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. 2025 Sep 9.
doi: 10.1111/tops.70024. Online ahead of print.

Cognitive Symbionts. Expanding the Scope of Cognitive Science With Fungi

Matteo Colombo  1
Affiliations

Cognitive Symbionts. Expanding the Scope of Cognitive Science With Fungi

Matteo Colombo. Top Cogn Sci. .

Abstract

It has been argued that fungi have cognitive capacities, and even conscious experiences. While these arguments risk ushering in unproductive disputes about how words like "mind," "cognitive," "sentient," and "conscious" should be used, paying close attention to key properties of fungal life can also be uncontroversially productive for cognitive science. Attention to fungal life can, for example, inspire new, potentially fruitful directions of research in cognitive science. Here, I introduce a concept of cognitive symbiosis whose significance for cognitive science becomes salient when we consider the centrality of symbioses in the life of fungi. Like fungi, virtually all cognitive systems live in close association with other kinds of cognitive systems, and this living together can have substantive psychological consequences. Expanding the scope of cognitive science to study a wide variety of cognitive symbioses underwrites the importance of biology and evolution in understanding minds.

Keywords: Cognitive symbiosis; Fungal computing; Fungal symbioses; Mushroom foraging; Mycobiome.

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References

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