham posited; rather, if anything the opposite ought to be true. They're both ultimately the same stuff, so why shouldn't they interact ?

Idealism would seem to also tend towards neutral monism. If everything is a mental representation, then it has the same problem of materialism. It escapes this dilemma only by explicitly saying that this deeper level is the ultimate layer of reality and the mind of an unknowable God, which is neutral monism in all but name. The simulation hypothesis, by contrast, explains sod all, because adherents don't seem to understand what a representation actually is : it leads to an infinite (i.e. meaningless) series of nested simulations which solves exactly nothing. 

So that's where I stand. Dualism might be a correct and complete theory in and of itself (mind and matter are clearly different), but neutral monism is a more satisfying unification. To be a dualist in everyday life is just common bloody sense, as is being a materialist in science. Dualism and materialism are both "true" in their respective domains, but philosophically, both idealism and materialism seem unsustainable if we take them literally. 

Review : Entangled Life (part 2)

Concluding my review of Merlin Sheldrake's excellent Entangled Life, which flies the flag for fungi because someone bloody has to. Last time we looked at how fungi form decentralised networks and display many characteristics that in animals we would associate with intelligent, conscious behaviour. But is there actually any sort of mind at work here ? How could that happen without a brain ? To answer that, we have to go deep down the rabbit hole.

Materialism or idealism ?

One thing which will nearly always bring me massive levels of endearment to a work is when it suggests something to me implicitly which it subsequently discusses explicitly. Sheldrake manages this. Any discussion of qualia, indeed thought in general, naturally raises the question as to whether thoughts are somehow physical in nature or something else. I prefer the latter, though this is not to say that thoughts don't have some correspondence with the physical world. Clearly they do : hit yourself with a brick and your thoughts will rapidly change, and if you hit yourself too hard they'll never recover. All the same, there are no atoms of mercy or molecules of justice, nor particles of blueness. Experience of a thing is not the same as the thing itself.

The thing about fungi (and plants) is that they possess nothing even remotely resembling a brain. Whatever the connection between the brain and consciousness actually is, it's at least certain that there is one. The brain is involved somehow. It definitely does something. But fungi and plants don't have such a structure. Are we really going to suggest that the brain is so completely optional ?

One world view which does allow for this is idealism, the notion that the entire world is made of consciousness. And I found myself thinking that this apparently madcap notion seems an awful lot more sensible early in the morning or last thing at night. When sensation is quelled and faint... or better, to quote the Upanishads :

* I promise I will eventually blog up something about Berkeley so I can give my own now more informed perspective than that post. The difficulty is in finding enough time in between reading all these interesting books to write about them...

When the sun has set, and the moon is not there, and the fire is gone out, and the sound is stilled, what then is the light of man ? The self indeed is his light. Who is that self ? He who is within the heart, surrounded by the senses, the person of light consisting of knowledge. He, remaining the same, wanders along the two worlds, as if thinking, as if moving. During sleep he transcends this world and the forms of death.

It's easy to believe that the mind is all there is when physical sensation is numbed. In this state it's far easier to remember that, as Morpheus says, "real is just electrical signals interpreted by your brain*". And if that's all I perceive, a fabrication by a kilo or so of bloody goop, why should I call anything truly "real" ?

* I'm currently reading Livewired, a much more hard-headed book which feels firmly materialistic yet takes this extremely seriously. 

Conversely, when in the full light of day, when there's a rush of noise or a sharp collision, when the senses are saturated, it's virtually impossible to believe that they're anything but real. Which of me is right ? Sheldrake is pleasingly undecisive, thought I sense a strong inkling towards the former :

'You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day', the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once observed to his former student Bertrand Russel. 'I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.'

Which state of consciousness is the "right" one ? Here fungi pose a far more concrete challenge as well. Sheldrake discusses hallucinogens at some length, but he also covers the fungi that turn ants into zombies. Such fungi cause incredibly specific behavioural changes and it's not yet understood how this works. The ant, arguably, becomes part of the fungus' extended phenotype, an expression of its genes into the world. Just as with extended cognition a pencil and paper become, in a sense, part of the mind, so does an ant become part of a fungus. Or if you like, the fungus is wearing the ant.

