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What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)
- pavanky 6y agoIf anyone is else is interested in thought experiments on how other forms of intelligence / sapience may evolve, try to read "Children of Time" and "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Also if anyone else has other books that follow similar themes, please recommend!
- macando 6y agoThe Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (2nd story in the book).
- onnodigcomplex 6y agoTwo Greg Egan stories come to mind. Wang's carpets is a short story about life evolving within a simulation of a naturally occurring computer. (also part of the larger novel Diaspora) Schild's Ladder is about physicists researching the fundamental 'geometry' of the universe and accidentally create a quickly expanding geometry that is more stable than a regular vaccuum, very unhealthy for all regular matter, but...
- quercusa 6y agoThe novel Blindsight by Peter Watts considers the issues humans would face in contact with similarly alien aliens. It's an intriguing read. Available under CC: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#CC https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#CC
- centimeter 6y agoThe second book in the Children of Time series by A. Tchaikovsky deals with rapidly-evolved octopus intelligence. Similar vibe.
- perardi 6y agoSomewhat off-topic, but I just couldn't get into the second book, whereas I loved the first book. I think it's because Children of Ruin didn't have as much of the way relatable human (or Human, as the book goes into) characters to latch onto as an anchor while they explore the evolution of a different kind of intelligence. I was really rooting for some of the human characters in Children of Time, namely Lain, whereas Children of Ruin just felt a little too, uh, alien.
- shostack 6y agoWas wondering why I had to scroll this long for this to be recommended. The two books in the series are both fascinating for trying to imagine thinking in the manner of another species evolved to be "human level intelligence." I enjoyed the first book more, but the second does an admirable job exploring what communication, thought processes, and technology look like from an octopodes perspective.
- virtualritz 6y agoBlindsight reminded me a lot of Lem's Fiasko[1] which I read as a teenager in the 80's. It's worth to read all of his 'first contact' themed ones. They all use a slightly different lens on the same theme: Eden, Solaris, The Invincible & His Master's Voice [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)
- hcrisp 6y agoAlso, The Europa Report film, where astronauts search for life in the liquid ocean beneath ice on one of Jupiter's moons.
- kharak 6y agoTo this day I wonder if consciousness is needed, or a hindrance for intelligence. That is that SF is all about, raising and play with these kind of questions. Can truly recommend Blindsight.
- The_Colonel 6y agoCoincidentally (or not?), Peter Watts is also marine biologist.
- DiffProg 6y agoInteresting! From reading the book I started to think that was the case!
- jbotz 6y agoIt's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution clearly hints that there is something universal in this consciousness we share, something that seems to want to evolve to similar parameters given half a chance. We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship. Although first we'd do well to do a better job at communicating with and respecting the many non-human sentient beings on this planet.
- kensai 6y agoMaybe the Aliens will worships the Octopus like some old forgotten God and spare us from disaster or kill us quickly when they find out we eat them!
- mcv 6y agoCan we comprehend them? From what I've read about it, consciousness in octopuses has to be completely alien to ours, because it's spread out over multiple brain centers, including one for each arm. So the arm is a semi-intelligent entity of its own. No idea to what extent the article discusses this; part of it is blocked by a paywall, after which it continues about eating moluscs. But just like people eat octopuses, it's entirely possible that alien intelligence end up on our dinner plates before they end up at our negotiating table.
- DonaldFisk 6y agoOr vice-versa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man
- joycian 6y agoTo be fair, our brain is also split into two halves that have limited bandwidth to communicate. It's not clear how much bandwidth is needed to "feel" like a single entity.
- gigatexal 6y agoIf I could I’d come back as an octopus. What awesome, majestic creatures.
- superfreek 6y agoBut... sadly, for them, sex is a death sentence.
- gigatexal 6y agoYeah. Or it’s a selfless act of sacrifice for the next generation.
- Wistar 6y agoAt least you'd be well-armed.
- bserge 6y agoJust try not to get eaten alive for YouTube views, I guess...
