If you found the article interesting, i highly recommend this book: "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness". It is a fascinating description of how cephalopods are the closest thing to intelligence that is built vastly different from us. The author also explores philosophical questions (à la Thomas Nagel) What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it have multiple selves? The book doesn't have all the answers and sort of fizzles out at the end, but definitely one of my better reads this year.
Seconded. Great book. The range of neural architecture that exists in nature is really fascinating and something that i think could help inform AI research.
Curious—that book just caught my eye at the library. Time to go pick it up.
Definitely worth a read. If you end up with the official audio book on Audible (which is what i did), the narrator is pretty good too.
Screw that, cephalopods are monsters. Cuttlefish are almost literally tiny Cthulhus: they drive their prey insane (with a hypnotic moving chromatophore pattern) before devouring it.
And that's pretty freakin' rad. Nature is at least as strange and twisted as our deepest fears. It's a big amazing world.
Do you have a source handy for the mini-Cthulhu thing? I've never heard of cuttlefish actually mesmerizing their prey before.
I am not afraid of squids in specific or cephalopods in general; I fail to see how anything we have learned about them would do anything but increase that fear if I was.
Great article! Also I found it funny when it showed the illustration from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea due to the fact that "Nautilus" wrote it :)