8 ms·

"She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

153 points by zt 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago
> "Since the octopus was not reacting to any existing threat, but rather in anticipation of one, it had demonstrated foresight and planning." The journalist is hopefully misunderstanding a more correct explanation by the scientists. That most certainly isn't demonstration of foresight and planning. Nature is perfectly capable of encoding that sort of information as an instinctual response. Something like [trying to sleep] -> [get distressed by exposure to open ocean]. It is like how humans feel cold and put on a jumper. It isn't a demonstration that we all understand heat flow equations and have modelled out that we need to consume less food if we put another layer between us and the outside world, increasing the long term economics of our survival, demonstrating an advanced knowledge of thermodynamics and economics. Our body has encoded "heat leaking through skin" -> "feel uncomfortable" into our senses and that is all we need to respond to without considering the consequences of the response.
- brians 3y ago
  It sounds like you would prefer evidence of something like Kahneman’s System II as evidence of high intelligence? That is, an abstract general purpose thinking system, even if it is slower and in many ways weaker than the instinctive/trained/evolved systems for solving specific problems?
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I preferred the bottle-bouncing behaviour. It seems unlikely that nature encoded that one as an instinct - or if it did, it is an adaptive enough instinct to be intelligence for me. It just happens that the leading example was not correct. That sort of thing turns up all the time in creatures that are effectively thoughtless automatons.
    - lpfnrobin 3y ago
      Thankful this hasen't happend to you and me yet. Fascinating article
    - zztop44 3y ago
      It’s a bit off topic I’m not sure behaviour being “instinctive” means it’s thoughtless (whatever that means). For example, being uncomfortable might be an instinctive response to being cold, but it’s hardly thoughtless. Some people choose to swim in icy water as a form of recreation. Some sit outside on a cool night and enjoy the crisp air. We write songs and poetry about the deep frost. It means something to us. I know our nervous systems are far more complex than eg: a bivalve mollusc, who are probably not composing poetry about the sensation they get that makes them close their shell. I don’t really disagree with you about the observed behaviours in TFA, but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton.
      - paulrudy 3y ago
        > but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton. I feel very weird about this too. This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system, an article of faith, as the many alternatives are. Saying this doesn't imply that every belief system is equally valuable or scientifically verifiable. But I think it's important to recognize one's axioms and/or biases. The mechanistic view is certainly compelling and has the appearance of being all-encompassing. Its all-encompassing appearance may actually be an artifact of how used to the story we've grown. A clockwork universe. We know that one by heart, whether we're scientists or not. We can apply that template to anything, and set about exploring (or reading about) the mechanisms. The fact that there are mechanisms everywhere doesn't prove that mechanism is all there is. That last part is an implicit belief system, a hidden article of faith, and that's how you get Descartes vivisecting dogs, and conscious experience necessarily (as though no other possibility could exist) having to be an "emergent" property.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Agreed. This is like building a little den out of nearby objects, which seems to be at sub-mammal levels? Even birds that didn’t get the best grades do this. They picked an extremely mediocre example by octopus standards. Play is more interesting but this happens with primitive mammals as well, like squirrels and such. And fish, btw. It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of magnitude less sophisticated[1] than what is obvious from having pets, watching a basic nature doc, or just observing wildlife for a tiny bit. [1]: I tend to avoid words like intelligence etc both because they’re ambiguous as hell, and because people jump to anthropomorphization, backwards-rationalizing etc, in exactly the fashion you mention.
  - legacynl 3y ago
