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The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
- james-redwood 5y agoOctopi are remarkably intelligent creatures, as any good aquarium owner will tell you.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago(waiting for the recurring comments, that 2 x octopus -> octopodes or octopuses but not octopi since it's not latin 2nd declension, but rather misspelled greek)
- amelius 5y agoOctopus is already wrong in itself.
- colechristensen 5y agoLet’s not encourage the unnecessary language pedantry.
- totalZero 5y agoPedantry is no felony when discussing an eight-armed genius. I personally settle for nothing less than "octopodes," with the accent on the second of its four syllables.
- OJFord 5y agoI think 'octopodes' should be considered incorrect on the basis that the vast majority of even the people using it are probably not pronouncing it correctly.
- mc32 5y agoEh, as long as it rhymes with ‘tetrapods’, it’s accepted and current pronunciation.
- dragonwriter 5y agoDoesn't it actually come into English from Latin (in its later academic/international use, rather than the classical language)? But in any case, it's English, not Latin or misspelled Greek, and octopi seems to at least be the oldest evident English plural of octopus, AFAIK, though octopuses seems to be experiencing current popularity, and octopodes is just...no, though the suggestion once made that English ought to adopt octopods, wasn't bad, but never caught on.
- datameta 5y agoAn even better aquarium owner wouldn't have them at all. My Octopus Teacher is a fantastic look into the life of an octopus, their intellectual capacity, and their propensity to interact with humans.
- suifbwish 5y agoWhy would that be better to not have them? It sounds a bit presumptive of a universal morality rather than a logical statement.
- gorgabal 5y agoIt sounds like a moral statement because it is a moral statement. Nothing wrong with that IMHO .
- procinct 5y agoOctopuses are known to not live very long in captivity.
- girvo 5y agoThough they also don’t live long in the wild either. Fascinating creatures.
- ceejayoz 5y agoIt's not an insane idea that octopuses might not enjoy being stuffed into what amounts to a studio apartment for their entire life.
- DoingIsLearning 5y agoThey are also notorious for finding increasingly cleverer ways of escaping aquariums. Which again adds to the case that an aquarium is not a suitable environment.
- 5y ago
- vanusa 5y agoI'd say ask the Octopi first. Wait, can't do that? But you were about to do it anyway? That's why you can't be friends.
- Fezzik 5y agoSo you can’t be friends with mute people or people you do not share a language with? There are far more telling ways to determine friendship than someone saying ‘yes, let’s be friends’. Even between those who do speak the same language.
- willis936 5y agoNot all communication is verbal. You can't be [friends in the same way you are friends with humans] an octopus because they are not human. I'm friends with my cat. We have a mutual social relationship and he doesn't speak a lick of English.
- asxd 5y agoIt is pretty amazing the extent of understanding you can achieve with an animal. After a year or so raising my pup, it feels like we have both picked up certain signals to communicate. He paws at me and then sits by the front door when he needs to go to the bathroom, for instance (although sometimes he cleverly abuses this because he just wants to go outside and play with me during worktime, but I can't fault him for that). I'm sure this is mundane for most people who are dog owners, but being my first dog I couldn't help but be impressed at the level of communication the little guy seems to be capable of. I can't imagine they're the only animals capable of that. It certainly feels like we're friends with a mutual understanding.
- V-2 5y agoDogs have lived alongside humans for millennia. They're genetically engineered animals (in the oldschool way - by breeding and selection, not in a test tube). And we've bred them largely by rewarding their ability to interact with us. Dogs are obviously quite artificial species in that sense
- uninstantiated 5y agoWhen humans are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?
- np1810 5y ago> When humans are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting? Haha... I think it depends on the current situation of the human is in... Sometimes human just wants to have a meaningful conversation, sometimes just reacting aptly to prevent social awkwardness or being tagged rude...
- dang 5y agoI changed the title from "Can We Really Be Friends with an Octopus?" to "When octopuses are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" (the subtitle, more or less) in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this. (A comment reacting purely to information, or lack of information, in a title is pretty much shallow by definition.) Since that didn't work, I guess it's time to look for some more representative phrase from the article text. Edit: ok, I've combined two phrases from the article to try to that. Commenters: please discuss the actual material now.
- wombatmobile 5y ago… in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this. Shallow? It’s profound. Have you tried to respond to the question, in the human context?
- dang 5y agoA shallow comment can contain a profound question. "What is the meaning of life?" would be an even shallower comment. Were a comment to contain new and interesting information about a profound, i.e. generic, question, that would be fine. But this is precisely what internet comments bringing up generic questions don't usually do. It's not a good fit for the genre. Someone who really has something original to say about a profound question would be better off writing an essay, or a book. Certainly not a one-liner to an internet forum. This is so much the case, in fact, that changing the subject from a concrete topic to a more generic one is a frequent form of trolling. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- zzzeek 5y agothis seems to be about the Netflix movie "My Octopus Teacher". It's a great watch and certainly interesting whether or not you think the octopus is bonding with the filmmaker.
- neonate 5y agoThe article is about much more than that movie.
