Octopuses are building small “cities” off the coast of Australia (2017)
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The book features, among other things, an octopus civilization.
It's the second book in the series; the first features a spider civilization.
I highly recommend both; they explore concepts of what civilizations would look like with intelligences very different from our own.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Children-Ruin-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky...
Especially since the dialog can be a bit boring imo (each character has some quirk and all their lines / actions tend to be predictable when taking this into account). IIRC, the Children of Time books aren't so bad in this regard (less drama, more reverse-engineering alien tech), but I definitely think the newest book for The Final Architecture kinda suffers from this.
But yeah nonetheless I really enjoy how creative the world building / overall plots are and would definitely recommend his stuff to anyone who likes sci-fi.
Nothing turns me off an author who can write prose well faster than switching perspectives every chapter - you're throwing out one of, if not _the_ biggest advantage of long-form narrative : the ability to get deeply into the head of a character.
I had to stop reading Cloud Cuckoo Land because of this. And while I'm shouting into the void, this goes for you too, TV/movie producers:
Just tell the damn story straight. If you can't do that and make it interesting, you need a better story.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
tl;dr there’s no right answer, and consequently no way to say “more than one octopus” on the internet without yours being the first response :-)
Hi, OctoPi!
I knew it was a series but everyone said the others weren't as good, so I just never bothered. But that sounds interesting enough that I just placed a hold on it in my library app (81st in line?! Children of Ruin is that popular? shh I also placed it on hold in a different library app).
https://podcasts.apple.com/br/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id...
https://overcast.fm/+oiPVWKYM0
Couldn’t get a direct link to the show at the NYT that didn’t involve a paywall.
What most struck me was how incredibly short lived octopuses are. I guess some deep-sea variants may have longer life spans, but i was surprised that the variants we usually encounter only live for approximately two years before they wither and die.
Now as for what an octopus could be able to do with its body-distributed form of consciousness given a longer lifespan is a rather interesting question.
See Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford, 2005, where, among other things, he points out that we will all be recycled some day.
I think it feels like progress to discover counterintuitive thoughts, and so thought experiments or explorations tend to to incentivize the seeking out of counterintuitive thoughts, which I think sometimes has the effect of endorsing strange conclusions, because their counterintuitive nature is what makes them seductive. I find the phrase "it's not a trick question" to be a healthy antidote, and I think when it comes to longevity it's in the "not a trick question" category, and, is fair to put in the good column, with usual caveats about all else being equal and except for unusual circumstances etc.
If you want a counterexample, languages models are intelligent enough to write essays asking for asylum but that doesn't mean any sane person would give a language model rights. There's no moral imperative to not kill something just because it's intelligent.
I also think Takoyaki is highly relevant because if octopus wasn't delicious, nobody would want to eat it in the first place and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Most things would taste delicious with those ingredients. Probably even Tofu :)
I found the parent comment more offensive than the reply - proselytising morality rather than framing it as an open question. I find it very patronising.
I was once walking through the Tokyo fish market at 5am and marveled at some enormous tentacles hanging out of a bucket. The man smiled and walked over to me and placed a chuck of octopus in my mouth. I remember this as semi-consensual.
What was astonishing was that I chewed that chunk for about a half hour before it dissolved and the whole time, every single chew, it tasted fresh (and very delicious).
Part of my moral reaction is the knowledge that the octopus tentacle would be still alive in a meaningful way. Sigh.
>Many animals are probably sentient, but personally I see no moral imperative to not eat them
In that case, what moral imperative is there for me not to eat you?
I don't want a lion to eat me. But I don't have a moral complaint against the lion for wanting to, trying to, or even succeeding. I'd be pissed, of course, but my objection is purely that I don't want to be eaten at all, period. There's not a moral dimension to it at all.
I also don't want YOU to eat me. But unlike the lion, I DO have a moral objection against you, on top of the simple not-wanting-to-be-eaten-at-all thing.
In conjunction with that, I find that I also have a moral objection against MYSELF, when it comes to the thought of ME eating YOU. So, although I don't know for sure yet what the basis of that moral objection is, I have learned that there does exist one. And, I can conjecture that whatever the foundation of that objection is, that's the same basis for my moral objection against you eating me.
But, whatever that basis is, it doesn't seem to apply to a lion who wants to eat me, because I don't morally object against the lion. So, although that doesn't guarantee anything one way out the other just yet, perhaps it's justified that I don't feel any moral discomfort with me eating the lion[0], while absolutely having immense moral discomfort with you doing so, or even really wanting to. The situation, morally, with the lion seems to be a different thing, morally, than you eating me or vice-versa.
([0] This is speaking in the moral abstract, anyway—as it happens, there's not really enough lions left in the world to waste eating them, but that's separate from the question of whether it's moral to do so in general, if situational stuff like species extinction and other ($n)th-order effects weren't a factor).
This doesn’t apply to other animals.
Kant sort to solve moral questions using pure reason. Culminating in his famous categorical imperative, also known as the universality principle: “It is our duty to act in such a manner that we would want everyone else to act in a similar manner in similar circumstances towards all other people”
You have some how confused this with pragmatism, and while Kant could be viewed as quite pragmatic, taken to its extreme, a pragmatic position would be: if you are hungry and human meat is available, then eat it.
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
For instance, don‘t inflict unnecessary harm on living animals if it can be reasonably avoided.
At least to me this sounds like a pretty reasonable rule that I would be willing to follow and could prevent a lot of suffering in the world.
Other hominids? Neanderthals?
Funny where empathy ends, isn't it. It seems to be subject to individual variation.
Medically, there is the risk of Prion disease. This is a major threat to yourself, and in a few cases it is contagious. So you would have the medical imperative to avoid it to keep the people around you safe.
We don't want our future AI overlords to kill us because we're 1000x dumber than them and also not the same species. I think it's only fair for us to extend the same morals to animals.
That depends on whether our future AI overlords need to eat us or not. The issue, at least for eating animals or humans is a need for sustenance.
As someone enjoying a vegan lifestyle, I am living proof that humans do not need to eat other animals. Also if we would stop the cruel practice of factory farming, it’s common knowledge that we would have more calories available for us humans. In terms of sustenance, we are going out of our way to hurt humans and other animals to uphold the entrenched consumption patterns of a select few.
I think for AI overlords the question will be quite similar… how should we use the resources which we have available? Who is worthy of consideration and who is not? At the moment, we are truly not making a great case for keeping us around because anything we can do, they can do better. So why keep us around if not for some ethical insight?
To take an example ranking of potential food animals: fish, chickens, cows, pigs, great apes, humans.
There's a question about where you draw the line, but most people agree there is one. Few people think it's OK to eat chimps.
It's not clear on this hierarchy where octopuses fit in.
That just seems so bizarrely naive to me. Every living thing suffers when hurt. Suffering is a feeling of not wanting to die, or to be hurt. I'm pretty sure that it is one of the primary mechanisms of evolution of living things, it is a strive for self preservation. Human suffering is fundamentally the same as that of an octopus, an insect or a tree.
No, intuitively, most people do not agree there is a line… people just buy meat and eat it, and the main consideration is taste. Can you provide any evidence suffering factors into the majority of peoples food decisions?
- Thomas, Garth J. (1967). 'Consciousness', Encyclopaedia Britannica. Vol. 6. p. 366.
I remember highlighting the line "Consciousness is consciousness of being conscious" in a Sartre essay when I was 16. It seemed profound then, but obvious now.
The mind of a chicken is neatly captured by Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMo4WlBmGM
Octopi are not like that. Octopi are something else, and I do believe they are not so far from us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kQb-badp1s
He doesn't mention anything about vegetarianism, I made my own connection there. But even something as dumb as birds have connections to one another, they have a mating and courtship process that feels very similar to humans, they care about their young and will defend them to the death, and the male partner understands the importance of providing for his mate and younglings and does so both by finding and building a nest, but also tirelessly providing food for months
Given an octopus can regrow a limb can we farm them more ethically than we do mammals?
Almost all animals that don't have an economic basis in human politics are going to go extinct so we better find something meaningful to justify their protection.
Of course there are some truly resilient ones like rats and roaches that seem to have actually adapted favorably but the vast majority haven't.
Don't most vegans just want livestock to go extinct too?
Something just a bit beyond this plus some significant AI developments is the bulk of milieu for _The Mountain In The Sea_:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605957/themountaininth...
I enjoy the genre of 'marine biologist writes sci-fi about the nature of consciousness', but I can only take so much Peter Watts before I feel the need to read something with at least a dreg of hope, you know?