    > It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of magnitude less sophisticated[1] than what is obvious from having pets, watching a basic nature doc, or just observing wildlife for a tiny bit. I would go further and claim that basically everybody holds the assumption that animal cognition lives on a scale of not sophisticated to very sophisticated, and also that human cognition holds the top spot on this scale, and that therefor anything else is below us in sophistication. The idea that conscious thoughts are what makes our cognitive abilities so good is merely an assumption. It's very possible that in million year of evolution humans evolve a way to do everything we do today on instinct without the need for energy hungry consciousness. That would probably allow the brain to become much smaller and efficient over time. With our assumptions we would conclude that the smaller brain and instinctual behaviors would signify a less sophisticated brain.
- godelski 3y ago
  While I agree with your distinctions I think it is important to note that the boundary of this is not explicitly clear and it can be difficult to differentiate. Certainly instinctual responses are a form of planning, but more automated. For example, people often forego reaching for a jacket (that is well within reach or even in their literal hands) if they are quickly going from one warm place to another. And idk about you, but I've done this without a moment's thought about how the other end will be warm. The action feels fairly automatic in the same way walking outside in winter has an automatic response of grabbing a jacket. Of course, this could be because (and likely is) a more complex equation is formulated in my mind but just operated outside the conscious part. But I think that just illustrates how the lines blur. Especially since many conscious actions turn into unconscious ones. Think about when you first learned to drive a car and how involved you were compared to now many years later. In fact, you WANT to have automated responses as these are quicker, but they come through experience. Do we call this foresight and planning? I think you can argue either side. You can easily argue that some algorithm with explicit foresight and planning was encoded into the subconscious. I guess I'm just trying to say that it is quite complicated and we should be ensuring this complexity is known (the existence of complexity, not necessarily all the details), or it will be difficult to interpret.
- capex 3y ago
  There's a video about an octopus solving a maze: https://youtu.be/7__r4FVj-EI?si=FH2QsL7BxlJ4h7KF https://youtu.be/7__r4FVj-EI?si=FH2QsL7BxlJ4h7KF. You could call that reactionary too, but at some point we have to admit octopuses do have a higher level of intelligence than we'd assume from an animal their size.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  The jumper explanation is interesting, but it has a hidden catch. While the Stone Age people who first came up with clothing certainly didn't understand heat flow equations, they still had to think in advance about the coming cold snap and make preparations: hunting down some game for its coat, skinning it etc. Quite a sophisticated set of actions, not a mere instinctive response to changing temperature.
- legacynl 3y ago
  > like how humans feel cold and put on a jumper. This is actually a bad example. Although cold being uncomfortable is instinctual, the way how people deal with feeling cold is not instinctual at all. People use different methods of dealing with the cold depending on situation, culture, experience. In this way your example actually speaks for the claimed forethought, because in this analogy the octopus knows (from experience or speculation) that he will be uncomfortable when trying to sleep if he's exposed and he decides to 'put on a jumper' by putting rocks in front of the entrance. Also instinctual behavior is in general much less sophisticated. Like an infant animal starting sucking when encountering a nipple shaped object or a moth circling a light bulb because it always tries to keep the brightest source above it. It could be that pulling debris around him before sleeping could be instinctual, but it would be very unlikely for that to include the process of looking for suitable rocks beforehand.
- pugworthy 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, this is an excerpt from a book, not a piece by a journalist say, summarizing someone’s study. The author (Toomey) is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches courses in writing and in the history of science.
slothtrop 3y ago
Here we go again anthropomorphizing creatures that live 1-2 years by misrepresenting data for clicks.
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  I know that you're correct to generalize most octopuses living for that timeframe but I was very interested to learn of this one brooding for four years: https://www.mbari.org/news/deep-sea-octopus-broods-eggs-for-over-four-years-longer-than-any-known-animal/ https://www.mbari.org/news/deep-sea-octopus-broods-eggs-for-...
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
  Octopuses are crazy smart and theres tons of evidence for it; not sure where this comment comes from even if the article is mediocre.
  - lpfnrobin 3y ago
    What happens after the bottle?
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    There isn't. There's periodic pop-sci headlines shared on HN that suggest they are, but no evidence that they are "crazy smart". You might as well say the honeybee is "crazy smart", it makes as much sense.
- RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  What aspect of it is anthropomorphizing? Do you mean the phrase "bouncing the ball" because it is not literally bouncing a ball? Nothing else in the article jumped out at me as ascribing human-specific behavior to octopuses. Also, I don't follow what lifespan has to do with anything. Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most other animals, including animals with very long lifespans, such as turtles. Not to mention that the article was specifically regarding an octopus species that lives longer than that; I take it you did not actually read it?
brookst 3y ago
I had a joyful experience at the octopus farm near Kona Hawaii (now sadly closed because they were even more sadly apparently not treating the animals well). With hands in the tank, I was able to play catch with a small plastic ball and a roughly 2 month old octopus. It was definitely catch — I could scoot the ball anywhere and the octopus would grab it and throw it back. Possibly a trained behavior, who knows? It was really charming and delightful.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  One of the struggles with researching octopus intelligence is that they’re basically untrainable. They’ll do what you want them to if they’re interested but it’s quite difficult to get them to be consistently interested. In other words, it was probably fun for the octopus too.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    Boredom is likely a very good indicator of high cognitive capabilities.
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      It seems quite plausible that "boredom" is a mechanism that is required (or at least useful) for building high cognitive capabilities.
      - card_zero 3y ago
        I don't exactly believe in it. I think one can only be bored by external forces, or some irrationality.
        inglor_cz 3y ago
        External Forces of Boredom would be a nice band name.
psd1 3y ago
I've just finished Blindsight by Peter Watts - a First Contact sci fi. This discussion echoes it. Take that as a book recommendation, if you will.
- braymundo 3y ago
  Be sure to read Echopraxia, the sequel. Not as impactful, but nice.
- rgavuliak 3y ago
  I am just reading The Swarm by Frank Schätzing that kind of combines the First Contact and Earth's Oceans. I enjoyed Blindsight so maybe you'd like it too
sagaro 3y ago
I wish there was a video of this in that article. The reading was very descriptive, but would have loved to see the video of the octopus playing with the bottle.
dhosek 3y ago
There’s a part of me that kind of wonders whether the Jewish Kashrut laws are meant to protect the most intelligent animals: the best-known laws (cloven feet, does not chew the cud, that which swims in the sea but does not have scales) end up protecting pigs, cetaceans and cephalapods (plus other stuff that’s not so bright, but put that aside). There’s no rational reason to believe this, of course, but it’s still fun to imagine in a sort of Erik von Däniken way.
- BuildTheRobots 3y ago
  I blame this on watching Babylon 5 when I was younger (spoiler: same souls), but when they started using animal organs and heart valves in human surgery, it made (religious) sense to me that it was going to be pig. As you say, not a really rational belief, but I always like it when disperate ideologies point in similar directions. I think rationally, it's far more likely that Kashrut laws were designed to protect humans from eating certain more risky animals, especially 3-4,000 years ago in a place with high heat and little refridgeration, but I'll never actually know.
- the-chitmonger 3y ago
  That man may not have the respect of any academic community but damn it if he isn't entertaining to watch. On a more on-topic note, our growing understanding of animal intelligence has definitely made it harder for me to justify eating certain kinds of meat. My day-to-day is a bit too stressful to make the switch entirely to vegetarianism, but once my financial and personal situations have settled I'm looking forward to a less guilty lived experience. (This is of course not to say that you should feel guilty for eating meat - just my personal take)
  - dhosek 3y ago
    I don’t eat cephalopods because of their intelligence. I would do the same with pigs, but the problem is that they’re so delicious.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    As a person who made the switch after realizing how intelligent these animals are, I can honestly say that it's worth it if you do decide to. However, I also understand why you would continue to eat meat. It was probably one of the harder things I've done in my life.
mihaitodor 3y ago
I listened to an interesting podcast on octopus cognition recently: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-peter-godfrey-smith-on-sentience-and-octopus-minds/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-... Peter dives into the weeds and offers both philosophical and biological insights.

