Part I — The living network
The network beneath our feet, electric fungi, the spikes, signals across the network, and whether a fungus can sense — building an evidence ladder from membrane potentials to stimulus-responsive change.
Published · Ebook edition available · The Spore Patch Ltd
Can Fungi Compute?
An Evidence Atlas Investigation into Mycelium, Electricity and Living Machines
Fungi produce electrical spikes. Researchers have mined logic gates from oyster-mushroom substrate, built memory devices from shiitake and wired mycelium into reservoir chips. Headlines have called it a fungal language and a mushroom computer. Richard L. Pope asks what each experiment actually established — and keeps three questions apart: what a living fungus can do, what material grown by fungi can contribute to a machine, and whether any of it amounts to a mind.
Published as a reflowable EPUB 3 ebook, £7.99. The download link is sent by email after checkout, and the book can also be read online from your library.
The governing distinction
A measured signal is not automatically a message
A simulated gate, a measured voltage pattern and a manufactured device answer different questions. The book separates what researchers observed from what they inferred, what they demonstrated from what they proposed, and what remains uncertain.
Structure
How the investigation is built
An introduction, eighteen chapters in five parts, a reflection, a research map and technical note, and references.
Part II — The computational possibility
From signal to information, the first fungal logic, a mushroom that remembers and the shiitake experiment: what an extracted truth table and a hysteresis loop can and cannot establish.
Part III — Machines and materials
Neuromorphic computing, fungal sensors, buildings that feel, growing a computer, and fungi versus silicon — where romance meets the specification sheet.
Part IV — The evidence test
The intelligence trap, what would prove it, and the evidence map: every major claim classified as established, reported finding, plausible, unresolved or unsupported.
Part V — The horizon
The living machine, followed by a clearly separated philosophical and personal reflection on the possibility of another kind of mind.
The Fungal Computation Ladder
Which rung did the experiment actually reach?
The book's editorial framework — not a scientific certification scheme — for asking which capability a study demonstrated. At the evidence cutoff, no practical general-purpose fungal computer is established.
Level 0
Electrical activity
Level 1
Responsiveness
Level 2
Propagation
Level 3
Discriminable information
Level 4
Functional signalling
Level 5
Transformation
Level 6
Programmable computation
Level 7
General-purpose fungal computer
The author
Richard L. Pope
Author of The Fungal Evidence Atlas and The Psychedelic Evidence Atlas, published by The Spore Patch Ltd. No academic affiliations, qualifications, awards or endorsements are claimed, and none should be inferred.
Can Fungi Compute? First edition, 2026. Published by The Spore Patch Ltd as a reflowable EPUB 3 ebook. Text copyright Richard L. Pope. Evidence cutoff for this revision: 20 October 2026. This is a narrative investigation of selected evidence, not a systematic review.
Availability
Published · Ebook edition available
This edition is a digital publication only. The Spore Patch Ltd sells digital publications and does not sell mushrooms, supplements or remedies.
- Title
- Can Fungi Compute? An Evidence Atlas Investigation into Mycelium, Electricity and Living Machines
- Publisher
- The Spore Patch Ltd
- Edition
- First edition, 2026
- Format
- Reflowable EPUB 3 ebook
- Price
- £7.99
- File size
- Approximately 3 MB
- Contents
- Introduction, eighteen chapters, a reflection, research map and technical note, references
- ISBN
- No ISBN assigned for this edition
- Delivery
- Download link delivered by email after checkout