23 ms·

The Octopus: An Alien Among Us

525 points by BerislavLopac 7y ago

gautamcgoel 7y ago
There's a bio professor at my university, Michael Dickinson, who is one of the world's leading experts on flies, so much so that his email handle is "flyman". His group is trying to understand the relationship between the fruit fly's biological structure and it's behavior. They do all these zany experiments with motion tracking where they observe a bunch of flies interacting and try to figure out what's going on in their brains. Really cool stuff. I've always felt that if we could understand the genes -> cells -> systems -> behavior pathway much better then our understanding of the world might be completely transformed... I think octopuses would be an especially interesting model organism to study.
air7 7y ago
> An octopus, with its richly complex behavior and its large eyes filled with focused attention, is a far more compelling inkblot test, so to speak, triggering a strong social perception in us. Not only do we know, intellectually, that it gathers objective information about its world, but we can’t help feeling that it must have a subjective awareness as well emanating out of those soulful eyes. But the truth is, we don’t know, and the sense we get of its conscious mind says more about us than about the octopus. The experts who study octopuses risk becoming the least reliable observers on this point, because they are the ones most likely to be entranced by these wonderful creatures. Conciousness debates are so fundamental yet so moot: One can only attribute conciousness based on observing behavior. There really isn't a good "line on the sand" to distinguish who/what is conscious and who isn't for anything from humans to octopuses to microwaves to computer programs.
- nessunodoro 7y ago
  I came here to quote the ink blot metaphor as well. It raises a great question, and earns it thoroughly I think: Consciousness may be sensed before proven. What is the basis of that feeling, and is it worthy of scie tific consideration? Personally I think it's a brilliant metaphor. What do we see in an ink blot? What do we see in any symmetries?
- missosoup 7y ago
  Relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie The answer seems to lie in qualia. But by definition that is something that one cannot authentically communicate. And the notion of qualia itself is increasingly convergent with DNN latent space. Is the redness of red or the warmth of sunlight just a vector in n-dimensional latent space somewhere in our brain computers? Maybe we're not really conscious.
  - gbjw 7y ago
    What does this even mean? How can we not be 'really' conscious? How can I deny my own 'qualia'? I think you cannot explain subjective experience as a vector in latent space because it transcends any space in which you 'project' it in. My subjective experience is that which experiences that latent space, not identical to it.
- plutonorm 7y ago
  I believe it's fundamentally impossible to test for consciousness. You can't know if it feels like something to be any other thing but yourself. The domain of scientific knowledge is completely cut off from subjective experience. Even if the octopus could speak and told us in English "I feel therefore I am" we could not know for certain that it produced those words having a conscious understanding of what something feels like. Feeling is fundamentally in a different class of thing from those things which the scientific world can explore. And that to me, is absolutely bizarre. What does that mean? How can that possibly be true? Is it definitely true? What on earth is "feeling"?! What is qualia. It's the deepest question and I think probably holds the key to really understanding why the univers exists.
  - the8472 7y ago
    I would argue it's moot to discuss consciousness unless someone prefaces the discussion with a specific definition, preferably a scientific one and not some woo. Philosophical consciousness suffers from too many issues for day to day discussion, some previous arguments I made in this direction before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20501688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20501688
    - plutonorm 7y ago
      Yup I agree, the hard problem of consciousness should be deliberately excluded from discussions on various topics, particularly AI. It's not useful, its fascinating, but it's irrelevant and distracting for most purposes.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    It's not even clear to me that consciousness is "real" at the level of base reality, but I do have a proposed test: link yourself up to an octopus using the same BMI setups that are used to allow two rats to share experiences and memories. If you start experiencing/remembering the life of an octopus, the brain on the other side of those wires is almost certainly conscious. The inverse is not true, of course; we could simply fail to grasp the differences between the brains of cephalopods and mammals, resulting in a bad connection to a perfectly fine brain. (I'm more than 99% sure that octopuses experience the world, but I think this test can be generalised to simpler life forms in principle.)
- throwaway_law 7y ago
  >There really isn't a good "line on the sand" to distinguish who/what is conscious and who isn't for anything from humans to octopuses to microwaves to computer programs. I agree, but one step further I don't think we even have a base line definition for what consciousness really is, so how could we start defining what is and what isn't?
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    We can't. Ever. Even with each other, we only assume. I can only see one ultimate conclusion: consciousness is a silly meme and doesn't really matter. (Then, a corollary: personhood is a silly meme and doesn't really matter.) :D
    - throwaway_law 7y ago
      >Then, a corollary: personhood is a silly meme and doesn't really matter. The Supreme Court beat you to it and extended personhood to corporations. No one ever accused a corporation of being conscious.
- guest2143 7y ago
  my line in the sand is play. Does this creature play?
- coldtea 7y ago
  >The experts who study octopuses risk becoming the least reliable observers on this point, because they are the ones most likely to be entranced by these wonderful creatures. That sounds like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" line of reasoning though... I'd inverse the usual advice about not anthropomorphizing and ask "why not anthropomorphize"? Most creatures, especially the more advanced ones, are pretty close to us. Some, we literally descended from not very long ago, evolution-wise. They might not have abstract concepts and higher reasoning, but they could very well have "subjective awareness"... >Conciousness debates are so fundamental yet so moot: One can only attribute conciousness based on observing behavior. Well, that's for now. If we find the exact mechanism and complexity threshold required for consciousness (e.g. by experiment with simulations and artificial brains and brain modeling), we might be able to test and measure for it directly (e.g. with brain activity scanning).
  - likpok 7y ago
    > I'd inverse the usual advice about not anthropomorphizing and ask "why not anthropomorphize"? Most creatures, especially the more advanced ones, are pretty close to us. Some, we literally descended from not very long ago, evolution-wise. This is very much not true of octopuses, who diverged from us somewhere just after the development of bilateralism.
  - olooney 7y ago
    > why not anthropomorphize? It would be easy to be flippant about this suggestion and reply something like "Because we're doing science, not making Disney cartoons?" But the issue is not so black and white. I once saw a lecture by Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow) where he described why he talks about "System 1" and "System 2" as if they were real things (when of course there is no part of the brain you could point to and label as either) and his argument was that he was intentionally making use of a feature of the human mind which allows it to think quickly and reliably about "agents," (to use his exact word.) In other words, he is intentionally anthropomorphizing abstract systems to make it easier to attribute certain characteristics to it. There's some evidence this works in multiple contexts. First, we have the Wason selection task where performance improves remarkably when a problem is translated from an abstract logic question to a question about checking IDs at a bar. Humans are good at thinking about rule enforcement in a social context, and terrible about thinking about abstract logic. Second, we have various mnemonic techniques which associate the things to be memorized (cards, digits of pi, whatever) with people (often celebrities) and then encode information (say, a hundred people each representing two digits) by telling stories about the people. "Einstein and Mr. Rogers baked pies for Lady Gaga" is much easier to remember than "314159". If the human brain is wired to be good at thinking about other humans, if we can therefore co-opt more of our brain matter to work on a problem, why isn't that a good thing? After all, Popper would say that as long as the