The Mind of an Octopus | Hacker News Reader

The Mind of an Octopus

scientificamerican.com

185 pointsghosh49 comments

> They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

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

True, at first. But then things may change.

On the other hand, they might want to eat us too, so be careful.

If I were some kind of intergalactic alien consultant, I'd definitely advise the aliens to eat us or at least bomb us from orbit.

Isn't that the advice you give to all your intergalactic clients fellellor?

Yes. I tell them all to eat me.

I hope one day the in-joke world of startup job titles will produce an "intergalactic alien consultant" :)

It's just a shame all the probes we've sent extrasolar have been roughly in the ecliptic. Otherwise we might've seen some sign of the warning beacons that girdle the system, advising travelers to stay well clear of the inner planets and on no account approach the third, lest its natives attempt to eat and/or copulate with all aboard, and possibly also steal your FTL drive. As the universe has learned from the experience of one itinerant journalist in particular, of all the places in any galaxy where you might find yourself marooned, among the very last you'd choose is the kind of planet where the locals named it "dirt".

> where the locals named it "dirt"

Well, I mean. It IS mostly dirt. At least the parts where humans lived the most when it was being named. It also had a god or demigod status for many early cultures (and some current ones, I'm sure). It's not like we never realised the importance of dirt.

I don't have a problem with that, provided that the eating is not preceded by any slaughtering.

I can even imagine death rites wherein the deceased is consumed by high-prestige members of the other species as a final status symbol, or fed to low-prestige individuals as an act of charity, or by friends and co-workers, or by one's most effective enemy or rival--maybe as host for a brood of the other's larval offspring.

There are a variety of reasons why cannibalism may become taboo, and plenty of examples in non-cannibal cultures where dead people are allowed to be consumed by other species, whether those are carrion birds, sharks, arthropods, or fungi and bacteria. If your body isn't embalmed or mummified when you die, it's pretty much going to get eaten by something.

Why not get eaten by something that can appreciate your flavor and communicate its satisfaction?

It's a cookbook!

- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheTwilightZoneS...

and Cordwainer Smith's "From Gustible's Planet" -> http://www.vb-tech.co.za/ebooks/Smith%20Cordwainer%20-%20Fro... has humans eating the aliens.

Also: Popplers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_with_Popplers

Like the octopus, we test for danger, then try to eat, then play. I would expect this behavior from any creature that evolved in an environment with a contest for scarce resources, alien lifeforms included.

Or more generally, test for danger, then try to use most efficiently as a resource.

Whether that resource is as food, economic benefit, recreation, friendship, etc.

OTOH there are non-human lifeforms we already spent quite some time together.

Sure, cats and dogs and other pets have always been the junior partners in those relationships.

Which made me wonder how well humans would do in a relationship as a pet with an alien master.

I expect we'd be perfectly happy, not realising that we are the pet. Cats and dogs seem to be.

Of course that's my human arrogance, assuming the cats and dogs don't know.

The communication barrier is enough to ensure that the nature of the relationship is not necessarily agreed upon by both parties. It's like that trope in movies where someone visits another (generally less developed) culture, spends some time with them, and then discovers that they've been married into the group without realizing it.

Cats in particular are clearly not in agreement in regards to who is in charge in our relationships with them. They'll tolerate our paternalism on account of our superior size and power, but once you're no longer in the immediate vicinity compelling them they pretty much do whatever they want. They're teachable, but not really trainable.

Reminds me of the old Heinlein novel "The Star Beast", which centers around a boy and his alien pet that has been in his family for generations. It turns out that the alien is actually royalty and from her perspective she's been pursuing her hobby of raising "John Thomas's"

Cats and dogs are engineered¹ to be happy as pets. I wouldn't like the same to happen to us.

1 - By selection. I don't really know what to call the "engineering" where the "engineer" doesn't know he is doing it.

> Cats and dogs are engineered to be happy as pets.

Cats and dogs have evolved to be happy as pets.

Let's leave the use of 'engineered' to the creationists :)

Well, evolved due to human interference.

They were created by intelligent beings.

The flip side of that is, if they are stronger than us, many would take it for granted that they would attempt to communicate with us, even though we've made no such attempt to do the same with species on our own planet.

Peter Gabriel has though tbf

http://petergabriel.com/news/the-interspecies-internet/

https://www.ted.com/talks/the_interspecies_internet_an_idea_...

We have too made lots of attempts.

Dr Doolittle style anecdotal stories and anecdotes, lots of people who talk to their pets, moving up in seriousness to attempts to teach gorillas about sign language, attempts to give animals cards they can point to to request things, or react to verbal prompting, to attempts to decode meaning from animal calls like Dolphin calls or elephant body language.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/dolphins-conversa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)

What we're assuming with space travelling aliens is not just that they'd want to communicate with us, but that the attempt would be obvious - a patterned radio signal - but the content not obvious.

(And if we did blanket an area with nuanced pheromones and insects responded in bulk, is that communication or is it overriding and giving compelling orders?)