Do magic mushrooms do the same to us ? Nobody know the purpose of the psychoactive properties. Some tribal peoples apparently thought that the fungus could literally speak through us with its hallucinatory powers. A few modern people agree. And there's a wonderful paradox here. The material effects of the chemicals on the brain are reasonably well-understood. Yet :

Pollan found that many of those he interviewed had 'started out stone-cold materialists or atheists... and yet several had "mystical experiences" that left them with the unshakeable conviction that there was something more than we know - a "beyond" of some kind that transcended the physical universe'. 

These effects pose a riddle. That a chemical can induce a profound mystical experience appears to support the prevailing scientific view that our subjective worlds are underpinned by the chemical activity of our brains; that the world of spiritual beliefs and experience of the divine can spring form a material, biochemical phenomenon. However, as Pollan points out, the very same experiences are so powerful as to convince people that a non-material reality - the raw ingredient of religious belief - exists.

I get the distinct impression that Sheldrake has at least some strong sympathies for the idealist view. Clearly, if everything is made of consciousness, if all our observables are some form of "objective illusion", then it becomes a good deal easier to see that the presence of a brain is indeed optional. I don't think I agree with him that the mental effects of beer depend on the yeast involved in its fermentation, but deciding which state of consciousness is the more valid... I cannot give an answer to that. Something definitely exists out there. What its basic nature is I know not.

Writing this up one warm summer's evening, sipping some hot ginger tea, I wonder why, if idealism is correct, the brain needs to be so damnably complex. My senses appear to imperfect but still pretty darn reliable, and strongly constrained by their physical limitations. I find it a strenuous exercise to try and genuinely doubt them, to disbelieve in the sofa or the screen or the keyboard. Yet I also know that, come early morning, all this sensory perception will seem scarcely as convincing, that I'll be more malleable to the prospect that my senses are, at the very least, mere constructions of the brain, closer to figments than to facts.

Identity

Lest we get stuck down the rabbit hole, let's return to the network structure of a fungii. Here they present another philosophical conundrum : the notion of identity. I began with Stargate - time to bring in another science fiction show :

Fungi don't merely interconnect with plants - they penetrate them. Yet lichens go still further. At their simplest, they are a bound pair of a fungus and an algae, coexisting to create a new, independent organism. They are not quite the Changelings of Star Trek; not every fungus can pair with every algae to create a lichen, they must "sing the same metabolic song". But the similarities are strong. So long as they're compatible, they can join together "in less time than it takes for a scab to heal", can form with multiple species in excess of the simplistic one-fungus-one-algae view, yet can also exist independently. Lichens, according to Sheldrake, are more of a process, something organisms experience than an organism in their own right. While they can be robust extremophiles, they defy even something as basic as taxonomic classification.

In The War Of The World, Niall Ferguson vitriolically demolishes racism and exposes its modern pseudoscientific roots. Even today, the popular conception of evolution lends itself towards racism all too easily : one creature supplanting another by virtue of its superiority. This is nonsense, with remarkably similar creatures having evolved multiple times in response to similar conditions (sabre-tooth cats being a prime example) only to die off again as those conditions became unfavourable. And superior adaptivity is hardly the rallying cry of the nationalist.

But the popular misunderstandings of evolution run deeper. As well as genes having different results in different conditions (epigenetics), there is also horizontal gene transfer : where, for example, bacteria can absorb other organisms and incorporate them into their own. Genetic changes do not only occur in the classical manner of variation from generation to generation, but can also occur within a single generation. Sheldrake likens lichens to this process at a macroscopic scale.

Lichens are cosmopolitan bodies, a place where lives meet. A fungus can't photosynthesise by itself, but by partnering with an alga or photosynthetic bacterium, it can acquire this ability horizontally. Similarly, an alga or photosynthetic bacterium can't grow tough layers of protective tissue or digest rock, but by partnering with a fungus it gains access to these capabilities - suddenly. Together these taxonomically remote organisms build composite lifeforms capable of entirely new possibilities.

