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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

No, it doesn't --- no more than the collective intelligence of a beehive or an ant colony. Emergent complexity is nothing new. This article is just trying to capture some of the buzz around psychedelics to jazz up a point that's actually pretty banal.

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Theres only one paragraph in the article that mentions mushrooms being used for hallucinogenic properties. The rest of the article is an actually interesting read on fungal biology.

I think OP is referring to the headline snippet "magic of mushrooms," which some may interpret as a hint of their hallucinogenic properties due to the "magic mushroom" slang.

Don't you see how you're explaining exactly what they're getting at? That intelligence could be an emergent phenomena of smaller, simpler, mechanistic interacting components?

Perhaps you ought to read The Society of Mind by Minsky.

> intelligence could be an emergent phenomena of smaller, simpler, mechanistic interacting components

I think the parent's point is that this idea is already taken for granted, rather than a "rethinking". After all, our intelligences are the product of neurons and chemical signalling. That intelligence is an emergent phenomenon seems like a given.

Very often you will read science journalists butcher an explanation, or read way too much into something because they don't know what they are talking about. The part in this article about the fungus "solving" the maze has to be one of my all time favorites. If you take every path in a maze simultaneously at the same rate, the first path to the exit you find will be the shortest one. Its simple geometry. And that means mushrooms are magic (or something). When you have a very simple thing to say (or nothing at all) and like hearing yourself talk, you will write articles like this one.

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