theories make falsifiable predictions, who cares where they come from? And shouldn't we be as open minded and creative as possible during the hypothesis generation phase of science, as Feyerabend argued in Against Method? If Kepler's mystic beliefs about numbers could lead him to groundbreaking work in astronomy, who are we to deny any scientist any aspect of their full mental powers? And yet reliance on intuitive models often lead to bias, blind spots, and unwarranted assumptions. We have to remember that these specialized aspects of our brains evolved to solve very specialized problems in a particular environment, and the further we get from those traditional environments the worse they perform. Geometric intuition, developed by apes for a 3D world on the scale of meters was extremely useful aid when bootstrapping mathematics when it first allowed us to grasp plane geometry intuitively, but it became a hindrance as we investigated very small, very large, very fast, or very massive objects. Anthropomorphic models may allow to quickly generate new ideas, but we must always be willing to cast aside such intuitions as our theories develop. So, I would say that if we currently are at a loss for theories that fit the available data on octopuses, we should place no restrictions on what theories we consider; and if anthropomorphic thinking is one way of generating new hypotheses, than so much the better: toss them on the pile with the others and test them all. But if lessons from the history of science hold true, it is likely that we shall soon have to abandon these early theories (despite the siren call of their intuitive appeal) in favor of more objective, more abstract, and less intuitive concepts that nevertheless explain the facts more thoroughly and more deeply.
- clairity 7y ago
  you seem to be biased toward human exceptionalism, probably as a way to take the skeptical position. but the proper skeptical position would be to assume consciousness in the absence of definitive proof, since animals are observably much more similar than different (compared to a microwave or even a plant).
- efa 7y ago
  Experts who spend tons of time with animals (like in zoos) also assume animals feel affection for their handlers. This may be the case for some animals but I've seen it said for animals like snakes. A snake doesn't have any concept of love/affection (especially for a human).
  - z3phyr 7y ago
    I dont know about snakes, but affection is absolutely visible among the elephants, as I saw them often during my childhood. Baby elephants act a lot like toddlers; curios, playful, affectionate towards things they like, not caring about other things, needing their mother (or any female adult in case of elephants) They can't read and write but they do react "emotionally"
    - ufmace 7y ago
      I have read that all mammals seem to share some of the same emotional patterns and ability to relate to each other. Snakes and other reptiles, I have heard, don't have any of these traits and have no capability to feel any emotions at all. Supposedly, your pet snake that you care for every day, will never see you as a friend, just a warm thing in its environment, and bigger ones will happily try to eat you anytime they feel hungry. You're supposed to feed them often enough that they don't feel hungry and so aren't a threat to any humans, including children or other household pets.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        But maybe even a snake could experience a rudimentary kind of “joy” based in a conditioning - the handler always bringing food, warmth and other attention. Maybe it on some very primitive level “appreciates” the thing in it’s environment?
        ufmace 7y ago
        Maybe? I'm not an animal behavior expert or anything. But I do know that: Reptiles are not social/herding animals Many handlers report that a hungry snake will be happy to eat anything that looks edible, including you, your kid, your dog, etc. Humans do have a tendency to anthropomorphize, or attribute human emotions to things that absolutely cannot feel them, including machines, insects, plants, rocks, etc. Knowing that, I wouldn't trust the assumption that it must feel something. Animals, especially non-mammals, are near-alien in how their behavior may differ from what we're used to. Ignoring the advice of experts on how they actually behave is a good way to get killed.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  I've owned a lot of very moody animals of all kinds in my past which make a strong case for subjective experience in advanced lifeforms. If you disregard those external phenomena as a simple cause-and-effect relationship without subjective experience, you could easily do the same for human beings. Most of my goals in life can be traced back to the need for food, shelter, reproduction, and lack of stress. IMO emotional capacitance is one of the leading contributors to the kind of consciousness that we feel, but is not a prerequisite for consciousness in general. It just depends on what you consider consciousness. Some people think that all orchestrated matter has a proportional level of "consciousness" related to its thermodynamic complexity arising from quantum phenomena, but without the ability to "feel" (emotional circuitry) and "think" (logical circuitry) you're hard pressed to tell me a rock is alive in any sense of the word. But an octopus? C'mon, they're contenders for #2 intelligence on the planet. If anyone has subjective experience, it's them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
CameronNemo 7y ago
>octopus >last 5 characters of the domain are ithub
ufmace 7y ago
I wonder if anyone has managed to create some sort of sign language or writing or something to communicate with an Octopus.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Some fish hunt with an octopus buddy and signal the presence of prey.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Lots of people communicate with octopuses. Just as my dog and i can converse (ie "do you want food or to go out?") similar interaction can be done with an octopus.
  - throwaway_law 7y ago
    Do you have any link to confirm a domesticated octopus that responds to verbal commands? I always understood they barely have any capacity for sound.
    - sandworm101 7y ago
      Communication does not require the animal to answer commands. If I am sitting on the couch and my dog brings me her leash, that is her telling me that she wants to go for a walk. Octopus trained to use camera: https://petapixel.com/2015/04/10/this-octopus-was-trained-by-sony-to-take-pictures-of-aquarium-visitors/ https://petapixel.com/2015/04/10/this-octopus-was-trained-by... Wild pacific octopuses are known to have distinct personalities. Some like to interact with divers, a tactile form of communication. https://themarinedetective.com/2015/02/23/gentle-giants-what-to-do-when-you-find-your-dive-buddy-with-a-giant-pacific-octopus-on-her-head/ https://themarinedetective.com/2015/02/23/gentle-giants-what...
      - throwaway_law 7y ago
        That's fair enough I guess, I took your comment to mean respond to verbal commands >Lots of people communicate with octapuses. Just as my dog and i can converse (ie "do you want food or to go out?") No point in arguing but not sure how teaching a Octopus to push a button (that happens to take a picture) to be communication. And sure I dive and have interacted with Octopi, but I don't go around saying I communicate with Octopi, the same way I wouldn't say I communicate with monkeys if they interact with me by throwing their shit at me...but I get your gist.
pizzavore 7y ago
Good read! Adrian Tchaikovsky explored octopus consciousness in the sci-fi novel 'Children of Ruin'. They really do seem alien.
- mojomark 7y ago
  The intelligence of related cephalopod 'cuttlefish' was also highlighted in Baxter's "Time" novel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)
  - pndy 7y ago
    I'm not sure if that counts as well but Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee Rama series includes "octospider" species but that would be more for "alien" part in the article title.
- derg 7y ago
  I assume this is the sequel to 'Children of Time'? I enjoyed it, so I guess I should check out the sequel sooner rather than later.
  - arcticfox 7y ago
    It is - I thought it remained excellent, but unlike Children of Time, missed the mark a bit on its potential.
  - strig 7y ago
    I actually enjoyed it a bit more than Children of Time. Both are great books.
  - legohead 7y ago
    Just finished, would definitely recommend. The book has many interesting ideas, not just the octopodes :)
    - bduerst 7y ago
smrz 7y ago
Nice rip off of https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness/dp/0374227764 https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...
- Shebanator 7y ago
  rip off seems a little strong. this is an excerpt from a book on a different but related topic, and he is using the octupus as a way to make a larger point. The author probably has read the book in question and others to help them make their point, but that is not the same as ripping them off, its research.
youeseh 7y ago