To return to the wood wide webs, the fungal hive further challenges the idea of individual identity. While there is a mood among some to dismiss these networks as incidental, being nothing more than evidence of fungi growing to tremendous size, he thinks that at least one example makes a complete mockery of this position. Monotropa are plants which cannot photosynthesise, relying entirely on the fungal network for nutrients. Even those who dismiss the idea of fungal communication as "nonsense" are happy to conclude that the idea the fungal network is of no importance to plants is "patently absurd".

Is it even possible to say what the network is doing, how it acts in relation to itself and other species, in general terms ? Probably not. It seems too complex, too varied, and depends too much on the circumstances even among the same species. Plants can survive without fungi, and vice-versa, just as with lichens - and they don't always do better in combination. 

Can we think about a plant without also thinking about the mycorrhizal networks that lace outward - extravagantly - from its roots into the soil ? If we follow the tangled sprawl of mycelium that emanates from its roots, then where do we stop ? Do we think about the bacteria that surf through the soil along the slimy film that coats roots and fungal hyphae ? Do we think about the neighbouring fungal networks that fuse with those of our plants ?

Lots of organisms interact. If one makes a map of who interacts with whom, one sees a network. However, fungal networks form physical connections between plants. It is the difference between having twenty acquaintances, and having twenty acquaintances with whom one shares a circulatory system.

The question of where one individual begins and another ends cannot easily be answered. How strongly we believe in sensory reality depends on the strength of sensory perception, sometimes feeling inescapable, other times almost irrelevant. So it is with fungal networks and their relationships between plants and other organisms. There is probably no "one answer" here. It can be meaningful to think of a fungus as an individual interacting with other individual organisms, but it can also be meaningful to think of it as part of a much greater whole.

Conclusions

This and other recent reads have got another concept running around in my head lately - the sense of scale. Suppose it were possible to be the size of a bacterium and remain conscious. Your entire world view would shift : your sense of speed would have to alter to account for the different timescales on which life proceeds in miniature, your entire spatial environment would be altered, your notions of "solid" and "liquid" might be a good deal different. And you might well see cells as the fundamental, individual unit of life. You would have no notion you were inside, say, a hedgehog. If you somehow did manage to perceive on such a monumental scale, you'd probably think of the hedgehog as being some sort of emergent property of the cells - hardly a creature in its own right, any more than we would think of a crowd of football hooligans as being their own entity*.

* Mind you, individual hooligans are barely sentient anyway.

And to go to the other extreme, we suppose that life on an astronomical scale is impossible because it's beyond our conception. A creature the size of a galaxy would think of entire star systems as being its cells... given the gargantuan scale of fungal networks, is it, perhaps, not completely crazy to take the Gaia hypothesis somewhat literally ?

I don't think so. But it's worth considering.

Two things come to my rescue. First, Sheldrake gives an excellent summary of one of his running themes :

It is well established in the sciences that metaphors can help to generate new ways of thinking. The biochemist Joseph Needham* described a working analogy as a ‘net of coordinates’ that could be used to arrange an otherwise formless mass of information, much as a sculptor might use a wire frame to provide support for wet clay. The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin pointed out that is is impossible to ‘do the work of science’ without using metaphors, given that ‘almost the entire body of modern science is an attempt to explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly by human beings’. Metaphors and analogies, in turn, come laced with human stories and values, meaning that no discussion of scientific ideas - this one included - can be free of cultural bias.

* Kudos to Edward Morbius for pointing out that, "Describing Joseph Needham as a bichemist is a bit like describing George Washington as a lumberjack. Technically accurate, but omitting several significant endeavours." Needham is well worth Googling - though of course, this doesn't undermine Sheldrake's point at all.

