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Comment by jbotz | Hacker News Reader

It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution clearly hints that there is something universal in this consciousness we share, something that seems to want to evolve to similar parameters given half a chance.

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.

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Cephalopods are magnificent. I knew they were smart and curious but I was caught off guard the first time I realized that a curious cuttlefish was making eye contact with me. No other reef animals exhibit anything like this kind of intelligence; the dissimilarity is striking. When you start to doubt your interpretation they quite literally flash their emotional state through color changes that seem as telling as human facial expressions.

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.

We're all home (probably), but that [1] is NSFW! (it wasn't totally obvious to me before clicking, I thought it would be a text description)

Funny enough, there is a text description on the woodcut itself. If you click through to the photo on Wikipedia I believe there's a translation in the description.

For the lazy: it's pure, unadulterated smut

Rhetorical question to make you think: where do we draw the line between smut and art?

smut is gratituous and without meaning and has a singular purpose. It is pretty easy to tell apart.

Then this is art.

MAIDEN: You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Aah! yes… it’s…there!!! With the sucker, the sucker!! Inside, squiggle, squiggle, oooh! Oooh, good, oooh good! There, there! Theeeeere! Goood! Whew! Aah! Good, good, aaaaaaaaaah! Not yet! Until now it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! Ooh! Whew! How are you able…!? Ooh! “yoyoyooh, saa… hicha hicha gucha gucha, yuchyuu chyu guzu guzu suu suuu….”

(Art ∨ smut)? At least it's consensual, unlike Dr. Hill's trysting with a bubble headed coed.

I don't see any hectocotyli so it's possible The Fisherman's Wife passes the Bechdel test.

It's not so clear; not only is there porn that has meaning or even a message(think some fanfiction, or certain hentai manga), but erotic art sits in a strange position. Philosophers still argue about whether 'erotic art' is art, or whether it can be delineated from porn at all. Not to mention, there are contemporary (last five years) arguments for and against porn itself being art. You can make a reasonable case (i.e. one taken seriously by experts in the field) either way.

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

That's something for parents to do for their children, and for me to not care about.

Incorrect. It's erotic art, but art nonetheless. Otherwise we wouldn't be discussing it.

Maybe I have a only a loose grasp of how those words are defined but in my interpretation 'art' and 'smut' are not mutually exclusive

Fair enough. In my understanding "smut" is typically a synonym for pornography, and pornography is generally only valued for its ability to arouse or titillate.

Also a good description of most art.

Can we please talk about NoSQL Databases now?

I've never quibbled,

If it was ribald.

When correctly viewed,

Everything is lewd.

There is a less know man with stingray(?) version of this from the same era.

To these I'd add the classic Vampyroteuthis infernalis by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vampyroteuthi...

NOVA's Kings of Camouflage is another great doc - on cuttlefish

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/kings-of-camouflage/

Semi-related: "Arrival" was a terrific movie adaptation of "Story of Your Life", an even better short story by Ted Chiang, featuring attempts at communication with advanced alien intelligence. Highest recommendation for both.

"Terrific" is not the word I'd use to describe the adaptation. Arrival was entertaining and had, to me, impressive visual and auditory direction, but it completely missed the point of "Story of Your Life" in the way it changed the ending.

fair point; shouldve worded it "terrific movie, based on the even better book"

That story is not about aliens at all. It's about the subconscious.

I absolutely love love love love 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife'...I saw it for the first time online almost twenty years ago and even then without knowing what it meant or the language, i just knew that it would be the most erotic thing that I will ever see.. two decades since, I still stand by that assessment.

I have spent many an idle day swimming around a reef, playing with an Octopus like a puppy.

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.

> 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 healthy or productive relationship.

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 agree with all of this and also want to add, we only recognize octopi as intelligent because they are operating on our timescales. What would happen if we encountered nearly crystalline life. They might have a rich culture, art, and scientific understanding.. but it might be only for phenomenon that they have any hope of interacting with.

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".

Yea, we simply don't know about the intelligence of other things, and so I don't get the perspective that other things are the thing less intelligent when we're in the same boat as them as not being able to communicate with them. There are symbiotic relationships like cats and dogs, and mammals generally share a certain something, but we still have little to no knowledge of what's going on, even in mammals, much less more exotic things. For the octopus, we recognize intelligent of things we notice, but what about intelligence they have that isn't noticed by us.

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.

There's a fantasy world where fossils are actually stone-based forms of life that just move so slowly you can only even detect it over periods of thousands of years. To them stone is a liquid, and folded strata are actually waves.

> We have almost no capability of talking to orcas or octopuses. And it's not a fault of theirs.

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.

So.... are we commiting xenocide then?

> 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.

Given our experience with the octopus I suppose the first recognizably intelligent alien better hope it doesn't taste good fried.

Or the other way around

If you want a picture of the future, imagine an intelligent root snacking on a human face - forever.

Thank you for sharing those comments, jbotz.
> 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?

> 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.

How?

Gorillas can use sign language, dogs can use speaking buttons, I’m sure dolphins or orcas could be taught something we would recognise as language, maybe even chimpanzé

There's quite a bit of speculation that dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales are already using communication with sufficient complexity to be seen as language.
Here's a great talk that sent me on a recent youtube dive on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH9boP9pksM

I think it was the sleeve notes of "Stop making sense" by Talking Heads that had a lot of little aphorisms and one of them was something like: 'Dolphins are very smart but they don't want to talk to us'

Ha! How about... other people?

In the case of Gorilla, I think it wasn't quite the level of sign language that it learned, but vocabularies and phrases.
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.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/koko-kanzi-and-ape-lang...
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.

> 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.

Respecting aside, I don't think we have that much to talk about with other intelligent Earth species.

"Yo, squid guy, what do you think about Seinfeld?"
[...silence...]

You would get same response from me

> the product of parallel evolution.
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...

It's because your whole body develops "inverted" compared to theirs. Evolution got your eyes to point the right way and do something useful even though there's a blind spot, instead of growing optimally but facing inward and being useless.

The last common ancestor had eyes. The same genes control development and placement of eyes. I.e., you can stick a human put-an-eye-here gene into a fruit fly, and an eye grows there.
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.

I'm not sure it's clear how 'advanced' the last common ancestor was. From the hypothesised date, if it had 'eyes' they probably were simple light sensors:
" 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...

I draw the exact opposite conclusion from the same premise.
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?

TBH we haven't really tried very hard to communicate with cephlapods. A few dozen scientists max have worked on this in the last 50 years.

Too many speculative versions of really weird aliens throw out constraints that are likely to be universal in an attempt to emphasise strangeness. Things like basic constraints such as the conservation of energy and matter, evolutionary pressure, information theory, game theory.
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.

It seems completely reasonable to me that space-faring creatures who have reached Earth would likely have been living in a post-scarcity environment for long enough that competitive dysfunction would be (literally) alien.

I personally believe that at some point civilizations will stop using their bodies and live in something like computers or whatever it will be by then. So we may already be living in a highly networked universe without noticing it.
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.

Our bodies are extremely powerful and versatile. If we actually understood how they work and how to build/modify them, we'd get way more mileage out of them than an electromechanical alternative.
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).

> and our primitive side rejects most foreign biomatter altogether
Our immune systems do that too and for a reason.

I don't understand how that could happen. It is something descibed in fiction from time to time. But I don't see how you can move your consciousness from your body somewhere else. Copy perhaps. But the consciousness that remain in the body will want to live on, I am sure. So that is why I cannot see us "stop" using our bodies. Certainly, we can become extinct, but that is something else.

Odd to think about future "civilizations" of uploaded consciousness(es?) surviving the extinction of the organic species that produced it

We also don't know that a digital copy will be conscious. That's an assumption based on thinking functionalism is correct. But we simply don't know what the correct theory of consciousness is and what sort of limits that places on reproducing it artificially.

BBC's Blue Planet had a segment that showed an octopus and an entirely different species, a grouper fish I think, communicating with each other by changing the color of their skin, to coordinate and trap prey.
Watching something like that really hits home how intelligence already comes in so many forms on our own planet.

That's fascinating. Do you happen to have a link?

I don’t think it’s on YouTube, you may have to get the show on iTunes or Netflix etc.

Let's not forget we have much work to do about communicating and respecting between different very-much-human groups on this planet.

Our environments are very different places on Earth, but they might be very similar compared to some other sci-fi ideas about life, such as life evolving in charges particles suspended in plasma. :)

You’re optimistic. I like that. On a different note: I think it’s also possible to imagine that humans will try to eat the aliens. Some love eating cuttlefish.

Can we comprehend them? From what I've read about it, consciousness in octopuses has to be completely alien to ours, because it's spread out over multiple brain centers, including one for each arm. So the arm is a semi-intelligent entity of its own.
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.

Or vice-versa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man

To be fair, our brain is also split into two halves that have limited bandwidth to communicate. It's not clear how much bandwidth is needed to "feel" like a single entity.

Very little if the level of contextual loading is high enough. Vast amounts if it is low. Not all bits are equal.

> Can we comprehend them? From what I've read about it, consciousness in octopuses has to be completely alien to ours...
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.

Does the physical build actually matter? "We" are just virtual constructs that happen to run on a brain inside a skull at the top of a four-limbed creature.
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

Maybe the Aliens will worships the Octopus like some old forgotten God and spare us from disaster or kill us quickly when they find out we eat them!

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