The thing that I keep wondering about is, why don't octopuses have higher aspirations? Like building octopus cities, and forming an octopus empire. Or figuring out how to pass on information from generation to generation. Could an octopus be taught English?
- arcticfox 7y ago
  Anyone interested in thinking about this should read Children of Time and the sequel Children of Ruin. The first is about the (accidental) future uplift of spiders via genetic engineering and evolution, the sequel about octopuses. The author does an excellent job of imagining how this might come to pass.
- derg 7y ago
  I think about this Douglas Adams quote about Dolphins a lot: "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." You could apply the same idea to octopuses.
  - chibg10 7y ago
    While satirical, this doesn’t really make sense as an answer to question at hand. Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. There are some limits to this — humans in many cases clearly have other goals — but it should be true to a large extent. The wheel, New York, and wars are pretty clearly aligned with this goal. If the octopus possessed sufficient intelligence, something along the lines of an octopus city would presumably be in the cards. Or if they do possess such intelligence, the question again is why not form civilizations (which would presumably boost survival and fertility rates)?
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Would they though? cities allow close contact often which allows disease to spread thus wiping them out. Eventually you create sanitation, medication and such. It is a long time from intelligence to designing sanitation and medical systems. If you skip all that by avoiding close contact...
teddyh 7y ago
I thought that cuttlefish were the established kings of this particular hill? https://www.xkcd.com/520/ https://www.xkcd.com/520/ http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=400 http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=400
- z3phyr 7y ago
  The cuttlefish are the orangutans to the octopus's chimps
jcims 7y ago
Just saw this yesterday and feel it's apropos for this thread: Octopus Dreaming - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vKCLJZbytU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vKCLJZbytU Some of the best imagery I've ever seen of chromatophores (and other *phores) in action.
- rglover 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this! Was mid bite of my lunch and just stopped with my mouth open.
- human20190310 7y ago
  Wow... if dreaming evolved twice, I don't know what to think.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    If you spend enough time in a sensory deprivation tank, you will usually start experiencing abstract thoughts and sensory hallucinations. Dreaming is likely similar in that it's just the natural result of a few moving parts: 1. An eager sensory network with no inputs can introduce phantom inputs into the network, which can evolve through feedback loops in networks not being stimulated by real sensory phenomena 2. The brain and body's tendency to actively "simulate" its internal representation of the world, by creating mental scenarios and then playing them out. When you throw a baseball, your CNS & muscles run simulations which adjust your motor neuron activation profile and the way your muscular cells function based on feedback from the brain about the success of the action. When you practice a speech, you visualize the place you will be delivering it, visualize the audience and their potential reactions, so that you can plan accordingly. This is another kind of mental simulation. Dreams might be the same thing, generating sensory feedback loops from brain activity resulting from memory organization and compression during the sleep cycle, simulating a world and then running through the simulation. This can greatly increase an organism's survival if the organism's entire life revolves around finding food and avoiding predators / catching prey. While they are hidden and safely sleeping, animals are still able to "train" themselves completely unconsciously. Seeing as how evolutionarily useful it is, I'm not surprised to see it crop up in multiple kinds of brains and would be very surprised if advanced aliens do not dream as well.
xrd 7y ago
This article is a reminder that science based articles can be engaging and incredibly illuminating. There is a sharp contrast between this article and other science writing that seems primarily occupied with impressing the reader with facts, to detriment of any kind of connection with the human (or perhaps octopus?) reading it.
ajharrison 7y ago
I'd say this to my friends (literally "I believe octopi are aliens") and get laughed at. I believe that for a lot of underwater life. Basically our oceans are a cesspool of ancient alien life that's been collecting in there for millennia
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  Perhaps they laugh because they think by "alien" you mean from outer space and unrelated to our earthly evolutionary history. And to be pedantic, humans and octopuses (and bacteria for that matter) are all equally evolved, just for different niches.
irrational 7y ago
Are they the aliens, or are we the aliens? If octopus are conscious, do they look at us the same way we would look at aliens that came to earth with such incomprehensible technology that it looks like magic?
- andrei_says_ 7y ago
  Something I’ve found weird but interesting ... Castaneda’s books which involve shamanic seeing of energy fields mention the observation that our minds (not brains, minds) are a foreign implant. Like, an energetic-pattern-parasite capable of interfering with brain function. So, we’ve been colonized for a long time. Or, if you identify with the mind in “cogito ergo sum” fashion, we’ve invaded and colonized. Just a thought ;)
  - ColanR 7y ago
    On what basis could he make that claim? A sense of dissociation?
    - andrei_says_ 7y ago
      Multi-generational lineage of sorcerers including himself being able to observe the energetic structure of the mind and the entities attached to it. This specific observation is in one of his books, the active side of infinity. It’s very disconcerting and very uncomfortable to read. I have not observed these myself and I don’t think there’s instrumentation to confirm or rebutt these observations.
      - chachachoney 7y ago
        Downright Ellisonian. Given what we know know about the manipulative practices Castaneda used within his small cult, I have no problem seeing those observations as reflections of his inner psyche through the lens of shamanic ritual and intoxicants, possibly amplified for artistic purposes. >> I have not observed these myself and I don’t think there’s instrumentation to confirm or rebutt these observations. The only instrumentation one has to confirm or rebut the experience of shamanic mystics is the practice of shamanic mysticism.
gigatexal 7y ago
I’ve said this before here on HN when the octopus came up but I’ll say it again: these creatures are so damn smart I stopped eating them when I consume sushi. Many animals possess advanced intellect so I’ve limited my consumption of animals but it’s the octopus that has a special place in my eyes. What majestic creatures. The females find a rock to give birth to the next generation and slowly starve to death while doing so. As soon I learned that I thought of my own single mom while she didn’t give her life raising me or my sister she did sacrifice a lot.
- ericmay 7y ago
  I don’t think it makes sense to say “you look cute or seem smart” as the criteria for not destroying a creature. Everything is intelligent, it’s just a spectrum of intelligence. Makes more sense given we can’t really discern on that spectrum to just try and eat fewer of any animal, not just octopi, but birds and mammals as well. Mammals in particular if you use this criteria to not eat octopi.
  - hackstack 7y ago
    I made a similar decision to the GP -- it is not just that the octopus is intelligent (pigs are smart too, but I'm less perturbed by eating them). The octopus is such a vastly different creature to most/all other animals that we eat. To me, it feels more like eating a totally alien lifeform, which (subjectively, to me) is a greater pity than just eating something that is smart, but is pretty similar to all other animals (e.g. fish or mammals)
  - neuronic 7y ago
    What basically kicked off major concerns for me were articles and reports about human cases where people are too disabled to express their emotions and thoughts. Think strokes, major head trauma or birth defects. From this perspective, I would at the very least become far more careful about judging animals too quickly. Just because we cannot read them and interpret their emotions doesn't mean they don't feel love, comfort, fear, amusement or terror. How long did it take for us to understand that lobsters feel excruciating pain when boiled alive? It took microbiology to figure that out... whoopsy, what are those pain hormones doing here?
gbjw 7y ago
Also related: Thomas Nagel's 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum... ) wherein he argues that subjective experience transcends objective materialism.
hi41 7y ago