- joe_the_user 5y agoDoes "When octopuses are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" really have a meaning? Or is the distinction meaningful to make? The octopus regarded the research as "safe" and "interesting". It didn't integrate the researcher into octopus society because such a thing doesn't exist. But octopuses had a society, would it have to be more than a mutual regarding of a group as safe and interesting? Especially, since many other complex behaviors can be created from this start (just as the octopus created all sort of interesting things in the world). "Maybe octopuses don’t regard us so much as friends or associates as giant, elaborate levers they can manipulate for their own benefit" Maybe the difference between these kinds of relationships is less than we think.
- gattr 5y agoThere is a subplot about intelligence-enhanced cephalopods in Stephen Baxter's SF novel "Manifold: Time".
- troyvit 5y agoGonna check it out! I'm almost done with the Children of Time series, the second book of which also features intelligence-enhanced cephalopods.
- gebruikersnaam 5y agoA nice book about octopuses: Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28116739 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28116739
- neonate 5y agoHe is mentioned repeatedly in the article.
- christudor 5y agoHesiod in his Works and Days (c. 700 BC) talks about the behaviour of octopuses, saying that when octopuses get hungry they will eat their own tentacles. Amazingly, Hesiod was right about this behaviour (octopuses do sometimes eat their own tentacles) but it's not because they're hungry, but because they're stressed.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Amazingly, Hesiod was right about this behaviour I don't see why this is a surprise.
- andai 5y agoI'd be pretty surprised if I saw a guy eating his hands.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI mean, I do it. (Less now than I used to.) The amount of flesh I take off is unnoticeable visually or as a percentage of my hand. But more to the point, if somebody from a coastal, extensively seafaring culture 2700 years ago says octopi sometimes eat their own tentacles, there is every reason to believe he's saying it because it's true. The options are (I) octopi sometimes eat their own tentacles, as advertised; (II) octopi sometimes engage in a behavior that looks very similar to eating their own tentacles, but is subtly different; or (III) someone made it up and nobody in a culture with extensive exposure to octopi ever noticed that it never happened. Incidents of type III are far from unheard of -- I have a dictionary with the Tongue Map printed in it -- but they're not the way to bet.
- LadyCoconut 5y ago[dead]
- simiones 5y agoAncient Greek observations of nature have a spotty record of accuracy, as far as I know.
- 1024core 5y agoI read these articles about octopuses, and then lament the fact that we hunt them down and eat them. Given all of the other sources of nourishment available to us, why eat them?
- awb 5y agoFor the same reason people kill most animals: tradition and they're delicious. I've heard of vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, etc., but it would be interesting if there was another eating style based on some (admittedly challenging) evaluation of the animal's cognition or social behavior.
- benno128 5y agoThere are some vegans and vegetarians who subscribe to a "no pain" version of this which allows eating creatures like oysters who verifiably can't feel pain.
- ck45 5y agoThat’s a good question. I have always liked pulpo, but when I learned about what an incredible species octopuses are, I swore to never even consider eating it again. It’s a bit hypocritical to not feel the same about every animal, but then I’m as irrational as all humans
- 1024core 5y agoThis is why I became a vegetarian. I watched cows take care of calves, and could not think of eating meat again. We have the ability to thrive without meat (or at least, animal meat). It's time we took the next step in our evolution and eschewed killing other animals.
- temp12913231 5y ago
- Sporktacular 5y ago"When octopuses are social, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" "Maybe octopuses don’t regard us so much as friends or associates as giant, elaborate levers they can manipulate for their own benefit. " Both these statements read as if it's a settled question that human aren't doing the same thing.
- wheels 5y agoThe notion of sentience is something that's unsurprisingly well-trodden in both philosophy and neuroscience. Your statements presumes that such is flippant. While there's not a single well-agreed on definition, there are different things like ability to see and project oneself into the future and to assign value to those projections, the ability to empathize, the ability to miss things that are no longer there, etc. are often metrics used for higher levels of sentience. We know that humans and some other mammals do these things. I believe I remember that there's some debate about crows and some other birds. While octopuses are the only invertebrate that has passed the "mirror-test", part of what this article is getting at is that we don't know much about their emotions and extended sense of self, and assigning them to a high category of sentience may be premature. (Or not; asking that question is what this article is about.) But human sentience isn't trivial. Your argument is basically, "We're all chemical systems, eh?" And sure, at some level that's true, but it's not really enlightening to the discussion.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoPhilosophy says none of those assertions are provable. You could very well be an automaton in a simulation and all your presumptions about the world are false.
- wheels 5y agoThose are very different corners of philosophy. Things can be epistomogically unprovable, but at the same time ethically relevant. Put another way, your counterargument applies equally to genocide as it does to octopus intelligence. That doesn't mean we should proceed as if genocide is ethically neutral.
- usbqk 5y ago
- erwald 5y agosadly, a spanish multinational is planning to open up an octopus farm this summer -- the world's first commercial octopus farm -- which is to breed and kill something like 300,000 - 600,000 octopuses per year. (i wrote about this development here: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/against-octopus-farming/ https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/against-octopus-farming...)