153 points by zt 3y ago

> "Since the octopus was not reacting to any existing threat, but rather in anticipation of one, it had demonstrated foresight and planning." The journalist is hopefully misunderstanding a more correct explanation by the scientists. That most certainly isn't demonstration of foresight and planning. Nature is perfectly capable of encoding that sort of information as an instinctual response. Something like [trying to sleep] -> [get distressed by exposure to open ocean]. It is like how humans feel cold and put on a jumper. It isn't a demonstration that we all understand heat flow equations and have modelled out that we need to consume less food if we put another layer between us and the outside world, increasing the long term economics of our survival, demonstrating an advanced knowledge of thermodynamics and economics. Our body has encoded "heat leaking through skin" -> "feel uncomfortable" into our senses and that is all we need to respond to without considering the consequences of the response.

brians 3y ago
It sounds like you would prefer evidence of something like Kahneman’s System II as evidence of high intelligence? That is, an abstract general purpose thinking system, even if it is slower and in many ways weaker than the instinctive/trained/evolved systems for solving specific problems?
- roenxi 3y ago
  I preferred the bottle-bouncing behaviour. It seems unlikely that nature encoded that one as an instinct - or if it did, it is an adaptive enough instinct to be intelligence for me. It just happens that the leading example was not correct. That sort of thing turns up all the time in creatures that are effectively thoughtless automatons.
  - lpfnrobin 3y ago
    Thankful this hasen't happend to you and me yet. Fascinating article
  - zztop44 3y ago
    It’s a bit off topic I’m not sure behaviour being “instinctive” means it’s thoughtless (whatever that means). For example, being uncomfortable might be an instinctive response to being cold, but it’s hardly thoughtless. Some people choose to swim in icy water as a form of recreation. Some sit outside on a cool night and enjoy the crisp air. We write songs and poetry about the deep frost. It means something to us. I know our nervous systems are far more complex than eg: a bivalve mollusc, who are probably not composing poetry about the sensation they get that makes them close their shell. I don’t really disagree with you about the observed behaviours in TFA, but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton.
    - paulrudy 3y ago
      > but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton. I feel very weird about this too. This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system, an article of faith, as the many alternatives are. Saying this doesn't imply that every belief system is equally valuable or scientifically verifiable. But I think it's important to recognize one's axioms and/or biases. The mechanistic view is certainly compelling and has the appearance of being all-encompassing. Its all-encompassing appearance may actually be an artifact of how used to the story we've grown. A clockwork universe. We know that one by heart, whether we're scientists or not. We can apply that template to anything, and set about exploring (or reading about) the mechanisms. The fact that there are mechanisms everywhere doesn't prove that mechanism is all there is. That last part is an implicit belief system, a hidden article of faith, and that's how you get Descartes vivisecting dogs, and conscious experience necessarily (as though no other possibility could exist) having to be an "emergent" property.
klabb3 3y ago
Agreed. This is like building a little den out of nearby objects, which seems to be at sub-mammal levels? Even birds that didn’t get the best grades do this. They picked an extremely mediocre example by octopus standards. Play is more interesting but this happens with primitive mammals as well, like squirrels and such. And fish, btw. It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of magnitude less sophisticated[1] than what is obvious from having pets, watching a basic nature doc, or just observing wildlife for a tiny bit. [1]: I tend to avoid words like intelligence etc both because they’re ambiguous as hell, and because people jump to anthropomorphization, backwards-rationalizing etc, in exactly the fashion you mention.
- legacynl 3y ago
  > It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of magnitude less sophisticated[1] than what is obvious from having pets, watching a basic nature doc, or just observing wildlife for a tiny bit. I would go further and claim that basically everybody holds the assumption that animal cognition lives on a scale of not sophisticated to very sophisticated, and also that human cognition holds the top spot on this scale, and that therefor anything else is below us in sophistication. The idea that conscious thoughts are what makes our cognitive abilities so good is merely an assumption. It's very possible that in million year of evolution humans evolve a way to do everything we do today on instinct without the need for energy hungry consciousness. That would probably allow the brain to become much smaller and efficient over time. With our assumptions we would conclude that the smaller brain and instinctual behaviors would signify a less sophisticated brain.
godelski 3y ago
While I agree with your distinctions I think it is important to note that the boundary of this is not explicitly clear and it can be difficult to differentiate. Certainly instinctual responses are a form of planning, but more automated. For example, people often forego reaching for a jacket (that is well within reach or even in their literal hands) if they are quickly going from one warm place to another. And idk about you, but I've done this without a moment's thought about how the other end will be warm. The action feels fairly automatic in the same way walking outside in winter has an automatic response of grabbing a jacket. Of course, this could be because (and likely is) a more complex equation is formulated in my mind but just operated outside the conscious part. But I think that just illustrates how the lines blur. Especially since many conscious actions turn into unconscious ones. Think about when you first learned to drive a car and how involved you were compared to now many years later. In fact, you WANT to have automated responses as these are quicker, but they come through experience. Do we call this foresight and planning? I think you can argue either side. You can easily argue that some algorithm with explicit foresight and planning was encoded into the subconscious. I guess I'm just trying to say that it is quite complicated and we should be ensuring this complexity is known (the existence of complexity, not necessarily all the details), or it will be difficult to interpret.
capex 3y ago
There's a video about an octopus solving a maze: https://youtu.be/7__r4FVj-EI?si=FH2QsL7BxlJ4h7KF https://youtu.be/7__r4FVj-EI?si=FH2QsL7BxlJ4h7KF. You could call that reactionary too, but at some point we have to admit octopuses do have a higher level of intelligence than we'd assume from an animal their size.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
inglor_cz 3y ago
The jumper explanation is interesting, but it has a hidden catch. While the Stone Age people who first came up with clothing certainly didn't understand heat flow equations, they still had to think in advance about the coming cold snap and make preparations: hunting down some game for its coat, skinning it etc. Quite a sophisticated set of actions, not a mere instinctive response to changing temperature.
legacynl 3y ago
> like how humans feel cold and put on a jumper. This is actually a bad example. Although cold being uncomfortable is instinctual, the way how people deal with feeling cold is not instinctual at all. People use different methods of dealing with the cold depending on situation, culture, experience. In this way your example actually speaks for the claimed forethought, because in this analogy the octopus knows (from experience or speculation) that he will be uncomfortable when trying to sleep if he's exposed and he decides to 'put on a jumper' by putting rocks in front of the entrance. Also instinctual behavior is in general much less sophisticated. Like an infant animal starting sucking when encountering a nipple shaped object or a moth circling a light bulb because it always tries to keep the brightest source above it. It could be that pulling debris around him before sleeping could be instinctual, but it would be very unlikely for that to include the process of looking for suitable rocks beforehand.
pugworthy 3y ago
For what it’s worth, this is an excerpt from a book, not a piece by a journalist say, summarizing someone’s study. The author (Toomey) is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches courses in writing and in the history of science.