I did not appreciate life as a young person. It is only in recent years that I am absolutely enthralled by the beauty of life. Seeing how complex life is, it is surprising that it even exists. I sometimes question my own motivations about how I frivolously I have lived my life without paying much attention to suffering in the lives of other living beings. I also feel powerless in front of the huge economic forces that I have to come to depend on for my sustenance. I wish we were better equipped to comprehend the suffering in another life. I know it only when I am told explicitly. I see all the painful ways we hunt and find it extremely painful. And much of civilization thinks of hunting as a sport. Causing pain to another species is sport!
- gbjw 7y ago
  You can make concrete changes now. Vote with your dollar. Do not support industries that flippantly disregard the beauty and sanctity of life in its many forms.
  - apta 7y ago
    It's an important start, but sometimes it just feels like it's not enough, especially if people have certain beliefs that they hang onto without being able to defend them, for fear of a slippery slope situation. Take for example smoking. It's absolutely disgusting how they just throw their cigarette butts on the ground when they're done with them. So, not only is it a harmful activity to engage in for the individual at hand, it also harms people nearby, as well as the environment as the trash they leave behind is not biodegradable. No idea what can be done about this.
    - katbyte 7y ago
      Not a smoker but I have a friend who is, and he diligently collects his butts for proper disposal.. but I think he is in the minority.
  - otabdeveloper4 7y ago
    Like the abortion industry? Whoops, sorry, crimethink!
biztos 7y ago
Whenever I read an Octopus article I come back to the conviction that if it weren’t for the early death thing, these are the creatures that would be failing to fight the climate crisis, and we would be — if not the creatures on the plate in the tapas joint, at least some scared and scurrying thing in the underbrush.
- lolc 7y ago
  It's not only intelligence. The success of humans depends just as much on their social traits. Can groups cooperate? Can they have division of labour? Without that, you're not going to get far even if you're super smart.
- hnarn 7y ago
  It's comforting for us as humans, of course, to think that any life form would end up in the same inevitable energy race which destroys the planet. Unfortunately there is no basis for this assumption beyond our own failure.
mirimir 7y ago
> The octopus conundrum is an instructive example of how an animal can be complex and intelligent, and yet we are, so far, unable to answer the question of its subjective experience or even whether the question has any meaning for that creature. I'm not sure, but I think that the author is arguing that we can't say for sure whether any other creatures are conscious. There are the mirror experiments, but ultimately, we know that humans are (in general) conscious because we (personally) are conscious.
cpt1138 7y ago
Is the question just whether invertebrates have consciousness? It may be a forcing function of our desire to impose consciousness on things but it really seems like my cat and my dog both have a level of consciousness.
Scapeghost 7y ago
So octopuses are very intelligent, and very alien. Anyone who has even casually read or watched videos about them will know this. But their potential is cut short by their incredibly short lives (like 5? years at the higher end) which seem to be caused by a very bizarre self-destructive behavior after mating (starving themselves, eating their own arms), which in turn is caused by an "optic gland" and removing that gland completely eliminates that self-destructiveness and increases their lifespan. It makes you wonder if that gland was artificially engineered into them. The sci-fi nerd in me likes to think there is a cosmic conflict between axial-symmetry species and radial-symmetry species, which may be overall more common in the universe given how life evolves at the microscopic scale, and Earth was chosen to give apes a chance.
- TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
  If it was engineered such that humans win out over octopuses, why not, just not include octopuses directly? Then again this wouldn’t Mae a good sci-fi novel...
  - Scapeghost 7y ago
    Because genocide would cause corresponding repercussions, of course. :) If you eliminate a radial intelligence somewhere they eliminate an axial intelligence somewhere. Roundabout hindering them is clearly allowed. It may even have been a compensation for the seemingly barren corner of the galaxy we're in.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > If it was engineered such that humans win out over octopuses, why not, just not include octopuses directly? The original limits were symmetrical. They just haven't yet noticed humans started living long enough to develop into a technological species.
- human20190310 7y ago
  If I recall correctly, one theory is that octopuses are such voracious cannibals that a swift demise after reproduction evolved to keep them from eating the next generation.
TheMinorityGuy 7y ago
this might be off topic but I really loved the writing style of this author. This is the kind of journalism I would like to pay for. He is dealing with a complicated subject but his prose is so lucid and devoid of jargon that helps us understand what he is saying.
mindfulplay 7y ago
Maybe this is the highest form of intelligence? Octupuses also have a very short lifespan which seems apt: you don't need societies, buildings, relationships etc if you have truly mastered the sole purpose of your existence really well - the nature of procreation and empowering the next generation to survive. Human beings are actually awful at this it: makes me wonder if all social, cultural aspects are truly "too complicated" ways to achieve what octupuses have mastered through a much simpler process and potentially without needing arbitrary things like consciousness.
- countryqt30 7y ago
  I agree with that 100%. Human procreation has massively slowed down as wealth increased. I'd love to see some startups/governments tackle this REAL challenge.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Not so much of an issue as long as the population keeps increasing (maybe even the opposite...)
  - greenonions 7y ago
    I'm not an anti-natalist or anything of the sort, but it would appear to me that if anything, the evolutionary challenge facing humans is that we have had too many babies. Across the globe we've consistently created more humans than our ecosystem can reliably support, or that we can manage to support with our technology. This has resulted in climate change and ecological destruction. A future earth with the highest carrying capacity for life might look like the entire globe as rich in life as the Amazon rain forest, with humans benefiting from the enormous diversity. Our ecological niche would be in the microbiome, where the human species eliminates diseases, causes maximally high survival rates in other species, and uses this surplus for our energy supply, along with genetic engineering species to suit our needs. FWIW, I think many are concerned about conservation already, which I think is the key to our long-term survival as a species.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
> The octopus has a central brain and also an independent, smaller processor in each arm, giving it a unique mixture of centralized and distributed command. This is the most interesting part. I read that an octopus's brain can give their arms high-level commands, and the arms can execute some commands by themselves.
conjectures 7y ago
Sounds like this guy got pipped to publication by Peter Godfrey Smith's Other Minds. Can anyone who has read both comment on whether Graziano's book contains much different?
anotheryou 7y ago
"The Hawaiʻian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe." http://rustyidols.blogspot.de/2008/08/research-octopus-god.html http://rustyidols.blogspot.de/2008/08/research-octopus-god.h...
irwt 7y ago
Anyone interested to read more about the octopus' brain, this article is worth reading: http://greymattersjournal.com/dive-into-the-mind-of-an-octopus/ http://greymattersjournal.com/dive-into-the-mind-of-an-octop... In a nutshell: 1) Octopuses have a "vertical lobe", which is very similar in function and organization to our hippocampus. 2) Mammalian hippocampuses have the ability for something known as "longterm potentiation" (LTP), which is believed to play a crucial part in memory and learning. Experiments found a similar longterm potentiation mechanism in the vertical lobe of octopuses. Quoting the article: "The discovery of LTP in octopuses provides evidence for convergent evolution that has led to the selection of similar synaptic activity. Though not yet agreed upon in the scientific community, the existence of LTP in both mammals and octopuses strengthens the concept of LTP as a cellular basis for learning and memory and may be a general mechanism for associative learning".
nmca 7y ago
"Other Minds" is an excellent book on this topic.
ab8 7y ago
How is the author sure that humans are conscious? If he is going by his own personal experience, then he can be sure only of his own consciousness.
pts_ 7y ago
Relevant book Crichton's Sphere.