Or perhaps, in other words, "shut up and calculate !". I think this works both ways : sometimes mathematics can inspire a description in ordinary plain language, but sometimes you need that descriptive framework before you can proceed with the calculations. And the difficulty here is that our metaphors and analogies are not adequate to the task of dealing with fungi because they're so very different from our ordinary conceptions as to what life is and should be. 

Is this all down to our limited perspective ? Quite possibly. But the second thing which comes to my rescue is this recent Existential Comic. To quote :

How can our lives have any meaning if we are so small and insignificant ?

What the hell are you talking about, kid ? How small we are ? So if our lives were five times bigger our lives would be five times more meaningful ? Idiot. What if you were the size of the Moon, then would your life matter ? Would it make you ask less stupid questions ?

Accordingly, what should really bring our lives meaning is "large breasted women and worldwide Communism." Perhaps we should substitute one of those for "fungi". Whatever their full extent of their interactions with plants and other creatures, surely they richly deserve more attention and investigation.

Review : Entangled Life (part 1)

David Attenborough once said his producers were none too keen when he suggested they make an entire TV series about plants, but even he hasn't tried to do one about fungi. Which is a terrible shame. After reading Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, doing endless superb shows about zoology but not fungi seems a bit like making an otherwise-outstanding world atlas that completely misses the existence of Asia.

I must say I wasn't too impressed with the way the book begins. It spends far too long on introducing truffles by way of truffle-hunting, too caught up in an uninteresting anecdote about the effect of truffles on humans with little about the organism itself (for some reason it's popular among all longform pieces that you have to start off with something completely unrelated to your advertised content). Thankfully, this opening is an anomaly. We're soon deep into the science of fungi, which Sheldrake describes with tremendous enthusiasm (sometimes perhaps a bit excessively so) but also a deft, eloquent blending of gentle rhetoric with hard science. Uncertainties - and there are many - are not hidden from the reader but made part of the fascination. Anecdotes are generally used with some successful subtlety to convey a point without the need for direct exposition.

Overall, it's a marvellous book. Although it does have the occasional dud bit of narrative (usually stories which don't add anything relevant), I have no hesitation in giving this an easy 9/10. It truly is like diving into an entirely alien world, of organisms at once so familiar, so common, and yet so very much stranger than we suspect. Sheldrake does a first-rate job of introducing a topic that deserves much wider attention, blending science, philosophy, and personality into a brilliant combination.

(Incidentally, Merlin Sheldrake is the son of the more notorious Rupert Sheldrake, but do not for one moment let that deter you.)

It's hard to isolate particular topics I found most interesting. Nevertheless, I've narrowed it down to four : two scientific and two philosophical. First, let's see how fungi completely challenge our most basic notions of how life is organised. Then let's choose an ever-popular topic and try and see if there's any evidence they can think. In part two I'll move on to philosophy proper, and take a brief look at how fungi can providence evidence both for materialism and idealism depending on your point of view. Finally I'll circle back to see how they challenge our notions of identity and individuality.

Networked life

There's a rubbish episode of Stargate SG1 featuring some apparently primitive people living in harmony with some weird white blobs. They exist in a symbiotic relationship, with the daft-looking idiots singing to the interconnected plants to make them grow and... make the people... happy, I guess ? I dunno. 

As I say, it was a rubbish episode. Trouble is, the "plant" in question bears more than a passing resemblance to fungus.

First, the scale. In the episode the plants can grow to be a few metres tall, significantly larger than what we usually think of with fungi. But back in the Devonian era, says Sheldrake, a species called Prototaxites did indeed reach such heights as are normally found in Tamriel. But the phrase "the tip of the iceberg" looms forth like the underside of said proverbial iceberg, because these visible structures are probably the least interesting and certainly the smallest part of the fungus as a whole.

In Stargate the plants are connected underground, though to what extent is unclear. In real life, at least one fungus is a contender for the world's largest organism, spread underground across several miles. It doesn't have the giant fruiting bodies (a.k.a. mushrooms, the bits we normally see) as in Stargate, nor does it have the extremely rapid growth rate, but the organism as a whole dwarfs anything seen in fiction.

