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Comment by rowanseymour | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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.

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.

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