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

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

But humans are said to have a second brain that controls their gut. See e.g. [1]. Excerpt:

> The enteric nervous system has been described as a "second brain" for several reasons. The enteric nervous system can operate autonomously. It normally communicates with the central nervous system (CNS) through the parasympathetic (e.g., via the vagus nerve) and sympathetic (e.g., via the prevertebral ganglia) nervous systems. However, vertebrate studies show that when the vagus nerve is severed, the enteric nervous system continues to function.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system

There was some great discussion last week on cephalopods on this HN thread:

Just how smart is an octopus? (washingtonpost.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852

If you'll forgive me copy and pasting from my comment there:

I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...)

I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine.

https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/

And the follow-up:

https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus...

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

The work of the late Dr. Otto Octavius may prove an interesting study for you.

What would also be interesting is training real cephalopod neural networks in the lab on various type of synthetic input and see what kinds of data they can learn to make sense of.

Need better brain-computer interfaces I guess - perhaps something like neural lace.

Cephalopod powered skynet, here we come.

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

Octopii offer a tantalizing glimpse into how similar, and how different, aliens might be.

e.g. seems likely they'll have camera eyes.

> e.g. seems likely they'll have camera eyes.

Why is that likely? Mantis shrimp, for example, have compound eyes and one of the most sophisticated visual systems found in nature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes

Eyes have evolved on Earth about 20 different times. But octopii have large brains and camera eyes (and aren't mammals). It's only one extra data point, but it is a data point.

If anyone else is surprised by that claim, turns out it's not quite true (in a blurry way):

[The variety between eye types] has led to the dogma that eyes have evolved in all animal phyla 40 to 60 times independently (Salvini-Plawen and Mayr 1961). However, recent genetic experiments cast serious doubts on this notion and argue strongly in favor of a monophyletic origin of the various eye types followed by divergent, parallel, and convergent evolution.

https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/96/3/171/2187545/New...

Even at a wider structural level, there is enough common ancestry to put a serious damper on the idea that it evolved independently 20 times. It's more like a single origin for major photosensitive proteins, and one origin per major eye type.

That's not to say it never happens, notably, there's a behavioral trait in ants (seed dispersal) that appears to have evolved independently at least 100 times. Sometimes everything is set up to favor convergent evolution with dozens or more independent occurrences, but that probably wasn't the case with the eye.

Fascinating article! though much terminology. I think the gist is:

> the mouse Pax6 gene ... is capable of inducing ... eyes in Drosophila. [Pax6] can initiate eye development both in insects and mammals.

> transcription factors can control ... any target gene ..., [therefore] there are no functional constraints linking Pax6 to eye development. ... Therefore, the link between Pax6 and so to eye development must simply be a consequence of a common evolutionary history.

i.e. not parallel evolution of Pax6

> It's more like a single origin for major photosensitive proteins, and one origin per major eye type.

Since our latest common ancestor with octopii lacks camera eyes, doesn't this indicate more than one origin for this major eye type?

Their eyes can do a lot of fascinating things, but high detail density is not one of them. It is probably not a coincidence that compound eyes only show up in severely brain-size-constrained animals.

> Octopii

Octopus is from Greek, so it's not pluralized that way. The correct plural would be "octopodes", but "octopuses" is accepted and more conventional.

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

Also makes me wonder if I should avoid eating calamari...

eating is one thing, but eating them alive is something else altogether. In korea its a thing apparently. I dont really like the idea.

The actor in the film Oldboy ate a live octopus for a scene. He ate three before he got the scene right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_OxuZzIxY

It's a good film, but this scene really puts me off it.

I was once invited out by business partners to a meal in Soeul where the highlight was an octopus, cooked alive at the table. They had to put a lid on the pan to stop it escaping. It was delicious, but I had to tell myself that it had been debeaked and was dying anyway and then stare fixedly at the wall until they told me that it had stopped moving and had been chopped up; luckily, they found this funny rather than insulting.

shrug Weirdly, I've found myself getting more squeamish as I get older, rather than less...

That's seriously messed up, but entirely believable. A number of years ago, a Korean restaurant in LA was busted for boiling cats alive (it may have been "BYOC"). I asked a Korean co-worker about it, and he said that while it was going out of style, there is a traditional belief that an animal's suffering is beneficial to the person eating it.

As I understand the matter, squid aren't on the same order of demonstrated intelligence as octopi, so ordinary squid calamari shouldn't pose an ethical concern in that regard. Tako sunomono might be another matter, though, and likewise Legal Sea Food's giant scampi, topped with a dwarf octopus cooked whole.

Humboldt squid are considered to be as intelligent as octopuses. They're also pretty huge.

You might find Nagel's famous paper on what it's like to be a bat interesting if you haven't already read it.

http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

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

> Further, in an octopus, it is not clear where the brain itself begins and ends.

This to me is the central fallacy of the embodied versus central cognition argument. Why is there a need to define such a separation? Just view the neural network in its entirety and the "problem" is solved.

There was an octopus, Inky, who escaped from an aquarium by jumping out of his tank and sliding down a small diameter drainpipe to the sea at night.

I always wondered if he knew (or at least had an idea) where the drainpipe went and if he did how.

Fascinating read

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