8 ms·

The Mind of an Octopus

185 points by ghosh 10y ago

hyperpallium 10y ago
Octopii offer a tantalizing glimpse into how similar, and how different, aliens might be. e.g. seems likely they'll have camera eyes.
- clouddrover 10y ago
  > e.g. seems likely they'll have camera eyes. Why is that likely? Mantis shrimp, for example, have compound eyes and one of the most sophisticated visual systems found in nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes
  - hyperpallium 10y ago
    Eyes have evolved on Earth about 20 different times. But octopii have large brains and camera eyes (and aren't mammals). It's only one extra data point, but it is a data point.
    - pierrec 10y ago
      If anyone else is surprised by that claim, turns out it's not quite true (in a blurry way): [The variety between eye types] has led to the dogma that eyes have evolved in all animal phyla 40 to 60 times independently (Salvini-Plawen and Mayr 1961). However, recent genetic experiments cast serious doubts on this notion and argue strongly in favor of a monophyletic origin of the various eye types followed by divergent, parallel, and convergent evolution. https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/96/3/171/2187545/New-Perspectives-on-Eye-Development-and-the https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/96/3/171/2187545/New... Even at a wider structural level, there is enough common ancestry to put a serious damper on the idea that it evolved independently 20 times. It's more like a single origin for major photosensitive proteins, and one origin per major eye type. That's not to say it never happens, notably, there's a behavioral trait in ants (seed dispersal) that appears to have evolved independently at least 100 times. Sometimes everything is set up to favor convergent evolution with dozens or more independent occurrences, but that probably wasn't the case with the eye.
      - hyperpallium 10y ago
        Fascinating article! though much terminology. I think the gist is: > the mouse Pax6 gene ... is capable of inducing ... eyes in Drosophila. [Pax6] can initiate eye development both in insects and mammals. > transcription factors can control ... any target gene ..., [therefore] there are no functional constraints linking Pax6 to eye development. ... Therefore, the link between Pax6 and so to eye development must simply be a consequence of a common evolutionary history. i.e. not parallel evolution of Pax6 > It's more like a single origin for major photosensitive proteins, and one origin per major eye type. Since our latest common ancestor with octopii lacks camera eyes, doesn't this indicate more than one origin for this major eye type?
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    Their eyes can do a lot of fascinating things, but high detail density is not one of them. It is probably not a coincidence that compound eyes only show up in severely brain-size-constrained animals.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  > Octopii Octopus is from Greek, so it's not pluralized that way. The correct plural would be "octopodes", but "octopuses" is accepted and more conventional.
zeroer 10y ago
> They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. I've often thought that while we say we would want peaceful relationships with any aliens we might find, our history of interactions with "alien" life forms on Earth paints a different picture. I'm pretty sure if we meet alien life and it's not stronger than us, somebody's going to try to eat it.
- cema 10y ago
  True, at first. But then things may change. On the other hand, they might want to eat us too, so be careful.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - fellellor 10y ago
    If I were some kind of intergalactic alien consultant, I'd definitely advise the aliens to eat us or at least bomb us from orbit.
    - devoply 10y ago
      Isn't that the advice you give to all your intergalactic clients fellellor?
      - fellellor 10y ago
        Yes. I tell them all to eat me.
    - tehwalrus 10y ago
      I hope one day the in-joke world of startup job titles will produce an "intergalactic alien consultant" :)
    - throwanem 10y ago
      It's just a shame all the probes we've sent extrasolar have been roughly in the ecliptic. Otherwise we might've seen some sign of the warning beacons that girdle the system, advising travelers to stay well clear of the inner planets and on no account approach the third, lest its natives attempt to eat and/or copulate with all aboard, and possibly also steal your FTL drive. As the universe has learned from the experience of one itinerant journalist in particular, of all the places in any galaxy where you might find yourself marooned, among the very last you'd choose is the kind of planet where the locals named it "dirt".
coldcode 10y ago
I like how Octopuses are essentially a distributed system with most of the processing power in the arms. I wonder if anyone has attempted to model an octopus "brain"?
- eganist 10y ago
  The work of the late Dr. Otto Octavius may prove an interesting study for you.
- dharma1 10y ago
  What would also be interesting is training real cephalopod neural networks in the lab on various type of synthetic input and see what kinds of data they can learn to make sense of. Need better brain-computer interfaces I guess - perhaps something like neural lace. Cephalopod powered skynet, here we come.
er0l 10y ago
Just finished the book this past weekend, highly recommend. The science is great but the philosophy behind it all was what was really interesting to me.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
carrja99 10y ago
You know, the Hawaiian creation myth posits that the universe is destroyed and recreated many times over. The octopus is the sole survivor of the previous, alien universe.
- kriro 10y ago
  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
tudorw 10y ago
Our 'mind' is distributed across our organs too :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system
phyushin 10y ago
Fascinating read
rowanseymour 10y ago
I find it fascinating that we have very little idea how any other animal experiences the world - it's not something we can even imagine - and that seems especially true for these creatures with more of a "distributed" nervous system. Also makes me wonder if I should avoid eating calamari...
- ekianjo 10y ago
  eating is one thing, but eating them alive is something else altogether. In korea its a thing apparently. I dont really like the idea.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    The actor in the film Oldboy ate a live octopus for a scene. He ate three before he got the scene right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_OxuZzIxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_OxuZzIxY It's a good film, but this scene really puts me off it.
  - david-given 10y ago
    I was once invited out by business partners to a meal in Soeul where the highlight was an octopus, cooked alive at the table. They had to put a lid on the pan to stop it escaping. It was delicious, but I had to tell myself that it had been debeaked and was dying anyway and then stare fixedly at the wall until they told me that it had stopped moving and had been chopped up; luckily, they found this funny rather than insulting. shrug Weirdly, I've found myself getting more squeamish as I get older, rather than less...
    - username223 10y ago
      That's seriously messed up, but entirely believable. A number of years ago, a Korean restaurant in LA was busted for boiling cats alive (it may have been "BYOC"). I asked a Korean co-worker about it, and he said that while it was going out of style, there is a traditional belief that an animal's suffering is beneficial to the person eating it.
- 10y ago
nommm-nommm 10y ago
There was an octopus, Inky, who escaped from an aquarium by jumping out of his tank and sliding down a small diameter drainpipe to the sea at night. I always wondered if he knew (or at least had an idea) where the drainpipe went and if he did how.
amelius 10y ago
But humans are said to have a second brain that controls their gut. See e.g. [1]. Excerpt: > The enteric nervous system has been described as a "second brain" for several reasons. The enteric nervous system can operate autonomously. It normally communicates with the central nervous system (CNS) through the parasympathetic (e.g., via the vagus nerve) and sympathetic (e.g., via the prevertebral ganglia) nervous systems. However, vertebrate studies show that when the vagus nerve is severed, the enteric nervous system continues to function. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
geraldtrue 10y ago
After reading all these articles about octopuses lately... I felt so bad watching someone in a video on YouTube who fished one of these and was laughing about how it traveled on land.
jawarner 10y ago
> Further, in an octopus, it is not clear where the brain itself begins and ends. This to me is the central fallacy of the embodied versus central cognition argument. Why is there a need to define such a separation? Just view the neural network in its entirety and the "problem" is solved.
Nexxxeh 10y ago
There was some great discussion last week on cephalopods on this HN thread: Just how smart is an octopus? (washingtonpost.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852 If you'll forgive me copy and pasting from my comment there: I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...) I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ And the follow-up: https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus/ https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus...