- gigatexal 6y agoI’d come back as a cross between an octopus and one punch man ;)
- deforciant 6y agoI would recommend these scifi books https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim... And https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-ruin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-rui... Lots of fun reading them, great author :)
- louisvgchi 6y agoI've also read both books. It's a good exploration into the minds of spiders and octopuses, if given "uplift". A recent study I read about shows that spider intelligence is ill-studied but actually holds a wealth of interesting facets. Jumping spiders plan, such as when hunting, and can be surprised. They are also doing elaborate planning when building webs, and make adjustments to strength/stickiness in webs based on failed catches. It's sophisticated tool use. And yet their brains are teeny weeny puny things. Another novel that you might enjoy if you haven't read is "A Deepness in the Sky", it's similar to Children of Time (and predates it), but told in a different way. Both are highly enjoyable and packed with ideas.
- sgt101 6y agoAnecdote : I had a mate who was a paramedic; called to a junkies house he noted a tarantula in a tank and felt terribly sorry for it - so bought it for £10. It lived for many years in it's flat, and it hid from people who it didn't know - but if you were calm and waited for it to try its courage, the after a while it would come and inspect you . Should you act kindly to it, well then for ever afterwards it would come out and greet you when you entered the room. I got the idea that it was a "personal" organism - it had an idea of others, and itself.
- mrec 6y agoIf you're recommending A Deepness in the Sky, you should also recommend A Fire Upon the Deep by the same author (Vernor Vinge). A very different take on alien intelligence, and possibly more relevant to the octopus model in that it covers distributed selves, albeit over individuals rather than limbs.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoI don't think we'll be doing well with SETI until we have a better understanding of the animals around us. This planet is teeming with non-mammalian intelligence and mostly we either ignore it, are irritated by it, or try to eat it.
- felbane 6y agoFor some reason I really expected this to be an interview with Danny Carey. Parallel evolution is amazing. Developing complex communication between human and octopus would be an amazing feat and would likely answer some of our questions about the nature of consciousness.
- pbk1 6y agoThe opening of this article references Hokusai's "Great Wave" woodblock print. There's an easter egg in this print I never noticed, which is that Mount Fuji is nestled in the trough of the wave. Learned this from a great NYT article on Hokusai focusing on another print from the same series: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/hokusai-fuji.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/h...
- Hamuko 6y ago>There's an easter egg in this print I never noticed, which is that Mount Fuji is nestled in the trough of the wave. It's literally part of the "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series, so I don't really know if it can be regarded as an easter egg.
- agency 6y agoSomething that totally blew my mind is that octopuses seem to react to MDMA in ways similar to us - socially disinhibited, acting "cuddly": https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/20/648788149/octopuses-get-strangely-cuddly-on-the-mood-drug-ecstasy https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/20/6487881...
- cvaidya1986 6y agoThe original 8X engineers.
- allendoerfer 6y agoBy the logic of your own joke, they would be a 4x engineers.
- cvaidya1986 6y agoWell technically if two handed humans can be a 10X then 8 tentacled octopus can be 40X! Full stack octopus
- papito 6y agoNow do raccoons do raccoons!
- mellosouls 6y agoPaywalled. Please will the OP or somebody provide a readable link. Edit: For anybody who had the same problem as me, try using a different device or privacy mode. I can't access it on my PC due to the paywall but can on my phone (same, synced browser).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 6y agoOctopus intelligence is phenomenal achievement when you consider the restrictions they have: 1. No social interaction or learning. Octopuses[1] live alone. 2. Short life span. Most of them live only few years in the wild. ---- [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plurals-of-octopus-octopi-octopuses-octopodes https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
- GuB-42 6y agoI think that lifespan it is their biggest disadvantage, and the reason why there is no octopus civilization, unless you want to go beyond the Mountains of Madness. Modern humans for instance spend more time learning than the lifespan of most animals. If we were limited to a lifespan of 20 years, which is typical for a mammal of our weight class, human society would have been very different. Make it 5 years and there probably wouldn't have been any society at all. This, I believe, makes them even weirder. With so much intelligence, why didn't they evolve longevity as a way to capitalize on their experience? Why didn't they develop collective strategies that are so effective in other animal species?