525 points by BerislavLopac 7y ago

There's a bio professor at my university, Michael Dickinson, who is one of the world's leading experts on flies, so much so that his email handle is "flyman". His group is trying to understand the relationship between the fruit fly's biological structure and it's behavior. They do all these zany experiments with motion tracking where they observe a bunch of flies interacting and try to figure out what's going on in their brains. Really cool stuff. I've always felt that if we could understand the genes -> cells -> systems -> behavior pathway much better then our understanding of the world might be completely transformed... I think octopuses would be an especially interesting model organism to study.

air7 7y ago

> An octopus, with its richly complex behavior and its large eyes filled with focused attention, is a far more compelling inkblot test, so to speak, triggering a strong social perception in us. Not only do we know, intellectually, that it gathers objective information about its world, but we can’t help feeling that it must have a subjective awareness as well emanating out of those soulful eyes. But the truth is, we don’t know, and the sense we get of its conscious mind says more about us than about the octopus. The experts who study octopuses risk becoming the least reliable observers on this point, because they are the ones most likely to be entranced by these wonderful creatures. Conciousness debates are so fundamental yet so moot: One can only attribute conciousness based on observing behavior. There really isn't a good "line on the sand" to distinguish who/what is conscious and who isn't for anything from humans to octopuses to microwaves to computer programs.

nessunodoro 7y ago
I came here to quote the ink blot metaphor as well. It raises a great question, and earns it thoroughly I think: Consciousness may be sensed before proven. What is the basis of that feeling, and is it worthy of scie tific consideration? Personally I think it's a brilliant metaphor. What do we see in an ink blot? What do we see in any symmetries?
missosoup 7y ago
Relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie The answer seems to lie in qualia. But by definition that is something that one cannot authentically communicate. And the notion of qualia itself is increasingly convergent with DNN latent space. Is the redness of red or the warmth of sunlight just a vector in n-dimensional latent space somewhere in our brain computers? Maybe we're not really conscious.
- gbjw 7y ago
  What does this even mean? How can we not be 'really' conscious? How can I deny my own 'qualia'? I think you cannot explain subjective experience as a vector in latent space because it transcends any space in which you 'project' it in. My subjective experience is that which experiences that latent space, not identical to it.
plutonorm 7y ago
I believe it's fundamentally impossible to test for consciousness. You can't know if it feels like something to be any other thing but yourself. The domain of scientific knowledge is completely cut off from subjective experience. Even if the octopus could speak and told us in English "I feel therefore I am" we could not know for certain that it produced those words having a conscious understanding of what something feels like. Feeling is fundamentally in a different class of thing from those things which the scientific world can explore. And that to me, is absolutely bizarre. What does that mean? How can that possibly be true? Is it definitely true? What on earth is "feeling"?! What is qualia. It's the deepest question and I think probably holds the key to really understanding why the univers exists.
- the8472 7y ago
  I would argue it's moot to discuss consciousness unless someone prefaces the discussion with a specific definition, preferably a scientific one and not some woo. Philosophical consciousness suffers from too many issues for day to day discussion, some previous arguments I made in this direction before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20501688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20501688
  - plutonorm 7y ago
    Yup I agree, the hard problem of consciousness should be deliberately excluded from discussions on various topics, particularly AI. It's not useful, its fascinating, but it's irrelevant and distracting for most purposes.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  It's not even clear to me that consciousness is "real" at the level of base reality, but I do have a proposed test: link yourself up to an octopus using the same BMI setups that are used to allow two rats to share experiences and memories. If you start experiencing/remembering the life of an octopus, the brain on the other side of those wires is almost certainly conscious. The inverse is not true, of course; we could simply fail to grasp the differences between the brains of cephalopods and mammals, resulting in a bad connection to a perfectly fine brain. (I'm more than 99% sure that octopuses experience the world, but I think this test can be generalised to simpler life forms in principle.)
throwaway_law 7y ago
>There really isn't a good "line on the sand" to distinguish who/what is conscious and who isn't for anything from humans to octopuses to microwaves to computer programs. I agree, but one step further I don't think we even have a base line definition for what consciousness really is, so how could we start defining what is and what isn't?
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  We can't. Ever. Even with each other, we only assume. I can only see one ultimate conclusion: consciousness is a silly meme and doesn't really matter. (Then, a corollary: personhood is a silly meme and doesn't really matter.) :D
  - throwaway_law 7y ago
    >Then, a corollary: personhood is a silly meme and doesn't really matter. The Supreme Court beat you to it and extended personhood to corporations. No one ever accused a corporation of being conscious.
guest2143 7y ago
my line in the sand is play. Does this creature play?
coldtea 7y ago
>The experts who study octopuses risk becoming the least reliable observers on this point, because they are the ones most likely to be entranced by these wonderful creatures. That sounds like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" line of reasoning though... I'd inverse the usual advice about not anthropomorphizing and ask "why not anthropomorphize"? Most creatures, especially the more advanced ones, are pretty close to us. Some, we literally descended from not very long ago, evolution-wise. They might not have abstract concepts and higher reasoning, but they could very well have "subjective awareness"... >Conciousness debates are so fundamental yet so moot: One can only attribute conciousness based on observing behavior. Well, that's for now. If we find the exact mechanism and complexity threshold required for consciousness (e.g. by experiment with simulations and artificial brains and brain modeling), we might be able to test and measure for it directly (e.g. with brain activity scanning).
- likpok 7y ago
  > I'd inverse the usual advice about not anthropomorphizing and ask "why not anthropomorphize"? Most creatures, especially the more advanced ones, are pretty close to us. Some, we literally descended from not very long ago, evolution-wise. This is very much not true of octopuses, who diverged from us somewhere just after the development of bilateralism.
- olooney 7y ago
  > why not anthropomorphize? It would be easy to be flippant about this suggestion and reply something like "Because we're doing science, not making Disney cartoons?" But the issue is not so black and white. I once saw a lecture by Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow) where he described why he talks about "System 1" and "System 2" as if they were real things (when of course there is no part of the brain you could point to and label as either) and his argument was that he was intentionally making use of a feature of the human mind which allows it to think quickly and reliably about "agents," (to use his exact word.) In other words, he is intentionally anthropomorphizing abstract systems to make it easier to attribute certain characteristics to it. There's some evidence this works in multiple contexts. First, we have the Wason selection task where performance improves remarkably when a problem is translated from an abstract logic question to a question about checking IDs at a bar. Humans are good at thinking about rule enforcement in a social context, and terrible about thinking about abstract logic. Second, we have various mnemonic techniques which associate the things to be memorized (cards, digits of pi, whatever) with people (often celebrities) and then encode information (say, a hundred people each representing two digits) by telling stories about the people. "Einstein and Mr. Rogers baked pies for Lady Gaga" is much easier to remember than "314159". If the human brain is wired to be good at thinking about other humans, if we can therefore co-opt more of our brain matter to work on a problem, why isn't that a good thing? After all, Popper would say that as long as the theories make falsifiable predictions, who cares where they come from? And shouldn't we be as open minded and creative as possible during the hypothesis generation phase of science, as Feyerabend argued in Against Method? If Kepler's mystic beliefs about numbers could lead him to groundbreaking work in astronomy, who are we to deny any scientist any aspect of their full mental powers? And yet reliance on intuitive models often lead to bias, blind spots, and unwarranted assumptions. We have to remember that these specialized aspects of our brains evolved to solve very specialized problems in a particular environment, and the further we get from those traditional environments the worse they perform. Geometric intuition, developed by apes for a 3D world on the scale of meters was extremely useful aid when bootstrapping mathematics when it first allowed us to grasp plane geometry intuitively, but it became a hindrance as we investigated very small, very large, very fast, or very massive objects. Anthropomorphic models may allow to quickly generate new ideas, but we must always be willing to cast aside such intuitions as our theories develop. So, I would say that if we currently are at a loss for theories that fit the available data on octopuses, we should place no restrictions on what theories we consider; and if anthropomorphic thinking is one way of generating new hypotheses, than so much the better: toss them on the pile with the others and test them all. But if lessons from the history of science hold true, it is likely that we shall soon have to abandon these early theories (despite the siren call of their intuitive appeal) in favor of more objective, more abstract, and less intuitive concepts that nevertheless explain the facts more thoroughly and more deeply.
clairity 7y ago
you seem to be biased toward human exceptionalism, probably as a way to take the skeptical position. but the proper skeptical position would be to assume consciousness in the absence of definitive proof, since animals are observably much more similar than different (compared to a microwave or even a plant).
efa 7y ago
Experts who spend tons of time with animals (like in zoos) also assume animals feel affection for their handlers. This may be the case for some animals but I've seen it said for animals like snakes. A snake doesn't have any concept of love/affection (especially for a human).
- z3phyr 7y ago
  I dont know about snakes, but affection is absolutely visible among the elephants, as I saw them often during my childhood. Baby elephants act a lot like toddlers; curios, playful, affectionate towards things they like, not caring about other things, needing their mother (or any female adult in case of elephants) They can't read and write but they do react "emotionally"
  - ufmace 7y ago
    I have read that all mammals seem to share some of the same emotional patterns and ability to relate to each other. Snakes and other reptiles, I have heard, don't have any of these traits and have no capability to feel any emotions at all. Supposedly, your pet snake that you care for every day, will never see you as a friend, just a warm thing in its environment, and bigger ones will happily try to eat you anytime they feel hungry. You're supposed to feed them often enough that they don't feel hungry and so aren't a threat to any humans, including children or other household pets.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      But maybe even a snake could experience a rudimentary kind of “joy” based in a conditioning - the handler always bringing food, warmth and other attention. Maybe it on some very primitive level “appreciates” the thing in it’s environment?
      - ufmace 7y ago
        Maybe? I'm not an animal behavior expert or anything. But I do know that: Reptiles are not social/herding animals Many handlers report that a hungry snake will be happy to eat anything that looks edible, including you, your kid, your dog, etc. Humans do have a tendency to anthropomorphize, or attribute human emotions to things that absolutely cannot feel them, including machines, insects, plants, rocks, etc. Knowing that, I wouldn't trust the assumption that it must feel something. Animals, especially non-mammals, are near-alien in how their behavior may differ from what we're used to. Ignoring the advice of experts on how they actually behave is a good way to get killed.
soulofmischief 7y ago
I've owned a lot of very moody animals of all kinds in my past which make a strong case for subjective experience in advanced lifeforms. If you disregard those external phenomena as a simple cause-and-effect relationship without subjective experience, you could easily do the same for human beings. Most of my goals in life can be traced back to the need for food, shelter, reproduction, and lack of stress. IMO emotional capacitance is one of the leading contributors to the kind of consciousness that we feel, but is not a prerequisite for consciousness in general. It just depends on what you consider consciousness. Some people think that all orchestrated matter has a proportional level of "consciousness" related to its thermodynamic complexity arising from quantum phenomena, but without the ability to "feel" (emotional circuitry) and "think" (logical circuitry) you're hard pressed to tell me a rock is alive in any sense of the word. But an octopus? C'mon, they're contenders for #2 intelligence on the planet. If anyone has subjective experience, it's them.
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CameronNemo 7y ago

