At some point the word "consciousness" loses its already muddled meaning. Humans are conscious, dogs are conscious, fish are conscious, mollusks are conscious, insects are conscious, bacteria is conscious, fungi is conscious etc.
We don't even have a concrete definition for what conscious means but we use that classification as a means to make rules about what we can and can't do to certain entities. Can we destroy an ecosystem that has been found to be full of conscious mycelium? Is that worse than if we determined it was not conscious after all? Without a concrete definition of what consciousness is, we assign consciousness to things based on feeling and on what we want to signal to other humans about these entities.
I guess the idea is that if 2 beings are conscious there may exist some mechanism to transfer information between them?
Understanding what is conscious is and how it comes about seems interesting. I think currently it falls more into the philosophical sphere of science rather then biological or physics. Maybe once more is understood about human consciousness we will be able to categorize and add other life forms and consciousness types to this list.
Yeah I guess you can even say at what point is "communication" actual communication vs a response to stimulus? We can communicate with humans through speech. We can partially communicate to animals like dogs through speech. Is exerting a force on an insect an act of communication? How about excreting some chemical near an amoeba? Then back to mycelium, does stepping on a forest mycelium carpet constitute communication and thus consciousness?
It's all very fascinating but it seems to break down very quickly as the definitions mean nothing.
We don't even have a concrete definition for what conscious means but we use that classification as a means to make rules about what we can and can't do to certain entities. Can we destroy an ecosystem that has been found to be full of conscious mycelium? Is that worse than if we determined it was not conscious after all? Without a concrete definition of what consciousness is, we assign consciousness to things based on feeling and on what we want to signal to other humans about these entities.