- nabla9 6y agoAnswer to both of your questions is that there was no evolutionary path. Evolution is blind and path dependent. It only responds to differential pressures affecting just now. Evolution is like greedy search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm They didn't develop longevity because intelligence + longlivety does not provide immediate advantage. They didn't develop collective strategies because they the path path to collective strategies providing gains is too long or too unlikely to happen.
- iguy 6y agoYes. But I'd reverse these questions: why so much intelligence, with seemingly few opportunities to use it?
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- mellosouls 6y agoI can't read the article at the moment to judge, but going by some of the comments, the original famous essay of this ilk (exploring the idea of consciousness by imagining experiencing life as an very different species) might be of interest. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3...
- Afton 6y agoNagel's essay is mentioned explicitly.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/UsRxB https://archive.is/UsRxB
- mellosouls 6y agoThank you
- alikim 6y agoI strongly recommend both of these books. The Soul of an Octopus is more anecdotal and Other Minds is more academic; in sum they offer not just a fascinating picture of octopuses, but a larger discussion on consciousness and foreign intelligence.
- qwertygnu 6y agoThis was a really awesome article! Very well written and utterly thought-provoking. Also this blurb from the author's website is amazing[1]: > To research her books, films, and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by a silverback gorilla, embrced by a Giant Pacific Octopus and undressed by an orangutan. But she is perhaps best known for her 14 year love affair with Christopher Hogwood, a runt piglet who grew to a 750-pound great Buddha master. [1] http://symontgomery.com/ http://symontgomery.com/
- hinkley 6y agoI used to know someone whose favorite "are they kidding or serious" joke was that octopi were aliens. This often lead to a discussion about how we'd be an aquatic civilization of octopi lived much longer than they do.
- 40four 6y agoI've always been amazed and fascinated by octopuses. Their intelligence, the way they can manipulate their bodies. Most of all the almost instantaneous ability to change their skin color and camouflage with their environment. I highly recommend this episode of PBS 'Nature' I recently watched. "Octopus: Making Contact" https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus-making-contact-y8dyan/20052/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus-making-contact-y8dya...
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/UsRxB https://archive.is/UsRxB
- gregfjohnson 6y agoI wonder about the relationship between consciousness and Turing completeness. Although we don't have infinite tapes inside our heads, it seems that one could imagine a succession of progressively richer finite approximations to Turing-style computational universality. Perhaps "degrees on consciousness" as discussed in the article have to do with the depth of the approximation a creature with a given physiology can make to computational universality. I believe that the independent evolution of eyes resulted in surprising similarities, because of the underlying physics of photons, and the constraints placed on solving the same problems of interpreting streams of photons. It might be that there is some similar unifying computational phenomenon that drives evolution to similar mutually intelligible consciousnesses even via radically distinct evolutionary paths.
- abellerose 6y agoYour comment reminds me of the question, is the human brain really just a collection of complex machines? source - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39482345 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39482345 What we describe as awareness "consciousness" might not really exist. If everything is just a subsystem of the main system being the universe. Anyway I find it a fun philosophical question to think about.
- codeulike 6y agoTuring Completeness is pretty mundane. You just need GOTOs and IF statements, and registers/variables. Thats it really. Its not hard to acheive at all. The Emperors New Mind by Roger Penrose discusses the opposite idea, that consciousness has a non-computational element that could never even be approximated by a turing machine. I don't really agree with it but its an interesting book.
- codeulike 6y agoAnd for those who havent heard of him - Roger Penrose is a serious scientist and philosopher who did some of the key work on Black Holes with Stephen Hawking, so he's worth listening to.
- pengaru 6y agoRadiolab did a great "Octomom" episode that seems apropos here, definitely worth a listen. https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast20octomom.mp3 https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
- coldtea 6y agoIt's handy.