And that's just one organism. Collectively, the scale of fungi is - and I don't use this expression lightly - truly astronomical :

Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top ten centimetres of soil is around half the width of our galaxy. However, fungi don't stay still. Mycorrhizal hyphae die back and regrow so rapidly - between ten and sixty times per year - that over a million years their cumulative length would exceed the diameter of the known universe. Given that mycorrhizal fungi have been around for some 500 million years and aren't restricted to the top ten centimetres of soil, these figures are certainly underestimates.

This gargantuan mass affects ecology on a global scale*. While this is not one single entity, each individual fungus forms a highly complex network that requires we un-learn all our ideas about what an organism is and should be.

* For brevity I will omit the impacts of fungi on climate and agriculture, but suffice to say they are profound.

The root-like structures that make up the greater part of a fungus are called hyphae. with the network as a whole the mycelium. The fruiting bodies are tiny in comparison, but are made of the same essential structures (interestingly, no-one understands how hyphae coordinate their growth to form a mushroom). Rather than move around as animals do, the fungal solution of how to reach essential resources is just to grow there. In this regard they're more like plants than animals, but unlike plants, this growth is highly dynamic. The whole network structure can change in a matter of days in response to varying conditions.

The tip of a hyphal structure is the nearest a fungus gets to the classical picture of an individual entity. Here, small "bladders" arrive at the tip from the rest of the network and are rapidly fused, sometimes so rapidly you can watch them grow. The hyphal tips can extend the network linearly, branch into a multitude of additional tips, or they can rejoin and fuse so that the branches create a web. Though they form one distinct, connected item, and don't have unlimited rules for how they grow, there is no central directing command structure at work. This is a life form which is a pure network, like a single individual and a hive all at the same time. Struggling for metaphors, Sheldrake likens this hyphal swarm to a tribal song :

Unlike the harmonies in a barbershop quartet, the voices of the women never weld into a unified front. Nor does any one voice steal the show. There is no front woman, no soloist, no leader... Mycelium is polyphony in bodily form. Although each [hyphal tip] is free to wander, their wanderings can't be seen as separate from the others. There is no main voice. There is no lead tune. There is no central planning. Nonetheless, a form emerges.

This clearly gives the fungus tremendous flexibility. Though I did wonder : why be long ? If you need resources, why not just move to them ? How can some fungi manage just fine being very small indeed while others are enormous ? What is the point of forming such gigantic, intricate, ancient networks when smaller ones, in the same environment, apparently do just as well ?

Nobody knows. Mycology seems to be very much more in its infancy than most contemporary science, and a lot of major questions are for the present simply unanswered. Though one major omission which I presume people do understand is what happens to the parts of the mycelial network that the fungus discards - how exactly is the network reconfigured ? Do parts of it die off or are reabsorbed in some way ?

However, we can say a bit more about what the active network does. Their interactions with other organisms vary from full-on predatory, to parasitical, to truly symbiotic. They entwine themselves around the roots of plants and even extend inside them. For certain they enable the transfer of carbon, phosphorous, and nitrogen in significant quantities, but it also seems that they can transfer DNA, growth hormones, and herbicides for plants wishing to kill invaders growing nearby. 

This "wood wide web" has gained some popularity on the more familiar WWW*. Sheldrake points out that there's (among many others !) a key difference between the two : in the internet, the physical connecting cables are essentially passive data pipelines and nothing more. In the forest, the mycelial network is an organism itself : for all its intimate physical bindings with other organisms, it ultimately has its own needs, its own goals. One almost gets the impression that maybe the fungus is farming the plants, deciding which ones need more resources so the plant can capture more carbon for the fungus, which ones are thriving and don't need assistance...

* Sheldrake mentions the structure of the network as having a similar power-law shape to the internet : a few nodes have many branches, many have much fewer, with no typical number of connections. However, there seems to have been little work done on this (small fungi change rapidly while large ones are exceedingly difficult to map), and it isn't at all clear if and how the structure affects any capacity for cognition.

