Control Before Cognition in Fungal–Invertebrate Systems: Mycelial Information Geometry, Noise-Driven Selection, and Behavioral Suppression

This paper develops a control-first interpretation of recent empirical findings in fungal–invertebrate systems, using a psilocybin–producing fungal ecology study as its primary empirical anchor. The central claim is that many biological phenomena commonly framed as signaling- or cognition-driven are more parsimoniously explained as constraint-based control: the active restriction of accessible behavioral, developmental, and ecological trajectories under noise. Rather than treating inhibition, suppression, and non-action as secondary or corrective mechanisms, the paper argues that these are primary regulatory outputs of biological systems optimized for persistence rather than performance. Organisms and environments are modeled as stochastic dynamics evolving on a constrained state space, where control operates by reshaping geometry—through barrier formation, basin deformation, and anisotropic variance collapse—rather than by transmitting messages or selecting actions. The empirical results of the psilocybin–fungal ecology study are systematically recalibrated within this framework. Observed effects such as locomotor suppression, developmental disruption, reduced survival, receptor-independent persistence, and population-level restructuring are shown to correspond to increased first-passage times, contraction of viability regions, and shifts in stationary distributions. These mappings yield explicit, falsifiable predictions that distinguish geometric control from toxicity, signaling, and minimal cognition accounts. The analysis is intentionally substrate-agnostic and does not invoke consciousness, representation, or decision-making. Instead, it situates control as a first-order biological principle that precedes cognition and constrains it where cognition exists. The paper contributes a formal, testable account of how non-neural systems can exert robust regulatory influence through state-space constraint alone, and it clarifies the conditions under which cognition-centered explanations are warranted—or unnecessary.