- mindfulplay 6y agoFantastic article. Superb writing and makes me ponder about our species in general. I do have a general take on how humans perceive or judge other organisms through a very human lens. We characterize organisms based on their social structure, longevity, 'cleverness' etc. While looking at how humans compare with octopuses at a meta level, octopuses seem to be not waging wars, more peaceful, seem to have survived for more than 600 millions years. I wonder if human beings would have a similar track record: looks like humans are well into destroying their own kind and the environment faster than most other creatures. At the same time human beings seem ill equipped to judge or characterize 'alien' lives: we often want to 'make contact' or have a communication or social channel with aliens. As if a show of our mental power and social structure is the most important aspect.. Just looking at how octopuses are being measured by humans, it feels rather silly the kind of approaches humans use to evaluate other species let alone aliens.
- Sebb767 6y ago> looks like humans are well into destroying their own kind and the environment faster than most other creatures. To be fair - we really only focus on war against our own kind so much since we've basically won against every other one. Sure, there are still problems in small, but in general no other species is a threat to a large part of us in general. Also, destroying the environment really is a side effect of industrialization, so I don't think that's a fair comparison either. No other species needs any kind of stable power grid, but that's surely not because we're less advanced. > At the same time human beings seem ill equipped to judge or characterize 'alien' lives: we often want to 'make contact' or have a communication or social channel with aliens. As if a show of our mental power and social structure is the most important aspect.. Honest question: What is? > Just looking at how octopuses are being measured by humans, it feels rather silly the kind of approaches humans use to evaluate other species let alone aliens. In some way, yes. But it's hard to do it any other way; most possible partners are seriously limited in their communication abilities and (at least probably) in their intelligence.
- novia 6y ago> octopuses are more peaceful female octopi like to eat male octupi http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150223-mysteries-of-cannibal-octopus-sex http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150223-mysteries-of-canniba...
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens. Wow
- dschuetz 6y agoThe article is a good read. I was left with even more questions: How come that most documentaries explain the vibrant and undulating colors as some sort of communication, when in actuality there is no evidence that they can observe colors? Even more interesting is the question where do the chromatophores get their color "data" since there are no apparent color receptors in their eyes or skin so that they can mimic their surroundings for camouflage?
- Double_Cast 6y agoFrom what I've read elsewhere, an octopus's pupils isolate colors via chromatic aberration. They can see a range of colors, but only one color at a time.
- mindfulplay 6y agoOne amazing snippet that is contradictory to human beings: octopuses are color-blind across their entire body (with their physical eyes as well as their "body" eyes) but they are excellent camouflage artists! How is that even possible. Don't you need to perceive color to be able to take it??
- john-aj 6y agoHm, that is a good question. Evolutionarily, there is not necessarily any benefit for the octopus to being conscious of color, but there has to be some way in which its body, if only mechanically, "perceives" color and imitates it.
- gooseus 6y agoDoes anyone know if there has ever been experimentation with training octopuses to use some kind of user interface (buttons, dials, sliders, joysticks) with a grayscale screen or some other kind of modulated output to solve problems for rewards? Could an octopus learn to play Super Mario Bros or Pac-Man to beat levels for crab? If we could find a reliable way to teach an input language to an octopus we could start probing what classes of problems are easier or harder for them solve. We could develop octopus input devices that maximize the size of the 'octo-bus', and find ways to give them an "immersive experience" by modulating their environment (temp, salinity, pH, etc) as feedback. Anyone with me on this? I haven't found anything, but I don't know if my "dorking" is up to par.
- shostack 6y agoThe second book in the Children of Time series touches on this in the path of how octopodes get hyper evolved.
- cesarito 6y agoReminds me that this youtuber still is profiting from these animals: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NcChbIdrdaA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NcChbIdrdaA
- wizzwizz4 6y agoWhy would you eat an octopus‽
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- codeisawesome 6y agoBeing an octopus is intelligent and great until Korean people decide to pluck you as a baby out of the ocean and boil you alive for fun (and laugh as you struggle in unimaginable pain).
- inopinatus 6y agoWhen asked if I have any dietary requirements, I’ll always respond, I don’t eat octopus. Tales of Diogenes aside, this is why. I don’t eat my peers.
- akimball 6y agoEt moi aussi: I try not to eat anyone smarter than me.