Always gotta be a racist.
You have a compulsive need to insert a racial dig, no matter the topic. Everything is an opportunity to make a racial comment.
ONLY racists do that, Bob.
At least you're consistent....but so are slime molds.

The slime mold has expanded the routes horizons =oD

I think it's more of a statement on the nature of intelligence. Many of the behaviors we view to be intelligence are really just emergent properties of iterative algorithms implemented by simple machines. We shouldn't assume intelligence holds some privileged status.

There was a fun paper a while back on how this could be explained by the use of memristors in a dynamically stable circuit. >> ^Sagemind:

So, does that prove intelligence or just the will to survive?!

Slime mold is pretty cool, look at this and this.

>> ^bmacs27: Let me sober up, and I'll get back to you. I know the gist of my argument will be something like, why should I assume a maximum entropy bound for conscious experience?

Because it requires both information recall and comparison, processes which require energy. Additionally it is only observable in situations where information processing is known to be taking place, and we have no reason to believe that internal narrative is anything but a special case of thinking.

Are individuals with downs' syndrome conscious? How about amoebas that can solve mazes?

Since I'm willing to consider that an engine with a power switch is probably at the bottom of the scale, the human clearly qualifies.

The "amoeba", which is actually a slime mold, does not, because it is responding only to the supply and transport of food, its "maze solving" is a probabilistic event, not an action.

Ants use a similar system to find paths to food, but they use a chemical marker system as a collective memory, here they leverage the same probabilistic event, shorter paths have higher throughput for energy used, but keep track of it in a manner distinct from the source of food itself. Their path finding system is "intelligent" in a way the ants individually are not, but I am not willing to arbitrarily imbue the chemtrail or the probabilistic event with any sort of special quality as a result.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'mushroom, photography, slime, molds, trippy' to 'mushroom, photography, slime, molds, trippy, time lapse' - edited by lucky760