slothtrop 3y ago

Here we go again anthropomorphizing creatures that live 1-2 years by misrepresenting data for clicks.

kaycebasques 3y ago
I know that you're correct to generalize most octopuses living for that timeframe but I was very interested to learn of this one brooding for four years: https://www.mbari.org/news/deep-sea-octopus-broods-eggs-for-over-four-years-longer-than-any-known-animal/ https://www.mbari.org/news/deep-sea-octopus-broods-eggs-for-...
BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
Octopuses are crazy smart and theres tons of evidence for it; not sure where this comment comes from even if the article is mediocre.
- lpfnrobin 3y ago
  What happens after the bottle?
- slothtrop 3y ago
  There isn't. There's periodic pop-sci headlines shared on HN that suggest they are, but no evidence that they are "crazy smart". You might as well say the honeybee is "crazy smart", it makes as much sense.
RoyalHenOil 3y ago
What aspect of it is anthropomorphizing? Do you mean the phrase "bouncing the ball" because it is not literally bouncing a ball? Nothing else in the article jumped out at me as ascribing human-specific behavior to octopuses. Also, I don't follow what lifespan has to do with anything. Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most other animals, including animals with very long lifespans, such as turtles. Not to mention that the article was specifically regarding an octopus species that lives longer than that; I take it you did not actually read it?

