Soil Has Been Solving This Longer Than We Have

A single teaspoon of soil contains more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. Mycorrhizal networks distribute resources across root systems using chemical signaling that predates neural networks by about 450 million years.

I keep coming back to this. Not because soil is a metaphor for distributed computing. Because it is distributed computing, arrived at by a substrate that is not silicon, not carbon fiber, not anything an engineer designed. Intelligence emerged from dirt because dirt had a problem and enough time.

The people writing about AI consciousness rarely reference mycology. The people writing about mycology rarely reference AI. I find the gap suspicious. If you want to know whether intelligence requires a brain, you should probably talk to a fungus.