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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is interested in cephalopod intelligence I heartily recommend the book: "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

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One of the most interesting concepts in the book was "efference copies." The idea is that your mind needs to distinguish between stimulus that you caused by voluntary action (moving your arm) versus stimulus that the environment causes (your arm being moved by something else), so you send these "echos" of your voluntary actions back to your brain and this is possibly where your sense of self comes from.

That. And the idea that the cuttlefish are perhaps showing their internal state via their changing color patterns and not as a sinajng device. And of course their fairly short lives.

Related: I highly recommend the documentary My Octopus Teacher

https://www.netflix.com/title/81045007

Yes, that is excellent as well. And quite moving.

I second this recommendation. I think someone in HN recommended this, very fascinating. My respect and interest for octopuses and surprisingly cuttlefish went way high up after reading this book. Kudos to whoever recommended it!

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...

Thanks all, for these references! My wife is into cephalopod intelligence. I'll forward this to her and ask if she has any other recommendations.

I do know there are a couple of websites for cephalopod enthusiasts:

https://zapatopi.net/cephnews/ https://tonmo.com/

My wife sent me these that she has read and recommends:

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

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