Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other
nature.com
nature.com
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
My only critique is that the plural spelling is octopuses and not octopi, just like the article. Octopuses just looks wrong and sounds funny, I stand my ground. Yes yes I know that it's not a Latin word.
Well that certainly got our attention. Please, continue.
The full thing is worth a read, but when you steal a word from one language that it also stole from a third, the pluralization rules are pretty much anything goes.
Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem.
(Originally it would have been visos => visosa, but the final vowel in virus has become closed, while the intervocalic s has become r due to rhotacism.)
You have been thinking at the masculine words whose stem ends in -u, like fructu (fruit), where the singular is fructus and the plural is fructuus. There -s is not part of the stem but it is a marker of the singular masculine nominative case.
In virus and the other neuter nouns that end in -s, the -s is a part of the stem of the word, not a case marker. There are also masculine word where the stem ends in -s, like muus (mouse), in which the -s must also not be confused with the marker of the nominative case that is applied to some of the words with other kinds of stems.
This would be true if virus were a third declension noun. It it is second declension noun. Its genitive is viri, not viroris.
Nevertheless, the meaning of the word is not certain, at least in the examples that I have seen.
Even if the word "viri" was really intended as the genitive of "virus", that is just another example of many cases when even the native speakers of Latin were not certain about the gender and declination class of certain seldom used words.
Whoever has used "viri" as the genitive of "virus" was believing that it is a masculine word of the 2nd declension. Most attested uses of virus are consistent with it being a neuter of the 3rd declension (i.e. "virus" was used for the accusative case). The word virus cannot be a neuter of the 2nd declension (in that case it would have been "virum").
Actually it is possible that in very old Latin the word virus was indeed a masculine of the 2nd declension, like its cognate word in Greek, but due to its meaning as a name of a substance it was transferred to the neuter gender in the 3rd declension.
Such interconversions of the words ending in -us between 2nd declension masculine, 3rd declension neuter and 4th declension masculine have happened for many words during the history of the Latin language, because even some native speakers guessed wrong the word class after hearing a rare word just a few times, and then others imitated them.
I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are or are not the same species, whereas 'octopodes' deliberately speaks across speciation? I dunno... I'm just spit-balling here. I probably should have done more research before commenting. Downvote if I'm way off base. :)
It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns.
It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling anyone there’s a right way because there isn’t. It’s a greek, latin, and english word, but also none of them. No usage is standard or ultimately correct.
so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive!
Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is)
Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species
Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s
Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out
I recall reading that back in the day, there were criticisms that the neologism "television" would never catch on ... because it combined Greek and Latin roots.
Romances in a nutshell.
And given the time available to an octopus while she waits for her eggs to hatch, what is the recommended reading list from the Loeb library for the octopus's consciousness if there were a universal translator babelfish she could use?
Yet we still have names ending in -ano. Mariano, Emiliano, Cipriano, Maximiliano...
I think 'octopodes' is 'most correct', but 'octopuses' is fine. And most will mispronounce 'octopodes' if they choose it anyway, so 'octopuses' probably would've been better.
As far as the plural goes, it is just a weird corner of the language where there is no consensus on what the right word is. merriam-webster lists all three variants as plurals.
English is an absolute mess
grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves
That's a really good point actually, one I've not heard before.
I think it's still harder learning from an ungendered language, since you naturally think of mapping word:word, but you also need word:gender now. With your point though, maybe I can have an easier time of it by trying to consciously think of it instead as word:(word, gender), if that makes sense.
So thin flat things like paper or shirts are 1 mai, 2 mai, 3 mai, while to count books you say 1 satsu, 2 satsu, 3 satsu.
Long round things like pencils or umbrellas go 1 pon, 2 hon, 3 bon, 4 hon, 5 hon, 6 pon, etc (yeah you read that right).
There are different counter words for different kinds of animals, small things, vehicles, shoes, drinks, people, etc.
https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-numbers-co...
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_mutation
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendaku
2: Of course, English pretty much only does the conspicous verson of this for that one word, because English.
You'd have a hard time counting all the stars, but "sky of star" doesn't work like "head of hair" does. I love how expressive English is, but it's got issues for sure.
That's not an uncountable. It's the count form, explicitly being counted by the count-noun-exclusive determiner many. (The mass form of many is much.)
The entire difference between "the hair on my head" and "the hairs on my head" is that in the second one you're counting the hairs.
It's a pattern matching phenomenon.
It would be less weird if there were not spelling irregularities, since the -pus is meant to be foot (like pes, pedes...in Latin, or pos, podes,... in Greek).
Basically, the spelling irregularity triggers a sensible pattern match, which happens to of course not honor the spelling irregularity.
And then nerds like me write too much about such, but i had years of Latin (and a little Greek) for something!
--fellow Latin nerd
used as a noun, it's an (implicit thing) prepared (which preparatus would describe, but i guess we don't have any other word in English other than apparatus.
i don't have a Latin dictionary though
What about the fishes of bread and fishes fame?
All of this is recalled from my high school Latin, which was a long time ago.
[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4
The plural of surplus is surpluses[2]. It would be *surplures/surplura in latin, so it is an English/French original. It doesn't make sense from an historical linguistic perspective to have a stem in dental "d" when in latin was in liquid "r": plus, pluris[3].
[2]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun [3]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension
Cactus is a masculine name from the second declension: its latin plural is "cactī"[4]. Again, it would be unexplainable how that stem in dental would appear in a second declension name (stem in "o").
[4]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin
Octopus is right, given that it's a third declension name with a dental stem.[5]
I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule pages for crawling.
These days, I imagine they have one ML model for the expected time until a given page shows up on the first page of search results for some query, another ML model for guessing how much the page has changed (cosine distance of some semantic embedding or something), and schedule based on the product of the two estimates. It's still probably lots of black magic heuristics, just now it's probably heuristics nobody can read.
As I mentioned, I expect that even more arcane heuristics, in the form of ML models, has largely or completely replaced the hand-written heuristics.
nautilus->nautilodes
anus->anodes
?!
"virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English.
"surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should be whatever plurals were in Old French. However it also originates in Latin as "superplus", which is the prefix "super" + the adjective "plus". The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura".
I admit that "superplodes" is pretty fun to say.
What's irregular about that?
Just because some English professor assholes wanted to show off their knowledge of foreign languages in the 17-19th centuries, doesn't mean we should follow those rules now. They are responsible for a lot of the confusion and horrible English rules that users of English now have to deal with. I say shit on their horrible legacy.
It's always possible that there are zero people who think of "pies" as an appropriate way to refer to pizzas, but the myth persists that weird foreign people do it. People will believe anything about weird foreigners. Or there might be weird foreign people doing it right now. It's hard to know.
I assure you some Americans certainly do, wherever they got it from, 'American' or not. I've only been exposed to it via American film/TV, including food shows - most recently Somebody Feed Phil in Chicago.
I've never heard it in the UK. I'd be surprised to learn that Italians call them something else too that in other contexts translates as 'pie', but I'm not sure how relevant that would be anyway.
I'm not saying anyone does that. I said so in my comment just above you. If I knew there were someone doing it, it would be hard for me to claim it was possible that zero people do it.
You've never heard it in the UK. I've never heard it in the US. It's not a normal thing to say. None of that adds up to a claim that some people say it.
In addition to the TV citation I gave above, see Wiktionary:
> Noun
> pizza pie (plural pizza pies)
> 1. (US) A pizza.
> [no further entries]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pizza_pie
And the slew of pizza-based results for the search term 'chicago pizza': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chicago+pie
He spends very little time drawing connections to consciousness or speaking about what octopus life can tell us about consciousness. There is a whole chapter where he talks about the influence of language in human action (like self-talk), and then ends the chapter by with something like "and octopuses don't have this ability". What was the point of that whole chapter then?
Maybe my expectations were miscalibrated, and I thought he would spend more time drawing connections between octopuses and humans, and what those similarities could tell us about consciousness. Instead of that, the writing about consciousness in this book is quite shallow.
If you're more interested in consciousness a good place to start is "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" by Annaka Harris.
That sounds like a recommendation to me!
On the biology part, if you never have heard of terms like "efference copy" it will be interesting food for thought about what consciousness might be, but no "solution" really. And you'll learn that an octopus is a ten megapixel screen, but that's just the first point again. If you only want that first point, there is also a "My Octopus Teacher" on Netflix, which is great in its own way.
If you wanted to read about human intelligence, I suggest "The Secret of Our Success" by Henrich instead.
Can you expand on this? I think I kind of understand where you're going with this: consciousness might be an efference copy of our actions? (so our actions don't "surprise" us? rather than consciousness creating actions?)
First it's just a nerve-path to prevent flinching back from the contact with something you wanted to manipulate. But once you have a fancy neural path that tells the visual cortex what light/objects to expect after you move your head left/right (maybe flee if it's unexpected), it's only a small evolutionary step to re-purpose this path, "execute" the same path while suppressing the head movement. So now you can process further what you are expecting if you move left vs right. Which could be interpreted as a step towards being conscious of your surroundings. (This is not 100% what the book says, but the idea I got from that chapter.)
For others who may find them interesting check out "My Octopus Teacher"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s166nC_hiZ0&ab_channel=Sebas...
If you're speaking English then you just add an s or es. So Octopuses is right.
It came into English from scientific (not classical) latin, so it kind of is.
[0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/11/gloomy-o...
> “We weren’t able to try and assess what the reasons might be,”
What looks intentional to one observer may seem accidental to another. “A lot of animal-behavior analysts would look at the same sequence of behavior and give a different interpretation,”
Do they really feel affection for their favored humans? I don't know. Discussions of this sort tend to devolve into debates about "qualia". What I do know is that octopuses appear to manifest signs of affection, and of contempt. And that I'd be honored to be nuzzled by an octopus, and I'd surely prefer that to being spit at by one.
It's equally ignorant to assume they don't have emotions as it is to assume they do. We literally don't know, but the harm in assuming they don't is people get a free pass to be cruel without guilt. If you assume they do then maybe you'll think twice about torturing animals or destroying their habitats.
Yes, people tend to over-anthropormphize in the sense they map to specific human concepts. But otoh, we tend to greatly underestimate the complexity of animal behavior. Sometimes people mix these up. So, just because an anthropomorphization isn't correct, doesn't mean that the behavior isn't complex.
Even animals like spiders and ants demonstratw incredible complex behavior, for social, hunting, sanitation purposes etc. So don't feel bad about anthropomorphizing, as long as you are aware it's just fun speculation. There are infinite mysteries in animal behavior and it's absolutely fascinating. There is so much left to explore.
Sure, there will be people that do anthropomorphise the octopus' actions, but this doesn't deny the possibility that an octopus can experience something analogous to feeling pissed off. (See: my table has four legs therefore it's a dog.)
To preempt those who might say "ah, but you can't prove that an octopus does have any form of consciousness" I'd point out that it's practically impossible to do that with humans too.
[0] It's certainly not one single ability. Perhaps some fuzzy superset of fuzzy sets.
[1] I include consciousness in "experiences", and I'd suggest that human-type consciousness is just one among very many.
Absolutely. Every trait previously thought unique to humans that I know of have been found in animals, such as deduction, tool making, intra-species warfare, delayed gratification, play, language, dialects, curiosity, mischieviousness, boredom, empathy, grieving rituals, etc etc. The only generic trait missing from my bingo card is humor (but monkeys seem close).
It may very well be that humans just got a constellation of traits that happened to fit really well together. If I was a betting man, I'd say:
- Very long brain development time. At birth, our skulls aren't even hard yet, and we're blind. This lets the brain develop at a slow pace towards general purpose problem solving.
- Hands are extremely helpful for tool making.
- Knowledge sharing. Yes, we're quite smart, but more importantly we can combine our findings through language and persist it over time through writing. This is an incredible change in the topology of knowledge. Even an animal with 3x intelligence would not stand a chance without language.
The worst that can happen is you have empathy for them.
My question is: was it throwing the shells out since it’s done eating them or in response to the other octopus that’s sort of messing with it?
That one instance is kinda hard to tell, but it sounds like they saw similar behaviour across observations.
Out on a hike once I came across two coyotes that were playing some elaborate games. They would chase each other around obstacles and after separating would try to ambush or sneak up on the other. It was a blast watching them.
There was also a raven who started flying around in the mix and would land next to one, vocalizing at it. There was no aggression on either side, it honestly looked like the bird was joining the play but I have no idea if that's true.
I did some research and couldn't find anything on ravens and coyotes playing together, but crows/ravens have been known to hunt with coyotes and wolves.
This head-canon melts in the face of the actual lore, but it helps me suspend disbelief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...
Children of Ruin: Parasitic space horror
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605957/themountaininth...
Watching it, I immediately classify the behavior as aggression. Why they would stop at "communication" is not clear to me.
Yes..."get the fuck away from me douchebag" has always been understood as an effective way to communicate.
It seems naive to assume they don't have communication (more frequent and more complex), even though we may not have noticed or been able to detect it.
Futurama was right, about the future of TV being in hypnotic frogs and the like.
"Oh, dear Lord, all over the Dean!"