I don't see the relevance. Doesn't physics do the job of exhaustively explaining that behavior at this point? (I don't want to minimize that difficulty, as it may get into quantum physics if one hurls enough Socratic bombs at the explanation)
And even if you concoct a bad faith experiment to see how "priming" the water's temperature makes this look similar to the fungi example, doesn't mundane science still already cover that in terms of viscosity?
On the other hand, how would physics explain why fungi primed with high temperature stress recovered more quickly and grew more evenly in mild temp stress than the control group? Furthermore, how would physics explain why that improvement disappeared after 24 hours?
And what about the Beechwood example? What do you think of that one?
That's not to say we should anthropomorphize fungi, only that the experiments are vastly more interesting from a scientific standpoint than your analogy would suggest.
> how would physics explain why fungi primed with high temperature stress recovered more quickly
Easily. Artifact of the experiment or results being misunderstood (or ehem, embellished as requisite for publishing), is a perfectly possible explanation
Increase in metabolism triggered by temperature could be another. Is well known that mushrom formation depend a lot on soil temperatures reaching a threesold. All fungus in temperate areas evolved to react to any sign of fall or spring. Mushrom harvest is strictly seasonal and fixed for each species.
And movilisation of resources after an attack (leading to an accelerated grow just for a while) has been reported in plants since decades.
So, in resume, there are lots of possible explanations than don't need to force feed the concept of intelligence here at the slightest opportunity.
I'm not saying the experiments aren't interesting oh, they are. The fungi shows an amazing amount of sophistication and conditional response. I do however think that anthropomorphizing it actually detracts from the exciting response observed. Framing it as being mindful intelligent and having memory implies some concept of mind which clearly isn't there and isn't an is misleading. This distracts from the interesting chemistry and physics problems of how conditional responses are formed and information is stored. If one were to push back on a physics explanation, what would the alternative be: Magic? A soul? Some sort of new decentralized cognitive process never seen elsewhere in nature capable of awareness and decision making?
> I do however think that anthropomorphizing it actually detracts from the exciting response observed.
Sure, we don't want scientists to overestimate the impact of new findings. And perhaps that's what is going on here.
But it's daft to try to convince others to be more sensible about new findings by offering up an unscientific musing about an alternative to an existing field. Especially when that musing includes no experimentation, no predictions, and no citations.
As unfortunate as it is, sometimes there is just no way around reading an article and replying based on the actual content of it.
> I don't see the relevance. Doesn't physics do the job of exhaustively explaining that behavior at this point?
Unless you believe in God, it's literally all just physics, so the point stands. Rivers solving optimal flow paths is physics. Neurons solving commenting on hackernews is just physics too.
And by the way our physical theories are terrible at solving fluid dynamics problems. There's a reason why wind tunnels are still a thing. It's because that way we can let the real physics solve for what our models can't.
However, I'm reliably informed that we live in a material universe and I'm just matter that somehow started thinking, so therefore physics can explain why I'm posting this. I'm not sure how to get from F=ma to there, but assuredly it's solvable with enough computing power.
And even if you concoct a bad faith experiment to see how "priming" the water's temperature makes this look similar to the fungi example, doesn't mundane science still already cover that in terms of viscosity?
On the other hand, how would physics explain why fungi primed with high temperature stress recovered more quickly and grew more evenly in mild temp stress than the control group? Furthermore, how would physics explain why that improvement disappeared after 24 hours?
And what about the Beechwood example? What do you think of that one?
That's not to say we should anthropomorphize fungi, only that the experiments are vastly more interesting from a scientific standpoint than your analogy would suggest.