It's a highly imperfect analogy. But with such a complex network which challenges our whole notions of bodily identity, it could hardly be anything else. Far too much is still unknown.

Do fungi think ?

I've said that fungi have "goals", and I have to wonder to what (if any) extent that it comparable to human intentions. In transferring resources (certainly on scales of hundreds of metres), fungi are clearly causing complex outcomes. They mean we cannot think of plants as individual entities any more, but themselves part of the fungal network. But does the fungus act purely mechanically, utterly driven by stimulus response, or is it possible that it is actually thinking ? Is it making conscious choices ?

This may seem a bizarre idea. But then, the idea of a vast, complex network of a shapeshifting, hive-like organism that connects a multitude of different lifeforms - for fungi may also help plants communicate in producing toxins to fight off insects - is also bizarre. I think it's an idea we have to take seriously, if skeptically.

I've covered the idea of plant consciousness many times already, so at this point a link-summary might be helpful. Skip the next paragraph if you want to stick with fungi.

In this one I consider whether we need senses for consciousness or not, and note the problems with defining memory and the difference between simple stimulus response and deliberate intention (see also this). In this piece I note that plants can change their behaviour in response to changing conditions, arguably displaying a sort of learning, but with important caveats as to the control tests in the experiments. Here I consider whether the forest as a whole, rather than individual trees, might be conscious, noting that because consciousness is not a physical parameter*, it's presumptuous to state that plants simply cannot think. I elaborate somewhat on this here in response to a report by some angry botanists stating that plants simply cannot be conscious because they're not complex enough, but note that some of their objections do seem plausible. That led me to a bit more of an in-depth look at experiments showing that plants can make choices that require knowledge and intention**, although a disappointing follow-up found that the experiment could not be replicated. Finally, I consider a rather extreme view that plants are every bit as conscious as the rest of us here, and on a related note, I say that maybe Google's AI chatbot can maybe said to be sapient (intelligent, problem-solving) but not sentient (having sensory awareness). As to whether having both sapience and sentience together is enough to count as consciousness, I don't know. Possibly.

* A statement hardly without controversy ! More on that in the future.
** The key being that the choice must be indirect. Growing towards water doesn't count as requiring even a modicum of thought. Growing towards a button that releases water might. This would not entail any understanding of how the release mechanism works, but we couldn't ascribe such behaviour to pure sensory-driven "instinct" either.

Perhaps we should start with fungal behaviour, meaning how they respond to changing conditions. Well, for one thing they can hunt. Their prey are tiny nematode worms, for which they employ a variety of weapons : adhesive nets and branches, inflatable snares, toxins, and harpoons. These are active hunters to easily rival the Venus flytrap. And they hunt deliberately. They don't create their weapons until the sense the presence of worms; until then, they make do with other sources of nourishment.

Oddly enough their main means of detecting prey appears to be scent. This isn't what I expected at all : sure, mushrooms and truffles can be aromatic, but how does smell propagate underground ? Well, apparently it does. Some are also highly sensitive to light - and not just light in general, but different wavelengths. One species is highly sensitive to the movement of air, and can also avoid obstacles by means as yet unknown.

And they're versatile. At least one species is capable of predating on worms, decomposing dead matter, parasitically feeding off plant roots, and of blocking other fungi. "How it chooses between its many options", says Sheldrake, "is unknown".

But does it choose, or is this pure - though undeniably complex - stimulus response ?

That is very much harder to answer. They do appear to posses a kind of memory, noting the problems of distinguishing between "inner life" memory and simply being physically altered (like an abacus) that I mentioned with regard to plants. In one experiment, fungi were grown with a dish with a block of wood. Once they made contact, the fungus rearranged itself to concentrate in the direction of the block. Then the mycelium were heavily trimmed and the remaining fungus placed in a new, fresh dish, where the hyphae continued to grow in the direction where the block of wood should have been.