185 points by ghosh 10y ago

Octopii offer a tantalizing glimpse into how similar, and how different, aliens might be. e.g. seems likely they'll have camera eyes.

clouddrover 10y ago
> e.g. seems likely they'll have camera eyes. Why is that likely? Mantis shrimp, for example, have compound eyes and one of the most sophisticated visual systems found in nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes
- hyperpallium 10y ago
  Eyes have evolved on Earth about 20 different times. But octopii have large brains and camera eyes (and aren't mammals). It's only one extra data point, but it is a data point.
  - pierrec 10y ago
    If anyone else is surprised by that claim, turns out it's not quite true (in a blurry way): [The variety between eye types] has led to the dogma that eyes have evolved in all animal phyla 40 to 60 times independently (Salvini-Plawen and Mayr 1961). However, recent genetic experiments cast serious doubts on this notion and argue strongly in favor of a monophyletic origin of the various eye types followed by divergent, parallel, and convergent evolution. https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/96/3/171/2187545/New-Perspectives-on-Eye-Development-and-the https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/96/3/171/2187545/New... Even at a wider structural level, there is enough common ancestry to put a serious damper on the idea that it evolved independently 20 times. It's more like a single origin for major photosensitive proteins, and one origin per major eye type. That's not to say it never happens, notably, there's a behavioral trait in ants (seed dispersal) that appears to have evolved independently at least 100 times. Sometimes everything is set up to favor convergent evolution with dozens or more independent occurrences, but that probably wasn't the case with the eye.
    - hyperpallium 10y ago
      Fascinating article! though much terminology. I think the gist is: > the mouse Pax6 gene ... is capable of inducing ... eyes in Drosophila. [Pax6] can initiate eye development both in insects and mammals. > transcription factors can control ... any target gene ..., [therefore] there are no functional constraints linking Pax6 to eye development. ... Therefore, the link between Pax6 and so to eye development must simply be a consequence of a common evolutionary history. i.e. not parallel evolution of Pax6 > It's more like a single origin for major photosensitive proteins, and one origin per major eye type. Since our latest common ancestor with octopii lacks camera eyes, doesn't this indicate more than one origin for this major eye type?
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  Their eyes can do a lot of fascinating things, but high detail density is not one of them. It is probably not a coincidence that compound eyes only show up in severely brain-size-constrained animals.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
> Octopii Octopus is from Greek, so it's not pluralized that way. The correct plural would be "octopodes", but "octopuses" is accepted and more conventional.

