Entangled Life II
Even more radical to our present thinking is the organizational structure and internal processes of the fungi themselves. The great fungal networks―mycelia, are examples of distributed, decentralized order, demanding a needed reassessment of our hierarchical, centralized thinking, including a healthy expansion of our ideas on intelligence. As Sheldrake writes, by looking at the structure of fungi, “Some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften.”
While many fungi like yeasts are single cell, “Most fungi form networks of many cells known as hyphae: fine tubular structures that branch, fuse, and tangle into the anarchic filigree of mycelium. Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency. Water and nutrients flow through ecosystems within mycelial networks.”
Looking at the mycelium, the fungal network (shown above), it's important to notice there is no center. They are distributed order. We know little about the functioning of true distributed networks, including, as Sheldrake makes clear, fungi.
Most of the action is at the tip, known as the hyphal. “Hyphal tips are the parts of the mycelium that grow, change direction, branch, and fuse. They are the part of the mycelium that do the most. And they are numerous. A given mycelial network might have anywhere between hundreds and billions of hyphal tips, all integrating and processing information on a massively parallel basis.”
“Mycelial coordination is difficult to understand because there is no center of control. Fungi like plants, are decentralized organisms. There are no operational centers, no capital cities, no seats of government. Control is dispersed: Mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at a once and nowhere in particular. A fragment of mycelium can regenerate an entire network.”
All of this is completely radical to our notions of organization and processes. With fungi, there is no hierarchy of control as we now “believe” in animals. I use believe purposely, as it is absolutely certain, understanding fungi will give us a better understanding of how we actually function opposed to the many stories we fabricate and tell ourselves.