What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship. Although first we'd do well to do a better job at communicating with and respecting the many non-human sentient beings on this planet.
The article mentions [NSFW!] The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife [1] (erotic Japanese art from 1814) and the books Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [2] by Peter Godfrey-Smith and The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery [3].
[1] NSFW! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sy_Montgomery
EDIT: added NSFW! warnings.
For the lazy: it's pure, unadulterated smut
If it was ribald.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I don't see any hectocotyli so it's possible The Fisherman's Wife passes the Bechdel test.
They are delightful, inquisitive, smart creatures who seem to really enjoy engaging with these huge ungainly creatures from the land that occasionally stop by. I made acquaintance with one octopus on my local reef by introducing it to gold goins - they can't seem to resist shiny gold things, and indeed in this case, I gave the coin to the octopus and it swam off to its hidden midden (which I was able to find after a while), where it had also collected bottles-caps and lost fishing tackle.
Another time, I watched a smaller octopus playfully baiting whitefish by dangling an empty crayfish husk out of its hole .. just idly floating it in the current until a dumb whitefish came along for a nibble, and then BAM out came another tentacle from the hole, and the world was less one dumb whitefish.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vampyroteuthi...
In my opinion, this is a stretch. By comprehend and recognize, what do you mean? For an octopus, ant, or orca, we have little to no comprehension of their intelligence, philosophy, or consciousness. All of those things are a black box to us. We can observe behavior and take notes, but I think it's a huge leap to say we comprehend their intelligence.
It's an even bigger leap to say we could establish communications and relationships with an alien species. What is our relationship with orcas? We starve them, kill them with boats and pollutants, and we imprison them for entertainment. We try to rid the world of ants and attack and poison them on sight. We eat octopuses and also pollute their environment. I wouldn't call those things a relationship.
As for communication, how do we do there? We have almost no capability of talking to orcas or octopuses. And it's not a fault of theirs. It's because we are indeed different. There is even less hope for ants.
The existence of orcas, ants, and octopuses on Earth is the exact evidence I need to form the opinion that it is probable that there are alien species that we simply can't comprehend and vice versa.
Is it really that hard to believe there's a species out there such that we humans are their ant?
I often wonder about plants. Suppose a forest and/or its network of fungi was "intelligent" in some sense. It may well be that the intelligence only manifests on extreme scales and contexts well beyond human's ability to see. Perhaps forests engage in millenia long chess games to reshape their environment more favorably in battle with other species or something. Perhaps its in a way that relies on very old memories passed down from their ancestors stored via genetics or some other means, and involves very complex decisions we can't even hope to compute on our best computers. We'd barely even be able to recognize that, and certainly wouldn't have much hope of seeing the intelligence in action. We don't know the first thing about "how to tree".
Your description reminded me of a book called The Dragon's Egg. I haven't read it but need to. The gist is that there's a species that somehow thrives on or in a neutron star. However, their time scales are not slow but extremely fast. That's all I know about it other than it apparently being a tutorial on neutron stars masquerading as a novel.
How do you know that? Specifically, that they are capable of two way communication, which is suitable for establishing, for lack of a better word, diplomatic relations.
For ethical reasons we need to presume that they indeed are capable of that. But it's different from knowing that they are capable.
Given our experience with the octopus I suppose the first recognizably intelligent alien better hope it doesn't taste good fried.
> We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship.
And... what of terrestrial sentience?
[...silence...]
I had a psychology professor who was part of the research teaching Koko sign language. And according to him, what Koko learned was really impressive, more than they anticipated. But it was still fundamentally different from human language.
It was a long time ago, and I don't recall what exactly was lacking. It could be on the lines of grammatical structures, that for Koko, there was no difference between "not want banana" and "want banana not". She didn't have an idea of what the negation was directed at. In the eye of linguistic psycholinguistics, the difference wasn't trivial.
In contrast, human children, even with limited vocabulary, could grasp and even invent grammars.
The most prominent example would be Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was spontaneously invented over only a few years by deaf schoolchildren, ages four to sixteen, who had little or no other language.
The science isn't there for gorillas communicating like humans. No publications, no data and Robin Williams anecdotes instead. If there was something there one would think there would be more scientists doing research down that path.
Here's a great talk that sent me on a recent youtube dive on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH9boP9pksM
Famously, their eyes are almost identical to ours, and are purely the product of parallel evolution.
One difference, though is that at some point during our evolution there was a glitch, or at least it took a less-than-optimal turn, that resulted in our retina being 'inverted', i.e. light must traverse the nerves and some tissue before reaching the light receptors, while theirs is as one would expect, i.e. with the light receptors at the front. [1] This also means that our retina has a blind spot, while theirs does not.
[1] https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2015/01/12/the-poor-design...
Fun fact: death after mating is controlled by a single gene. If there were any net benefit to not dying after, one or other species would have it turned off.
" But our last common ancestor with the octopus was probably some kind of wormlike creature with eye spots that lived as many as 750 million years ago; " [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/10/how-the-freaky-octopus-can-hel...
Octopuses (cephalopods) are our direct relatives; we have physical contact with them; we easily observe to be intelligent; we know them to communicate with each other, and yet we can't meaningfully communicate with cephalopods.
How do we have any hope of communicating with an extra-terrestrial intelligence?
Take Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, who apparently has no understanding whatsoever of the reasons why humans do the things they do. What sort of superintelligence doesn't even get the simplest principles of competitive behaviour and dysfunctions that can arise from competition for resources? But no, we are incomprehensible to him and it all has to be explained by the humans, even though his own civilization went through _exactly_ the same problems.
It's fine for fiction, but taking that way of thinking and applying it to speculations in the real world as though it's valid science is an error.
With all the technological progress I can’t imagine why someone would want to deal with our very flawed bodies in the long run. We are already getting more and more of our experiences though means like TV and the Internet and I don’t see that trend stopping.
Imagine a body with perfect physique, maximum strength, a bigger/denser brain, programmable immune system, etc. It could even be adapted for deep sea or outer space life.
We haven't even begun to understand biotech at this level, because of moral/ethical concerns and a general aversion to anything organic (understandable, experimentation with sentient life is seen as bad, and our primitive side rejects most foreign biomatter altogether).
Our immune systems do that too and for a reason.
Watching something like that really hits home how intelligence already comes in so many forms on our own planet.
No idea to what extent the article discusses this; part of it is blocked by a paywall, after which it continues about eating moluscs. But just like people eat octopuses, it's entirely possible that alien intelligence end up on our dinner plates before they end up at our negotiating table.
What is completely alien is the evolutionary path compared to our own. What feels familiar is the connection you feel with these animals when they interact with you. They seem to be caught in a comical struggle between fear and curiosity. It feels human.
For an organism that evolved on this planet, it stands to reason they'd have some experience similar to ours. The fact that their consciousness would run on multiple nodes is of little relevance imo
Available under CC: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#CC
It's worth to read all of his 'first contact' themed ones. They all use a slightly different lens on the same theme:
Eden, Solaris, The Invincible & His Master's Voice
I think it's because Children of Ruin didn't have as much of the way relatable human (or Human, as the book goes into) characters to latch onto as an anchor while they explore the evolution of a different kind of intelligence. I was really rooting for some of the human characters in Children of Time, namely Lain, whereas Children of Ruin just felt a little too, uh, alien.
The two books in the series are both fascinating for trying to imagine thinking in the manner of another species evolved to be "human level intelligence."
I enjoyed the first book more, but the second does an admirable job exploring what communication, thought processes, and technology look like from an octopodes perspective.
And https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-rui...
Lots of fun reading them, great author :)
A recent study I read about shows that spider intelligence is ill-studied but actually holds a wealth of interesting facets. Jumping spiders plan, such as when hunting, and can be surprised. They are also doing elaborate planning when building webs, and make adjustments to strength/stickiness in webs based on failed catches. It's sophisticated tool use. And yet their brains are teeny weeny puny things.
Another novel that you might enjoy if you haven't read is "A Deepness in the Sky", it's similar to Children of Time (and predates it), but told in a different way. Both are highly enjoyable and packed with ideas.
Both are absolutely great, I highly recommend them!
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35827220.Dogs_of_War
1. No social interaction or learning. Octopuses[1] live alone.
2. Short life span. Most of them live only few years in the wild.
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[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
3. Living underwater. Fire is the easiest way to extract energy from raw materials, and there's no real substitute. On land, there's a lot of local, controllable dynamism, but when you put things down they tend to stay where you put them, at least on short timescales. Water is exactly the opposite: lots of changes you can't control, but no way to get a lot of energy all in one place. Dolphins would have a hard time developing technology for the same reason, even if they had the dexterity.
4. Not being apex predators. This is part of the short lifespan problem, but I think it goes beyond that. Not many animals are going to mess with a human if they can help it, which means that it didn't take much for us to get to the point of having some free brain cycles to spend on improving things. An octopus is comparatively small and squishy, and shares an environment with comparatively more large and toothy carnivores, which means that even when they do manage to survive for more than a couple years they're doing it by spending most of their time eating and hiding.
The point of fire is rapid oxidation that provides enough heat to melt metals.
Set aside what we know about human technological progress. You need some energy source to be the base of your technology pyramid, and it needs a few properties: it needs to be naturally occurring so that you can discover it by accident; it needs to be controllable or predictable enough that you can use it selectively; and it needs to be fast/intense enough that you can transform materials without massive time investment. What do you pick? On land, you have fire, flowing water, and, at a stretch, the muscles of large herbivores. Underwater, you have... ???
Also, that's not what "anthropic principle" means.
Modern humans for instance spend more time learning than the lifespan of most animals. If we were limited to a lifespan of 20 years, which is typical for a mammal of our weight class, human society would have been very different. Make it 5 years and there probably wouldn't have been any society at all.
This, I believe, makes them even weirder. With so much intelligence, why didn't they evolve longevity as a way to capitalize on their experience? Why didn't they develop collective strategies that are so effective in other animal species?
They didn't develop longevity because intelligence + longlivety does not provide immediate advantage.
They didn't develop collective strategies because they the path path to collective strategies providing gains is too long or too unlikely to happen.
Even in human brain huge area of brain dedicated into hands. Human fine motor skill (or dexterity) is superior compared to other apes. We can do small detailed moves. Other apes and monkeys are clumsy.
After the complexity of brain developed to control their dexterity, octopus gets benefit from spatiotemporal intelligence to exploit tentacles in hunting and moving. It's not surprising that intelligence plan and solve problems as well.
However, they seem to die very soon after mating for some reason related to their evolutionary history. There's no way for a marginally longer-lived octopus to be more successful at reproduction, because reproduction is a one-shot event for them. If anything there's pressure to reproduce (and die) at a younger age, since these octopi would be more successful.
Such are the tragedies of evolution, the blind idiot god.
https://www.nature.com/news/octopus-genome-holds-clues-to-un...
Trade-off between Transcriptome Plasticity and Genome Evolution in Cephalopods https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30344-6
• Unlike other taxa, cephalopods diversify their proteomes extensively by RNA editing
• Extensive recoding is specific to the behaviorally complex coleiods
• Unlike mammals, cephalopod recoding is evolutionarily conserved and often adaptive
•Transcriptome diversification comes at the expense of slowed-down genome evolution
You gotta wonder what sort of environmental pressures make intelligent animals less fit for survival by creating communities. Few predators? Very simple environments that don't require passing on information to future generations? High competition for resources?
The Emperors New Mind by Roger Penrose discusses the opposite idea, that consciousness has a non-computational element that could never even be approximated by a turing machine. I don't really agree with it but its an interesting book.
source - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39482345
What we describe as awareness "consciousness" might not really exist. If everything is just a subsystem of the main system being the universe. Anyway I find it a fun philosophical question to think about.
I do have a general take on how humans perceive or judge other organisms through a very human lens. We characterize organisms based on their social structure, longevity, 'cleverness' etc. While looking at how humans compare with octopuses at a meta level, octopuses seem to be not waging wars, more peaceful, seem to have survived for more than 600 millions years. I wonder if human beings would have a similar track record: looks like humans are well into destroying their own kind and the environment faster than most other creatures.
At the same time human beings seem ill equipped to judge or characterize 'alien' lives: we often want to 'make contact' or have a communication or social channel with aliens. As if a show of our mental power and social structure is the most important aspect..
Just looking at how octopuses are being measured by humans, it feels rather silly the kind of approaches humans use to evaluate other species let alone aliens.
female octopi like to eat male octupi
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150223-mysteries-of-canniba...
However, it is my understanding from previous reading that male octopuses die within months of mating and that female octopuses die after laying its eggs. I am surprised this article doesn’t mention it because it puts the cannibalism into perspective. It seems the biologically triggered death after mating and laying eggs is an evolutionary strategy, so it makes the female eating the already dying male less cannibalistic and more strategic.
https://www.sciencealert.com/mother-octopus-senescence-death...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/01/o...
To be fair - we really only focus on war against our own kind so much since we've basically won against every other one. Sure, there are still problems in small, but in general no other species is a threat to a large part of us in general.
Also, destroying the environment really is a side effect of industrialization, so I don't think that's a fair comparison either. No other species needs any kind of stable power grid, but that's surely not because we're less advanced.
> At the same time human beings seem ill equipped to judge or characterize 'alien' lives: we often want to 'make contact' or have a communication or social channel with aliens. As if a show of our mental power and social structure is the most important aspect..
Honest question: What is?
> Just looking at how octopuses are being measured by humans, it feels rather silly the kind of approaches humans use to evaluate other species let alone aliens.
In some way, yes. But it's hard to do it any other way; most possible partners are seriously limited in their communication abilities and (at least probably) in their intelligence.
Parallel evolution is amazing. Developing complex communication between human and octopus would be an amazing feat and would likely answer some of our questions about the nature of consciousness.
Could an octopus learn to play Super Mario Bros or Pac-Man to beat levels for crab?
If we could find a reliable way to teach an input language to an octopus we could start probing what classes of problems are easier or harder for them solve. We could develop octopus input devices that maximize the size of the 'octo-bus', and find ways to give them an "immersive experience" by modulating their environment (temp, salinity, pH, etc) as feedback.
Anyone with me on this? I haven't found anything, but I don't know if my "dorking" is up to par.
Also if anyone else has other books that follow similar themes, please recommend!
Wang's carpets is a short story about life evolving within a simulation of a naturally occurring computer. (also part of the larger novel Diaspora)
Schild's Ladder is about physicists researching the fundamental 'geometry' of the universe and accidentally create a quickly expanding geometry that is more stable than a regular vaccuum, very unhealthy for all regular matter, but...
Also this blurb from the author's website is amazing[1]:
> To research her books, films, and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by a silverback gorilla, embrced by a Giant Pacific Octopus and undressed by an orangutan. But she is perhaps best known for her 14 year love affair with Christopher Hogwood, a runt piglet who grew to a 750-pound great Buddha master.
Learned this from a great NYT article on Hokusai focusing on another print from the same series: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/h...
It's literally part of the "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series, so I don't really know if it can be regarded as an easter egg.
"Octopus: Making Contact" https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus-making-contact-y8dya...
https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
Wow
This often lead to a discussion about how we'd be an aquatic civilization of octopi lived much longer than they do.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3...
Edit:
For anybody who had the same problem as me, try using a different device or privacy mode.
I can't access it on my PC due to the paywall but can on my phone (same, synced browser).