zeroer 10y ago

> They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. I've often thought that while we say we would want peaceful relationships with any aliens we might find, our history of interactions with "alien" life forms on Earth paints a different picture. I'm pretty sure if we meet alien life and it's not stronger than us, somebody's going to try to eat it.

cema 10y ago
True, at first. But then things may change. On the other hand, they might want to eat us too, so be careful.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fellellor 10y ago
  If I were some kind of intergalactic alien consultant, I'd definitely advise the aliens to eat us or at least bomb us from orbit.
  - devoply 10y ago
    Isn't that the advice you give to all your intergalactic clients fellellor?
    - fellellor 10y ago
      Yes. I tell them all to eat me.
  - tehwalrus 10y ago
    I hope one day the in-joke world of startup job titles will produce an "intergalactic alien consultant" :)
  - throwanem 10y ago
    It's just a shame all the probes we've sent extrasolar have been roughly in the ecliptic. Otherwise we might've seen some sign of the warning beacons that girdle the system, advising travelers to stay well clear of the inner planets and on no account approach the third, lest its natives attempt to eat and/or copulate with all aboard, and possibly also steal your FTL drive. As the universe has learned from the experience of one itinerant journalist in particular, of all the places in any galaxy where you might find yourself marooned, among the very last you'd choose is the kind of planet where the locals named it "dirt".

coldcode 10y ago

I like how Octopuses are essentially a distributed system with most of the processing power in the arms. I wonder if anyone has attempted to model an octopus "brain"?

eganist 10y ago
The work of the late Dr. Otto Octavius may prove an interesting study for you.
dharma1 10y ago
What would also be interesting is training real cephalopod neural networks in the lab on various type of synthetic input and see what kinds of data they can learn to make sense of. Need better brain-computer interfaces I guess - perhaps something like neural lace. Cephalopod powered skynet, here we come.

er0l 10y ago

Just finished the book this past weekend, highly recommend. The science is great but the philosophy behind it all was what was really interesting to me.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

carrja99 10y ago

You know, the Hawaiian creation myth posits that the universe is destroyed and recreated many times over. The octopus is the sole survivor of the previous, alien universe.

kriro 10y ago
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

tudorw 10y ago

Our 'mind' is distributed across our organs too :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system

phyushin 10y ago

Fascinating read

rowanseymour 10y ago

I find it fascinating that we have very little idea how any other animal experiences the world - it's not something we can even imagine - and that seems especially true for these creatures with more of a "distributed" nervous system. Also makes me wonder if I should avoid eating calamari...

ekianjo 10y ago
eating is one thing, but eating them alive is something else altogether. In korea its a thing apparently. I dont really like the idea.
- DanBC 10y ago
  The actor in the film Oldboy ate a live octopus for a scene. He ate three before he got the scene right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_OxuZzIxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_OxuZzIxY It's a good film, but this scene really puts me off it.
- david-given 10y ago
  I was once invited out by business partners to a meal in Soeul where the highlight was an octopus, cooked alive at the table. They had to put a lid on the pan to stop it escaping. It was delicious, but I had to tell myself that it had been debeaked and was dying anyway and then stare fixedly at the wall until they told me that it had stopped moving and had been chopped up; luckily, they found this funny rather than insulting. shrug Weirdly, I've found myself getting more squeamish as I get older, rather than less...
  - username223 10y ago
    That's seriously messed up, but entirely believable. A number of years ago, a Korean restaurant in LA was busted for boiling cats alive (it may have been "BYOC"). I asked a Korean co-worker about it, and he said that while it was going out of style, there is a traditional belief that an animal's suffering is beneficial to the person eating it.
10y ago

nommm-nommm 10y ago

There was an octopus, Inky, who escaped from an aquarium by jumping out of his tank and sliding down a small diameter drainpipe to the sea at night. I always wondered if he knew (or at least had an idea) where the drainpipe went and if he did how.

amelius 10y ago

But humans are said to have a second brain that controls their gut. See e.g. [1]. Excerpt: > The enteric nervous system has been described as a "second brain" for several reasons. The enteric nervous system can operate autonomously. It normally communicates with the central nervous system (CNS) through the parasympathetic (e.g., via the vagus nerve) and sympathetic (e.g., via the prevertebral ganglia) nervous systems. However, vertebrate studies show that when the vagus nerve is severed, the enteric nervous system continues to function. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

geraldtrue 10y ago

After reading all these articles about octopuses lately... I felt so bad watching someone in a video on YouTube who fished one of these and was laughing about how it traveled on land.

jawarner 10y ago

> Further, in an octopus, it is not clear where the brain itself begins and ends. This to me is the central fallacy of the embodied versus central cognition argument. Why is there a need to define such a separation? Just view the neural network in its entirety and the "problem" is solved.

Nexxxeh 10y ago

There was some great discussion last week on cephalopods on this HN thread: Just how smart is an octopus? (washingtonpost.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852 If you'll forgive me copy and pasting from my comment there: I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...) I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ And the follow-up: https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus/ https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus...