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.