A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children
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I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light.
Cephalopods have proven to to be incredibly intelligent, and emotional. I think you could easily argue many of them are smarter than human children, maybe even a lot of adults :)
I highly recommend an episode of ‘Nature’ I saw recently on PBS about octopi. It’s called “Octopus: Making Contact”. It’s the story of a professor who decided to install a tank and keep an octopus in his home, and the relationship he & his daughter developed with it. Absolutely stunning!
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus-making-contact-previ...
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/baby-cephalopods-first-momen...
I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for decades, but I suspect it can be reduced to arrogance, convenience, and gluttony. It has been a difficult revelation in some ways. Cooking meat has almost been a part of my way of life; it’s something I took pride in and always did to the best of my ability. Now I don’t really have much interest in food at all.
But that said, there's so much great vegetarian food to be eaten!
And you're right, most of the world has amazing vegetarian food. It's daunting to take on learning all of it. Indian and Thai foods especially have been incredibly appealing to me lately. So much flavour and nutrition is possible and these people seem to have figured it out a long time ago.
I think personally owning a pet dog and realizing they aren't biological machines simply responding to stimuli has helped me with that realization.
I think the parent comment to yours is more about avoiding meat because of compassion to the intellect/consciousness. Rather than avoiding meat in order to eliminate any suffering that may occur during "production" of it.
I'm curious because I'm pretty good at convincing myself that the meat I buy comes from animals that haven't suffered. And if it can actually be guaranteed (moose killed by hunter) I'm all-in on meat. But if I somehow "woke up" and realized that I didn't want to eat other living things because of compassion (or whatever) to their minds? I'm not sure that I could go back from that.
I am asking myself if it is better for the animal to live a decent life even if it is to be killed and ate at the end or not to live at all.
If I want the animal to have a good life, why do I/should I get to (or even want to) decide when and why that life should end? It seems very contradictory to me and necessitates a need for the taking of the thing I’m apparently attaching value to.
Also I know I don’t physically kill these animals on a stop watch, but I vote for their death with my wallet. I don’t see a significant difference. Actually, I think it’s somewhat worse than it I carried it out myself. That’s why I generally try to only eat seafood that I selectively harvest while diving. I can guarantee the final moments were as brief as humanly possible and the rest of its life were as nature intended.
So, I really struggle with this one part where I decide the animal has worth and should therefor have a good existence. However, I’m also deciding it should only have that until I decide I want to deep fry its muscles or something. So it must be that I’m deciding to be a benevolent killer or something, which is certainly better than a ruthless one, but leaves me a uncomfortable nonetheless. I need to justify my own need or desire to continue killing, or at least profiting from the killing.
That’s the part I can’t do so far. Do I actually need to eat them? No, so far I really don’t. My health is still good after quite a while and the initial cravings have subsided. Do I want to eat them? No, not anymore, although I do miss it from a culinary perspective. Does that justify killing them? Well, would it justify killing someone’s dog if I thought dogs were delicious? Or any dog? No, never - the notion is absurd.
Well. I suppose some people eat dogs. This has a significant cultural element to it.
Nonetheless I really can’t bring myself to convince myself that I have any good reason to eat animals. Though admittedly I make an exception for fish and shellfish. I feel strange about that. I mean, when I get in the water those fish are arguably smarter than I am. One thing I justify the action by is that at least in the water they have a natural chance and environmental advantage. It isn’t a relationship of control and systematic murder from birth to death.
In time I suspect I’ll stop eating fish too. I don’t know.
The more I think about it the more it becomes an existential matter to be honest.
> would it justify killing someone’s dog if I thought dogs were delicious?
That's a bit silly. Regardless of the ethics of eating meat, there are a whole bunch of other reasons why you wouldn't kill someone's pet. Just like you don't dive into people's fish tanks for your seafood :)
My main objection is to the manner of which animals have to be raised and harvested in the most efficient manner to satisfy the ever increasing demand for meat in the world while still being bottom of the barrel in price. Has there been any evidence this can be sustained without wholesale suffering?
If you can ensure all the meat you purchase comes from the opposite of such conditions then all the more power to you. The meat I do eat I also try to purchase from better farm conditions, but I don't think that's always possible.
Death is a form of suffering. Whether the creature you kill knows it lives only to die for you, whether it can see and understand some aspect of its cage or not, you took it before its time. It is all the same wrong in the end.
Now, eating an animal that died of natural or uncontrollable causes, or using for-real excess milk or eggs? Sure, fine. But those are not at all sustainable activities at a population level. We have to do things to animals that cause real harm to ever get enough of those products to sell them, even if we treat the animals way better overall. (And it's still better to push for better treatment than to do and feel nothing!)
My own mental backflip: I do still eat meat, because I'm a selfish and horrible person. I accept my complicity in the evil. But I also know my own choices will not meaningfully change demand patterns, so I allow myself the pleasure of the flavours I grew up eating, and try not to dwell on it too much. Even the Buddha was said to eat meat if it was what was served -- but of course, would request not to be served it!
Regardless, I know full veganism is the only actually ethically justifiable choice, and I believe and hope it will one day be the only realistic or acceptable choice for all of us. I will advocate for it (I hope) strongly whenever I can. No being deserves any part of what we do to them for food, and most people have pretty awful reasons to continue to eat meat; often literally at the level of, "animals can't suffer!", or, "humans are a higher being!", which is a mind-blowingly horrific thing to understand people will assert even after being given the evidence. I find the dismissive attitude appalling and try to get friends to at least see it in its real light.
Personally, once I catch wind that the tide toward veganism is beginning to turn, or that we somehow achieved affordable ethically lab-grown cheap muscle+fat tissue meats, I'll gladly turn that page. Or, once the horror again resurges strongly enough to overcome the value of shepherd's pie, thanksgiving ham, or a hamburger.
It's not much of an intellectual position, but it's all I've got. I ask that you at least be honest with yourself: the beings you eat have suffered for your pleasure.
I don't think this blanket statement is true. eg: people often live long past the point that they enjoy being alive.
> Now, eating an animal that died of natural or uncontrollable causes, or using for-real excess milk or eggs?
What's "natural" in your opinion? Do you mean old-age, disease, natural predators or something else? Humans are natural predators. Death from old age/disease is often caused by environmental factors or stress.
Calling any of this "evil" is an interesting choice. Maybe this is all just how the world works and we have yet to accept that as a species. I do think our role in the food chain needs to be sustainably defined and understood.
Next, I agree that "natural" could mean a lot of things. In this case, understanding that we're discussing moral involvement, I'm speaking about whether or not you have moral involvement in causing the death.
Paying for a burger from McDonald's is indirectly asking for the death of the cow. They wouldn't kill it if no one bought burgers, but we all know that people do buy burgers, so the blame is diffuse. We all share. But you, in eating it, still profit by the being's death, and it was ultimately a deed done for your benefit when you chose to pay them. Of course it is more direct if you pay a butcher to slaughter a cow, and far more direct if you wield the knife. Hit a deer with your car by mistake? Maybe that's like manslaughter levels of culpability.
As a sidebar, is a cow killed by a wolf a natural death? It happens 'in nature', and the wolf couldn't live without killing other things, so it is natural for a wolf to kill a cow. But... is the death a natural death? I do not feel it is. I cannot blame the wolf (as it does not know better and does not possess other actual options, like we do), but I do not think the cow exists for the wolf. To paraphrase Kant I think, each being is an end unto itself. The cow's most natural death is one of old age, i.e. what we would legally call 'natural causes'. Suppose that health care could have extended its life, well sure, but there's a limit of practicality.
Last, it would be possible to justify literally any act from the position of "maybe this is just how the world works and we have to accept it" -- so, again, sure. But slavery was 'just how the world worked' for a long time, and I feel I am better off, and I can think of a hell of a lot of other humans who are better off, for us eventually having not just accepted it. There are similarities.
Veganism is really the only choice that's morally consistent, intellectually honest, and doesn't rely on special permission. It is ultimately not really arguable that it is a terrible thing for us to do to breed them, to keep them, to manipulate them, to harvest their products, and to kill them, especially in the ways we do. One must rely on ideas like 'might is right', 'we are inherently special for reasons that must be taken on faith', or 'nothing really matters anyway, everything is relative', which are exactly the arguments that have been used to justify all past atrocities of our doing.
likewise :)
In terms of practicality, a wolf needs to eat too. Without wolves (or predators) we find over-population which leads to food scarcity which leads to suffering (queue yoda reference.)
I think there is a big difference between slavery (a dark human endeavor) and the natural order of the world. Humans didn't invent predators. At best, we conquered them and at worst, we became them while growing to become the second most dominant (and largely unchecked) biomass on the planet.
Given that plants have been shown to have feelings, I'm not sure where our idea that eating plants is morally superior to eating animals comes from. Some plants poison animals in order to fertilize their soil. Some people poison plants in order to have a somewhat pleasant looking front-yard. Many plants have developed obvious defenses against being eaten, much like animals. By eating fruit that has dropped to the ground, you are denying the plant its intent to reproduce.
I think that most humans are more capable of empathizing with other animals than with plants and that's the root of the sense of morality here. The hard truth is that no living thing wants to be eaten to death but every living thing needs to eat. The circle of life is a real thing, the carbon cycle relies on plants recycling decayed organic matter including animals.
I know what you mean, but on some level you and I are also "biological machines simply responding to stimuli". The difference is more in the complexity of said stimuli and responses in time and space :)
I don't think that cephalopods are arrogant when they eat other creatures, although I suppose they may be gluttonous. Why hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold the animals you refrain from eating?
For some, morality isn't fungible or based on the morality or others (animal or human). If someone is a thief and willing to rob you, does that mean its okay for you to steal from them? It seems reasonable to me to hold a personal code of ethics and standards that isn't dependent (or at all related) to the ethics and standards of others (if any).
This cannot be how you approach morality. Animals routinely do horrific things to each other. Would you ever ask someone that question outside of a conversation on whom we kill to eat?
Also, I'm not sure a cephalopod has evolved the physical and mental capability to vary its diet on command such that it can choose if it will feed on other animals or not.
At some level humans and cephalopods are just animals, and equivalent in that regard, but I'm not sure I accept the equivalence far beyond that or especially when it comes to morality.
Cooking is a source of pleasure and society. My cultural Christian inheritance (and yours?) is quite committed to the separateness of people and animals. Many people deny even the wholeness of the human species. Where is the mystery in your beliefs? It is only an inheritance you now reject.
You can come back to meat later, or not, in your own time. Sort of like when you go far enough left, you get your guns back. There is nothing shameful in a cat.
So I don't see the need to look down on yourself for realizing something new. It wouldn't be new if it was totally familiar. However, the knowledge itself is thousands of years old, and also evolving.
If our civilization lasts long enough, someday we'll all be reviled for eating animals, especially octopi and pigs.
That may very well be a skewed understanding, but it's likely why they choose that grouping.
They’re just as social and emotional as dogs are.
Intelligence wise, dogs are probably a bit smarter. But how much, I don’t know, they don’t seem that radically different.
I think pigs have just received enough good PR recently that they come to mind as another particularly intelligent animal.
Harry Harrison wrote a book I read many years ago called West of Eden, where the dinosaur extinction event didn't occur. An advanced species of lizard used modified lifeforms for their tech. I have it on my list to read again. It does make you think people might be more symbiotic towards the world rather than what we have now.
The naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre, in the 19th century, made an extensive study of solitary, spider-hunting wasps. Much of what he discovered, with regard to the surprising complexity of their hunting and nesting behavior, became well known in his day - he was one of the first writers I discovered when I started delving into the literature to feed my own burgeoning interest in the aculeates, and one of the reasons his work is so easy to come by is that it was popular, and thus well preserved.
It was very much new to me, though; to whatever extent it had entered common knowledge a century and a half ago, it has since exited again. If anything, I think that in recent generations we have become less likely to recognize complex behavior and intelligence in nonhuman animals, not more so; that may be changing, but if so, I think it must have begun quite recently.
Park Ranger at Yosemite National Park (on designing secure garbage cans)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...
The kea sit and watch and learn over s day or 3 and then they are back in, causing chaos.
The kitchen staff were trying to solve each puzzle with time pressure, a job to do and bad weather. The kea looked to find it funny whole the poor worker was frustrated.
Well, it is objectively inferior. That doesn't mean that it's not intelligence.
Great post. Respectfully, though, I disagree with the excerpt above.
I find that urbanization has led to a disconnect between people and animals. In times past, a person would have regular contact with a host of domesticated animals (cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, sheep, goat, chickens, pigs, etc.) as well as the wild animals that are a part of everyday life in rural settings (rodents, possums, armadillos, foxes, coyotes, snakes, deer, birds, etc.)
Without question, people in the past had a far greater appreciation of the ‘intelligence’ and behavior of animals than modern city-dwellers.
One need look no further than the numerous metaphors that have been passed down from these non-urban times: stubborn as a mule, wise as serpents, cunning like a fox, horse-sense, wise as an owl, etc...
In short, I’d suggest that the more modern (or, perhaps, urbanized is a better word) the LESS appreciation one finds for animal intelligence.
The degree of ‘compassion’ one has toward an animal is not directly correlated to one’s opinions as to its intelligence.
My uncle raised pigs. A frequent topic of conversation was how smart they are. Without question, they’re smarter than dogs. (I had a pet pig growing up.)
Yet, we ate then.
An even more brutal example: slavery. It was obvious and undeniable that human slaves were intelligent; yet, that didn’t mean that compassion towards them was common.
Are you sure that comes from nature observation ?
Satire used to criticize the powerful of the world picturing them as animals. So these associations might not come from where you think they do. La Fontaine's fables are a good example of that. He was not the only one to do that.
Never thought snakes were that ‘wise’ though. Don’t know about owls.
On the whole, psychologist and dog researcher Stanley Coren estimates, the average dog's intelligence is roughly as sophisticated as a 2.5-year-old baby's.
I think dogs are still surprisingly smart.
I take zero offense and thank you for the correction, but it's somewhat amusing to think that someone presumably has two accounts and switches between them to make comments when a post is inadequately proofed.
And the neurological development to process and produce speech. I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands. I suspect babies do have similar problem solving abilities compared to those animals, but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords. They're also missing the brain to use them, with whatever that means for reasoning.
I put gorilla in there specifically for this reason - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)
Gorillas can't produce speech but they can process language at about the level of a 2-3 year old human. Which is roughly the level of intelligence that dogs were being described as having in the article I linked earlier.
>I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands.
well I'm no cognitive scientist and I think differently than you do!
>but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords.
and I think it's disingenuous for out cephalopod overlords to claim I lack the ability to reason about potential threats because I don't shoot ink out of my fingers when in danger.
I mean I don't actually know or care that dogs might be as smart as a three year old or that any of the other animals I named might be; I just accept the findings of experts in the manner as being more likely to be correct than what I might think is the case. Still I am supposing none of the named animals are as smart as I am so I am certainly not threatened by the concept.
In humans, intelligence is often defined as "what is measured by an IQ test", which obviously doesn't work for either babies or animals.
So while you can say "some dogs can learn to understand hundreds of words, just like most babies", you can not really say "being able to tell words/people/emotions apart means an organism is intelligent"
A few weeks ago she (on her own) decided to dry her wet painting by taping it to the heat vent. We have never used tape in any way similar to that, and certainly have never used the heat vent to dry anything (it being a long-term safety hazard, and potentially bad for the ventilation system).
She routinely falls on her face because of getting herself into ridiculous precarious situations (in disturbingly similar ways).
The problem is intelligence just isn't 1D no matter how much we wish it was. Delayed gratification, problem solving and communication ability are not necessarily highly correlated enough for a single metric to make sense of the three.
The clumsiness might be a different thing. Changes in height, weight, strength and sight and probably a load of other things come into this. If you change something about an adult it takes them a while to adapt.
The example that comes to mind is a pregnant woman squeezing though some gap. To any observer the attempt was obviously not going to go smoothly.
https://vaviper.blogspot.com/2019/06/from-onion-study-reveal...
Some primates can delay gratification, along with dogs, albeit inconsistently. Corvids, too, have passed the marshmallow test.
Having had a couple of human children, I would definitely not claim that they are anything but extremely clever, but then so are many primates, dogs, and corvids.
And I learned Hungarian (and Portuguese) as a kid.
The only issue is that there’s a critical window in there that shapes your accent.
On the other hand, human children are incredibly curious and experiment with everything. It may not be stupidity that keeps them from following directions.
There is much to be learned by occasionally breaking the rules.
1. Draw a triangle on your forehead
2. Make a shitty clone of yourself with a circle drawn on the clone's forehead, who comes out of the shop immediately after you walk in
Then see if your dog decides to follow the shitty clone, or whether it waits a couple minutes for the regular version of you.
Edit: also, repeat with many more dogs, many more dog owners, and many more shitty clones.
Recurring villain, probably gets his own show.
Anyway, I think a fun cartoon would be the Flintstones with ceph, for example their screen could be a smaller ceph whose chromataphores are pixels.
[edit]
Old drawing, back of a napkin (apologies to MIT AI Memo 554):
https://github.com/koalahedron/ideas-for-models/blob/main/RE...
Human children are stupid by design (well, evolution). Language, culture, and technology are overtaking genetics as the more effective information transfer mechanism. As we shed our instincts to make room for learning, human children will be born more and more stupid over time. It's a trade-off: At the same time, human adults will have greater capacity for smarts. It is the increasing stupidity at birth which enables us to learn so much into adulthood.
Animals without developed language haven't been able to afford this progress. They are smarter than human children from birth, but are unable to learn as much. So while your dog outperforms a human child at waiting outside the store, it will never have the capacity for art, mathematics, nor engineering, no matter how hard you train it. Humans on the other hand, can be trained quite a bit.
This feels like an evolutionary attribution error, if that's a thing. Self control is different from a thumb; there aren't necessarily any genes that code for it.
My first guess would be that, in order for a creature to be as smart as a cuttlefish, it needs to have a mental model of spacetime and of itself. Self-control is just one of the many results of such intelligence.
It feels like we are wasting our time looking for aliens searching for them in the skies (especially the unscientific work around oumuamua).
They are living right beside us in the form of cephalopods. We haven't deployed enough science on these amazing creatures yet (without of course distributing them like putting them in cages), probably because it's not a sexy field as compared to say astronomy or other cool things...
I do know there are a couple of websites for cephalopod enthusiasts:
Textbooks:
Cephalopod Cognition by Anne-Sophie Darmaillacq (Editor), Ludovic Dickel (Editor), Jennifer Mather (Editor)
Cephalopod Behaviour 2nd Edition by Roger T. Hanlon (Author), John B. Messenger (Author)
Personal anecdotes:
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness Paperback by Sy Montgomery
I don't care if its my favorite treat either. I believed quite strongly that a little vs a lot doesn't matter: the best parts are in the anticipation, the initial bite, and enjoying the lingering aftertaste. Having more more bites to eat is a gimmick with nothing but downsides (however now I get how things like addiction can drastically alter that equation so the "more" is practically everything).
So show me a version of this test that doesn't have the assumption "all kids are greedy for food and the most successful ones will optimize for that" at its core.
>The other part of the experiment was to test how good the six cuttlefish were at learning. They were shown two different visual cues, a grey square and a white one. When they approached one, the other would be removed from the tank; if they made the "correct" choice, they would be rewarded with a snack.
>Once they had learnt to associate a square with a reward, the researchers switched the cues, so that the other square now became the reward cue. Interestingly, the cuttlefish that learnt to adapt to this change the quickest were also the cuttlefish that were able to wait longer for the shrimp reward.
https://rs.figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_set_raw_traini...
Theory of Mind is much more a test of human-ness - a stage person-ness really. And yes, quite a few animals qualify.
Some birds remember thousands of locations of their stashed food. Some animals have a detailed internal map of many square miles of land on which they live. Pick just about anything a typical 3 year old can do, and we can find an animal to outperform them in that respect.
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...
And I'm curious if those studies of animal intelligence, actually tried a human. Could I remember thousands of place I put stuff? I think I do. I have a whole house full of stuff, and can find most of it quickly. I remember where I kept my socks in an apartment I lived in 30 years ago.
So yeah no, animals maybe aren't ahead of us in cognitive function.
But I have to doubt, when somebody claims (as in the title above) that some animal is cognitively more advanced that a human child. That's linkbait and best, and plain wrong at bottom.
-> Intelligence is ambient.
All cells think, and all collections of cells (from biofilms and stomatolites on up) think. In computer terms all cells use compatible protocols and processors and the living world is a kind of biological internet ("Wood-Wide Web").
-> All life shares one mind.
Whatever mind is, if you believe it "runs on" the physical substrate of cellular internet, then our minds are not separate from the minds of other living things. This would explain a lot.
When I bring this up people often object that this is anthropomorphism, but don't see it that way. Since all living tissue is intelligent, I see humans as the anthropomorphism of that ambient intelligence of the biosphere.
-> The biosphere is the result of "intelligent design": it's own.
From early on, the evolution of life would have become (more deeply) self-referential through mental feedback, meaning that the advent of intelligence itself becomes a factor in the further evolution of life. Things like the great switch-over from anaerobic to aerobic metabolism and the concomitant massive increase in atmospheric oxygen may well have been deliberate choice on the part of the global mind. In any event, the reductive mechanistic view of "dumb" life is faulty. Earth is Solaris.
Now this changes nothing about evolution. It's still a chemical tautology with no purpose, and adaptive pressure doesn't stop just because cells can think. ("Science does not remove the terror of the gods.") The Earth as a single being still has to navigate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Gaia is mortal. Part of the reason living systems seem so wildly inefficient (an illusion) is that they are so inconceivably resilient. (Efficiency vs. inefficiency is meaningless in evolution: there is no purpose so there can be no measurement of efficiency.)
[1] "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
It's a bit of natural selection. I don't know if cephalopods have a 'patience' gene. If yes, then --> natural selection. The ones who didn't have this gene got eaten many generations ago. The ones who do (and their genetically blessed offsprings), are alive to 'tell the tale'.
This is a bit biased if you ask me. They examined only the ones thay they found. The ones they found are the ones that are alive. The ones that are alive are the ones that are patient.
To disqualify my above 'theory' the scientists must capture eggs of 100 (?) eggs, raise them, treat them all the same, and then release them in a controlled 'wild' environment and see how fast they get eaten/how many survive for how long.
Then they compare results with their observations in the wild.
I am not a marine biologists, so I probably wasted 30secs of your life (apologies).