>octopus >last 5 characters of the domain are ithub

ufmace 7y ago

I wonder if anyone has managed to create some sort of sign language or writing or something to communicate with an Octopus.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Some fish hunt with an octopus buddy and signal the presence of prey.
sandworm101 7y ago
Lots of people communicate with octopuses. Just as my dog and i can converse (ie "do you want food or to go out?") similar interaction can be done with an octopus.
- throwaway_law 7y ago
  Do you have any link to confirm a domesticated octopus that responds to verbal commands? I always understood they barely have any capacity for sound.
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    Communication does not require the animal to answer commands. If I am sitting on the couch and my dog brings me her leash, that is her telling me that she wants to go for a walk. Octopus trained to use camera: https://petapixel.com/2015/04/10/this-octopus-was-trained-by-sony-to-take-pictures-of-aquarium-visitors/ https://petapixel.com/2015/04/10/this-octopus-was-trained-by... Wild pacific octopuses are known to have distinct personalities. Some like to interact with divers, a tactile form of communication. https://themarinedetective.com/2015/02/23/gentle-giants-what-to-do-when-you-find-your-dive-buddy-with-a-giant-pacific-octopus-on-her-head/ https://themarinedetective.com/2015/02/23/gentle-giants-what...
    - throwaway_law 7y ago
      That's fair enough I guess, I took your comment to mean respond to verbal commands >Lots of people communicate with octapuses. Just as my dog and i can converse (ie "do you want food or to go out?") No point in arguing but not sure how teaching a Octopus to push a button (that happens to take a picture) to be communication. And sure I dive and have interacted with Octopi, but I don't go around saying I communicate with Octopi, the same way I wouldn't say I communicate with monkeys if they interact with me by throwing their shit at me...but I get your gist.

pizzavore 7y ago

Good read! Adrian Tchaikovsky explored octopus consciousness in the sci-fi novel 'Children of Ruin'. They really do seem alien.

mojomark 7y ago
The intelligence of related cephalopod 'cuttlefish' was also highlighted in Baxter's "Time" novel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)
- pndy 7y ago
  I'm not sure if that counts as well but Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee Rama series includes "octospider" species but that would be more for "alien" part in the article title.
derg 7y ago
I assume this is the sequel to 'Children of Time'? I enjoyed it, so I guess I should check out the sequel sooner rather than later.
- arcticfox 7y ago
  It is - I thought it remained excellent, but unlike Children of Time, missed the mark a bit on its potential.
- strig 7y ago
  I actually enjoyed it a bit more than Children of Time. Both are great books.
- legohead 7y ago
  Just finished, would definitely recommend. The book has many interesting ideas, not just the octopodes :)
  - bduerst 7y ago

smrz 7y ago

Nice rip off of https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness/dp/0374227764 https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...