Fungi also fuck. Their "genders" are quite different to ours : any two dissimilar mating types can mate to produce offspring, but the roles of paternal and maternal (donating and receiving genetic material) are interchangeable and not fixed to each mating type. They apparently find each other through smell, and produce spores which can swim. 

And they can solve problems. Slime moulds are justifiably well-known for being able to create complex maps; they can also learn from each other. So they have memory, hunt, seek out partners to mate with, can sense their environment and respond to it in different ways, and can alter their behaviour through learning. They can sense (at the very least) touch, light, and smell. 

Let's be honest, this sounds a lot like most animals. Few sane people would deny that an animal displaying these characteristics had at least a rudimentary consciousness.

There's one more thing that should be mentioned. As well as various nutrients, mycelial networks can also transmit electrical signals :

When the wood came into contact with the mycelium, the firing rate of the impulses doubled. When he removed the block of wood, the firing rate returned to normal. To make sure the fungi weren't responding to the weight of the wooden block, he placed an inedible plastic block of the same size and weight onto the mycelium. The fungus didn't respond.

This particular researcher doesn't think that fungi are literally brains (they are too dissimilar for that) but they might be brain-like : doing the same or similar jobs of memory, learning, decision-making and more but by a different method. 

So, do fungi think ? Do they have inner, mental lives ? Do they experience qualia ? Do they make choices beyond purely mechanistic responses ? Surely, this is at least a possibility we have to consider. True, they have nothing like the centralised system found in most animals : but the octopus outsources much of its decision-making capabilities to its individual arms. Perhaps fungi take this to the extreme. Their brain and body are one and the same, a unified, hive-like network all in a single organism. 

Throughout the book, Sheldrake is careful to note the use of imperfect analogies and the difficulties of metaphors. He's also sympathetic to the view we should take these comparisons literally. When he says fungi communicate, he really means it. And yet :

How best to interpret the behaviour of shared mycorrhizal networks is a sensitive subject. Some researchers are concerned about how wood wide webs are commonly portrayed. 'Just because we found that plants can respond to a neighbour', Johnson told me, 'doesn't mean that there is some altruistic network in operation.' The idea that plants are talking to each other and warning each other of imminent attack is an anthropomorphic delusion. 'It's very attractive to think that way,' he admitted, but it's ultimately 'a load of nonsense'.

Which made me want to grab this Johnson fellow by the shoulders and yell at him, 'Good God man, why ? Why is it nonsense ?'.

To be fair, there does not seem to be a clear example of a fungus or a plant making an indirect choice. Pavlovian responses in plants are controversial but there doesn't seem to be any hint of that in fungi as yet. Then again, given their radically different nature, we would do well to remember that designing such a test is fraught with difficulty, otherwise we arrive at nonsensical results like the mirror test. 

The nearest I could find in Sheldrake (who remains gloriously ambiguous as to what he himself thinks) to the possibility of fungi making decisions comes in the wood wide webs. Fungi, apparently, are an economist's dream : a rational actor. Where phosphorous is scarce, the fungus extracts (or the plant gives*) more carbon in return, and vice-versa. But it will also transport resources across its network efficiently. It will take the phosphorous from places where it's abundant and transport them to plants where it's scarce, so getting greater carbon in return. How the network coordinates this is unknown, but it seems there's more going on than the action of individual hyphal tips. The network as a whole does something.

* A running theme throughout the book is how much language and metaphor matter. We just don't know enough to state things rigorously, but we have to venture some statement or we'll get nowhere.

So can plants and fungi think ? As usual, results are inconclusive. Trees and fungi alike are bigger and live longer than us and have had longer to evolve. They work differently, but they have senses and take action : why should they not have a form of consciousness, of decision-making, albeit one resulting from a different process from our own ? Or, if we are purely mechanistic, deterministic creatures, but clearly conscious, why should fungi not be the same ? In a materialist framework, just because something is a pure, unavoidable stimulus response doesn't mean it isn't also a conscious choice.

Things could be considerably weirder than that. To understand thought, we might have to rethink the very nature of reality. And that altogether stranger yet not less valid perspective is something I'll look at in part two.