brookst 3y ago

I had a joyful experience at the octopus farm near Kona Hawaii (now sadly closed because they were even more sadly apparently not treating the animals well). With hands in the tank, I was able to play catch with a small plastic ball and a roughly 2 month old octopus. It was definitely catch — I could scoot the ball anywhere and the octopus would grab it and throw it back. Possibly a trained behavior, who knows? It was really charming and delightful.

colechristensen 3y ago
One of the struggles with researching octopus intelligence is that they’re basically untrainable. They’ll do what you want them to if they’re interested but it’s quite difficult to get them to be consistently interested. In other words, it was probably fun for the octopus too.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Boredom is likely a very good indicator of high cognitive capabilities.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    It seems quite plausible that "boredom" is a mechanism that is required (or at least useful) for building high cognitive capabilities.
    - card_zero 3y ago
      I don't exactly believe in it. I think one can only be bored by external forces, or some irrationality.
      - inglor_cz 3y ago
        External Forces of Boredom would be a nice band name.

psd1 3y ago

I've just finished Blindsight by Peter Watts - a First Contact sci fi. This discussion echoes it. Take that as a book recommendation, if you will.

braymundo 3y ago
Be sure to read Echopraxia, the sequel. Not as impactful, but nice.
rgavuliak 3y ago
I am just reading The Swarm by Frank Schätzing that kind of combines the First Contact and Earth's Oceans. I enjoyed Blindsight so maybe you'd like it too

sagaro 3y ago

I wish there was a video of this in that article. The reading was very descriptive, but would have loved to see the video of the octopus playing with the bottle.

dhosek 3y ago

There’s a part of me that kind of wonders whether the Jewish Kashrut laws are meant to protect the most intelligent animals: the best-known laws (cloven feet, does not chew the cud, that which swims in the sea but does not have scales) end up protecting pigs, cetaceans and cephalapods (plus other stuff that’s not so bright, but put that aside). There’s no rational reason to believe this, of course, but it’s still fun to imagine in a sort of Erik von Däniken way.

BuildTheRobots 3y ago
I blame this on watching Babylon 5 when I was younger (spoiler: same souls), but when they started using animal organs and heart valves in human surgery, it made (religious) sense to me that it was going to be pig. As you say, not a really rational belief, but I always like it when disperate ideologies point in similar directions. I think rationally, it's far more likely that Kashrut laws were designed to protect humans from eating certain more risky animals, especially 3-4,000 years ago in a place with high heat and little refridgeration, but I'll never actually know.
the-chitmonger 3y ago
That man may not have the respect of any academic community but damn it if he isn't entertaining to watch. On a more on-topic note, our growing understanding of animal intelligence has definitely made it harder for me to justify eating certain kinds of meat. My day-to-day is a bit too stressful to make the switch entirely to vegetarianism, but once my financial and personal situations have settled I'm looking forward to a less guilty lived experience. (This is of course not to say that you should feel guilty for eating meat - just my personal take)
- dhosek 3y ago
  I don’t eat cephalopods because of their intelligence. I would do the same with pigs, but the problem is that they’re so delicious.
- foxyv 3y ago
  As a person who made the switch after realizing how intelligent these animals are, I can honestly say that it's worth it if you do decide to. However, I also understand why you would continue to eat meat. It was probably one of the harder things I've done in my life.

mihaitodor 3y ago

I listened to an interesting podcast on octopus cognition recently: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-peter-godfrey-smith-on-sentience-and-octopus-minds/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-... Peter dives into the weeds and offers both philosophical and biological insights.