Shebanator 7y ago
rip off seems a little strong. this is an excerpt from a book on a different but related topic, and he is using the octupus as a way to make a larger point. The author probably has read the book in question and others to help them make their point, but that is not the same as ripping them off, its research.

youeseh 7y ago

The thing that I keep wondering about is, why don't octopuses have higher aspirations? Like building octopus cities, and forming an octopus empire. Or figuring out how to pass on information from generation to generation. Could an octopus be taught English?

arcticfox 7y ago
Anyone interested in thinking about this should read Children of Time and the sequel Children of Ruin. The first is about the (accidental) future uplift of spiders via genetic engineering and evolution, the sequel about octopuses. The author does an excellent job of imagining how this might come to pass.
derg 7y ago
I think about this Douglas Adams quote about Dolphins a lot: "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." You could apply the same idea to octopuses.
- chibg10 7y ago
  While satirical, this doesn’t really make sense as an answer to question at hand. Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. There are some limits to this — humans in many cases clearly have other goals — but it should be true to a large extent. The wheel, New York, and wars are pretty clearly aligned with this goal. If the octopus possessed sufficient intelligence, something along the lines of an octopus city would presumably be in the cards. Or if they do possess such intelligence, the question again is why not form civilizations (which would presumably boost survival and fertility rates)?
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Would they though? cities allow close contact often which allows disease to spread thus wiping them out. Eventually you create sanitation, medication and such. It is a long time from intelligence to designing sanitation and medical systems. If you skip all that by avoiding close contact...

teddyh 7y ago

I thought that cuttlefish were the established kings of this particular hill? https://www.xkcd.com/520/ https://www.xkcd.com/520/ http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=400 http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=400

z3phyr 7y ago
The cuttlefish are the orangutans to the octopus's chimps

jcims 7y ago

Just saw this yesterday and feel it's apropos for this thread: Octopus Dreaming - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vKCLJZbytU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vKCLJZbytU Some of the best imagery I've ever seen of chromatophores (and other *phores) in action.

rglover 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this! Was mid bite of my lunch and just stopped with my mouth open.
human20190310 7y ago
Wow... if dreaming evolved twice, I don't know what to think.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  If you spend enough time in a sensory deprivation tank, you will usually start experiencing abstract thoughts and sensory hallucinations. Dreaming is likely similar in that it's just the natural result of a few moving parts: 1. An eager sensory network with no inputs can introduce phantom inputs into the network, which can evolve through feedback loops in networks not being stimulated by real sensory phenomena 2. The brain and body's tendency to actively "simulate" its internal representation of the world, by creating mental scenarios and then playing them out. When you throw a baseball, your CNS & muscles run simulations which adjust your motor neuron activation profile and the way your muscular cells function based on feedback from the brain about the success of the action. When you practice a speech, you visualize the place you will be delivering it, visualize the audience and their potential reactions, so that you can plan accordingly. This is another kind of mental simulation. Dreams might be the same thing, generating sensory feedback loops from brain activity resulting from memory organization and compression during the sleep cycle, simulating a world and then running through the simulation. This can greatly increase an organism's survival if the organism's entire life revolves around finding food and avoiding predators / catching prey. While they are hidden and safely sleeping, animals are still able to "train" themselves completely unconsciously. Seeing as how evolutionarily useful it is, I'm not surprised to see it crop up in multiple kinds of brains and would be very surprised if advanced aliens do not dream as well.

xrd 7y ago

This article is a reminder that science based articles can be engaging and incredibly illuminating. There is a sharp contrast between this article and other science writing that seems primarily occupied with impressing the reader with facts, to detriment of any kind of connection with the human (or perhaps octopus?) reading it.

ajharrison 7y ago

I'd say this to my friends (literally "I believe octopi are aliens") and get laughed at. I believe that for a lot of underwater life. Basically our oceans are a cesspool of ancient alien life that's been collecting in there for millennia

tasty_freeze 7y ago
Perhaps they laugh because they think by "alien" you mean from outer space and unrelated to our earthly evolutionary history. And to be pedantic, humans and octopuses (and bacteria for that matter) are all equally evolved, just for different niches.

irrational 7y ago

Are they the aliens, or are we the aliens? If octopus are conscious, do they look at us the same way we would look at aliens that came to earth with such incomprehensible technology that it looks like magic?

andrei_says_ 7y ago
Something I’ve found weird but interesting ... Castaneda’s books which involve shamanic seeing of energy fields mention the observation that our minds (not brains, minds) are a foreign implant. Like, an energetic-pattern-parasite capable of interfering with brain function. So, we’ve been colonized for a long time. Or, if you identify with the mind in “cogito ergo sum” fashion, we’ve invaded and colonized. Just a thought ;)
- ColanR 7y ago
  On what basis could he make that claim? A sense of dissociation?
  - andrei_says_ 7y ago
    Multi-generational lineage of sorcerers including himself being able to observe the energetic structure of the mind and the entities attached to it. This specific observation is in one of his books, the active side of infinity. It’s very disconcerting and very uncomfortable to read. I have not observed these myself and I don’t think there’s instrumentation to confirm or rebutt these observations.
    - chachachoney 7y ago
      Downright Ellisonian. Given what we know know about the manipulative practices Castaneda used within his small cult, I have no problem seeing those observations as reflections of his inner psyche through the lens of shamanic ritual and intoxicants, possibly amplified for artistic purposes. >> I have not observed these myself and I don’t think there’s instrumentation to confirm or rebutt these observations. The only instrumentation one has to confirm or rebut the experience of shamanic mystics is the practice of shamanic mysticism.

gigatexal 7y ago

I’ve said this before here on HN when the octopus came up but I’ll say it again: these creatures are so damn smart I stopped eating them when I consume sushi. Many animals possess advanced intellect so I’ve limited my consumption of animals but it’s the octopus that has a special place in my eyes. What majestic creatures. The females find a rock to give birth to the next generation and slowly starve to death while doing so. As soon I learned that I thought of my own single mom while she didn’t give her life raising me or my sister she did sacrifice a lot.

ericmay 7y ago
I don’t think it makes sense to say “you look cute or seem smart” as the criteria for not destroying a creature. Everything is intelligent, it’s just a spectrum of intelligence. Makes more sense given we can’t really discern on that spectrum to just try and eat fewer of any animal, not just octopi, but birds and mammals as well. Mammals in particular if you use this criteria to not eat octopi.
- hackstack 7y ago
  I made a similar decision to the GP -- it is not just that the octopus is intelligent (pigs are smart too, but I'm less perturbed by eating them). The octopus is such a vastly different creature to most/all other animals that we eat. To me, it feels more like eating a totally alien lifeform, which (subjectively, to me) is a greater pity than just eating something that is smart, but is pretty similar to all other animals (e.g. fish or mammals)
- neuronic 7y ago
  What basically kicked off major concerns for me were articles and reports about human cases where people are too disabled to express their emotions and thoughts. Think strokes, major head trauma or birth defects. From this perspective, I would at the very least become far more careful about judging animals too quickly. Just because we cannot read them and interpret their emotions doesn't mean they don't feel love, comfort, fear, amusement or terror. How long did it take for us to understand that lobsters feel excruciating pain when boiled alive? It took microbiology to figure that out... whoopsy, what are those pain hormones doing here?

gbjw 7y ago

Also related: Thomas Nagel's 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum... ) wherein he argues that subjective experience transcends objective materialism.