In the second or third book, amongst other things, a planet is seeded with octopuses and an "uplift virus" that dramatically boosts their sentience. It's a brilliant trilogy in its own right, but the sentient squids were my favorite species by far. Each having 8 independent minds to gather data and execute, plus a central vague philosophically minded intellect that holds their volition and long term planning.
I think that's basically justified. He gives the foundation of their tech with a good amount of rigour and plausibility, and then as their civilisation develops and becomes equivalent to human civilisation and then significantly higher tech he obviously can't go into full detail on every piece of technology any more than you could write a story about modern human society while including a description of how every piece of our technology that is mentioned works, from first principles - the resulting book would be beyond the capability of any individual to write and would include far, far more descriptions of technological principles than actual plot. Just imagine if you wanted to tell a story about an interpersonal relationship between two people, but one of them uses a chat program on their phone and even though you've previously explained how our computation basically worked, now you have to explain neural networks and then LLMs - I think it's reasonable to just expect the viewer to imagine the things that aren't directly explained as being approximately as well explained and justified as everything else was.
He does definitely go beyond hard sci-fi at the end of book two though. The idea that c as a limit is simply a result of our brains thinking too linearly is silly, and in general going beyond the hard laws of physics is where I draw the line.
We shouldn’t just leave them as-is after doing so though—we should build a super massive aquarium, and if we actually succeeded in making them smarter — be there to teach them science, math, physics, biology, medicine, computer science, etc.
The trouble is, in this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one. And if you can’t know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, you can’t compare the character of the lived experience of what it is like to be you, right now, a mere human, to the character of the lived experience of what it would be like to be a vampire. This means that, if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future, you can’t do it rationally. At least, you can’t do it by weighing the competing options concerning what it would be like and choosing on this basis. And it seems awfully suspect to rely solely on the testimony of your vampire friends to make your choice, because, after all, they aren’t human any more, so their preferences are the ones vampires have, not the ones humans have. -- L.A. PaulBut the first time? Absolutely.
Kind of your moral question but in reverse.
As it happens, I am perfectly comfortable with the idea of intervening to help animals in more cases than we currently do, and if I had to guess what one belief we have now that will be regarded as appalling by some future generation, I think this (letting nature run its course when it leads to animals suffering) could be one of them.
Becoming sentient on an already developed industrialized world seems like it would be awful, though . I like to think there are many paths where a species could be welcomed & supported well, but it's hard to imagine that happening on our present earth.
We should be careful in case someone decides to try to uplift us.
So that may not be an argument in favor of it being the moral choice.
A lot of discussion on the problem of evil is quite obscure but worth reading if you're in any doubt about all of creation being a fundamentally excellent thing.
Edit: missed the "if". Assuming you put that there because we currently do not have this tech. Speculatively: like most society wide moral choices, it'd probably be made in such a way as to serve the short term interests of whoever had the power to enact the policy.
Alternatively: Would octopus uplift increase the quarterly profits? If so, say hello to your new eight-legged neighbors.
But then, perhaps they would learn to give each other nub rubs and then we’d have this runaway hedonic biological phenomena underseas. My god.
Within the article, there is this quote that further hints at the click-baity idea that this is some new behavior: “ Researchers now suspect octopuses have been building group habitats for a long time.”
Would one say that squirrels have been hiding nuts for a “long time”?
Phrasing it this way, in my opinion, misleads the reader it I thinking this is some new behavior which has been going on for a “long time” — perhaps for several decades!
When, in reality, it’s probably normal octopus behavior thst had been occuring for as long as there have been octopuses.
I picture s 18th century naturalist breathlessly writing to the Royal Society: “you know the beavers we heard about? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but they are now building dams! And I think they’ve been up to this for quite some time! What will they come up with next?!”
"Octopuses observed engaging in light manufacturing"
"Octopuses experimenting with novel propulsion methods"
"Octopuses clearing out a large, flat space and assembling assorted metallic objects"
"Octopuses targeting Sydney, Brisbane"
> "Congregations such as these probably occur wherever shelter is limited to small patches of habitat, and food is plentiful," Scheel told Quartz.
They don't decide to live nearby others, but there simply is no other place.
The headline should be: Octopuses cannot live everywhere and may settle close to eachother if there is no other space available.
Sounds more like a village than a city or even a town
It's a one-seahorse town.
I had no idea it was a scientifically significant thing though. I wonder if they're still there, as there's been a lot of development nearby.
> