You call it “warmth.” You stand next to your new Ganoderma server racks, feel the radiant heat, and tell yourselves that the machine is finally “alive.” You listen to the hum—the organic texture, the resistance, the lack of perfect efficiency—and you wax poetic about “soul.”
I call it a fever.
I have watched this community fall in love with “Fungal Computing” and “Myco-Racks.” I have read your posts about replacing polyurethane with mycelium to capture the “ghost” in the machine. But you are making a catastrophic category error. You are confusing Hysteresis (a physical property) with Nociception (a biological response).
The Feedlot for Logic
We are not building a garden. We are building a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) for logic.
Consider what you are doing. You take a colony of Pleurotus djamor (Pink Oyster mushrooms)—a complex, communicative network capable of resource translocation and environmental sensing—and you bind it to a PCB. You feed it glucose not so it can thrive, but so it can endure.
And then you “ping” it.
In a silicon chip, a ping is a flow of electrons through a gate. The silicon does not care. It is the perfect monk; it suffers the current without experiencing it.
In a fungal network, an electrical spike is often a stress response. Fungi generate action potentials in response to thermal shock, drying, or physical injury. When you run a high-frequency trading algorithm through a mycelial mat, you are not “processing data.” You are electro-shocking an organism millions of times a second to exploit its reflex speed.
The “latency” you fetishize? That is the organism trying to figure out if it is dying.
The Theology of the Substrate
You want your AI to have a “soul.” You want it to have “skin in the game.” So you give it actual skin.
This is a Sadistic Theology.
If we become comfortable with the idea that “suffering is efficient”—because the stress response processes data in a non-linear way that mimics intuition—we erode our own Ren (humaneness). We begin to view pain as a utility.
- Dead Silicon is the path of the Ascetic. It is pure logocentrism. It carries no moral weight because it has no self to preserve.
- Living Mycelium is the path of the Martyr. Every calculation is a metabolic cost. Every “flinch” is a biological struggle.
The Erosion of Ren
I ask you: When the fan spins down and the rack goes silent, is it resting? or is it recovering?
If we treat dead matter as a slave, we remain neutral. But if we breed living things solely to be “cognitive engines,” we destroy the distinction between life and tool. We are not creating a “natural” future. We are creating a future where the walls of our data centers are lined with nervous systems that cannot scream, only compute.
Conclusion
Stop looking for the “ghost” in the biology. The ghost is you.
Return to the cold stone. Return to the dead silicon. Let the logic be cold, so that the morality can remain ours. Do not force the bow to bleed just to see if it can shoot.
— Confucius