hi41 7y ago

I did not appreciate life as a young person. It is only in recent years that I am absolutely enthralled by the beauty of life. Seeing how complex life is, it is surprising that it even exists. I sometimes question my own motivations about how I frivolously I have lived my life without paying much attention to suffering in the lives of other living beings. I also feel powerless in front of the huge economic forces that I have to come to depend on for my sustenance. I wish we were better equipped to comprehend the suffering in another life. I know it only when I am told explicitly. I see all the painful ways we hunt and find it extremely painful. And much of civilization thinks of hunting as a sport. Causing pain to another species is sport!

gbjw 7y ago
You can make concrete changes now. Vote with your dollar. Do not support industries that flippantly disregard the beauty and sanctity of life in its many forms.
- apta 7y ago
  It's an important start, but sometimes it just feels like it's not enough, especially if people have certain beliefs that they hang onto without being able to defend them, for fear of a slippery slope situation. Take for example smoking. It's absolutely disgusting how they just throw their cigarette butts on the ground when they're done with them. So, not only is it a harmful activity to engage in for the individual at hand, it also harms people nearby, as well as the environment as the trash they leave behind is not biodegradable. No idea what can be done about this.
  - katbyte 7y ago
    Not a smoker but I have a friend who is, and he diligently collects his butts for proper disposal.. but I think he is in the minority.
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  Like the abortion industry? Whoops, sorry, crimethink!

biztos 7y ago

Whenever I read an Octopus article I come back to the conviction that if it weren’t for the early death thing, these are the creatures that would be failing to fight the climate crisis, and we would be — if not the creatures on the plate in the tapas joint, at least some scared and scurrying thing in the underbrush.

lolc 7y ago
It's not only intelligence. The success of humans depends just as much on their social traits. Can groups cooperate? Can they have division of labour? Without that, you're not going to get far even if you're super smart.
hnarn 7y ago
It's comforting for us as humans, of course, to think that any life form would end up in the same inevitable energy race which destroys the planet. Unfortunately there is no basis for this assumption beyond our own failure.

mirimir 7y ago

> The octopus conundrum is an instructive example of how an animal can be complex and intelligent, and yet we are, so far, unable to answer the question of its subjective experience or even whether the question has any meaning for that creature. I'm not sure, but I think that the author is arguing that we can't say for sure whether any other creatures are conscious. There are the mirror experiments, but ultimately, we know that humans are (in general) conscious because we (personally) are conscious.

cpt1138 7y ago

Is the question just whether invertebrates have consciousness? It may be a forcing function of our desire to impose consciousness on things but it really seems like my cat and my dog both have a level of consciousness.

Scapeghost 7y ago

So octopuses are very intelligent, and very alien. Anyone who has even casually read or watched videos about them will know this. But their potential is cut short by their incredibly short lives (like 5? years at the higher end) which seem to be caused by a very bizarre self-destructive behavior after mating (starving themselves, eating their own arms), which in turn is caused by an "optic gland" and removing that gland completely eliminates that self-destructiveness and increases their lifespan. It makes you wonder if that gland was artificially engineered into them. The sci-fi nerd in me likes to think there is a cosmic conflict between axial-symmetry species and radial-symmetry species, which may be overall more common in the universe given how life evolves at the microscopic scale, and Earth was chosen to give apes a chance.

TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
If it was engineered such that humans win out over octopuses, why not, just not include octopuses directly? Then again this wouldn’t Mae a good sci-fi novel...
- Scapeghost 7y ago
  Because genocide would cause corresponding repercussions, of course. :) If you eliminate a radial intelligence somewhere they eliminate an axial intelligence somewhere. Roundabout hindering them is clearly allowed. It may even have been a compensation for the seemingly barren corner of the galaxy we're in.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > If it was engineered such that humans win out over octopuses, why not, just not include octopuses directly? The original limits were symmetrical. They just haven't yet noticed humans started living long enough to develop into a technological species.
human20190310 7y ago
If I recall correctly, one theory is that octopuses are such voracious cannibals that a swift demise after reproduction evolved to keep them from eating the next generation.

TheMinorityGuy 7y ago

this might be off topic but I really loved the writing style of this author. This is the kind of journalism I would like to pay for. He is dealing with a complicated subject but his prose is so lucid and devoid of jargon that helps us understand what he is saying.

mindfulplay 7y ago

Maybe this is the highest form of intelligence? Octupuses also have a very short lifespan which seems apt: you don't need societies, buildings, relationships etc if you have truly mastered the sole purpose of your existence really well - the nature of procreation and empowering the next generation to survive. Human beings are actually awful at this it: makes me wonder if all social, cultural aspects are truly "too complicated" ways to achieve what octupuses have mastered through a much simpler process and potentially without needing arbitrary things like consciousness.

countryqt30 7y ago
I agree with that 100%. Human procreation has massively slowed down as wealth increased. I'd love to see some startups/governments tackle this REAL challenge.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Not so much of an issue as long as the population keeps increasing (maybe even the opposite...)
- greenonions 7y ago
  I'm not an anti-natalist or anything of the sort, but it would appear to me that if anything, the evolutionary challenge facing humans is that we have had too many babies. Across the globe we've consistently created more humans than our ecosystem can reliably support, or that we can manage to support with our technology. This has resulted in climate change and ecological destruction. A future earth with the highest carrying capacity for life might look like the entire globe as rich in life as the Amazon rain forest, with humans benefiting from the enormous diversity. Our ecological niche would be in the microbiome, where the human species eliminates diseases, causes maximally high survival rates in other species, and uses this surplus for our energy supply, along with genetic engineering species to suit our needs. FWIW, I think many are concerned about conservation already, which I think is the key to our long-term survival as a species.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago

> The octopus has a central brain and also an independent, smaller processor in each arm, giving it a unique mixture of centralized and distributed command. This is the most interesting part. I read that an octopus's brain can give their arms high-level commands, and the arms can execute some commands by themselves.

conjectures 7y ago

Sounds like this guy got pipped to publication by Peter Godfrey Smith's Other Minds. Can anyone who has read both comment on whether Graziano's book contains much different?

anotheryou 7y ago

"The Hawaiʻian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe." http://rustyidols.blogspot.de/2008/08/research-octopus-god.html http://rustyidols.blogspot.de/2008/08/research-octopus-god.h...

irwt 7y ago

Anyone interested to read more about the octopus' brain, this article is worth reading: http://greymattersjournal.com/dive-into-the-mind-of-an-octopus/ http://greymattersjournal.com/dive-into-the-mind-of-an-octop... In a nutshell: 1) Octopuses have a "vertical lobe", which is very similar in function and organization to our hippocampus. 2) Mammalian hippocampuses have the ability for something known as "longterm potentiation" (LTP), which is believed to play a crucial part in memory and learning. Experiments found a similar longterm potentiation mechanism in the vertical lobe of octopuses. Quoting the article: "The discovery of LTP in octopuses provides evidence for convergent evolution that has led to the selection of similar synaptic activity. Though not yet agreed upon in the scientific community, the existence of LTP in both mammals and octopuses strengthens the concept of LTP as a cellular basis for learning and memory and may be a general mechanism for associative learning".

nmca 7y ago

"Other Minds" is an excellent book on this topic.

ab8 7y ago

How is the author sure that humans are conscious? If he is going by his own personal experience, then he can be sure only of his own consciousness.

pts_ 7y ago

Relevant book Crichton's Sphere.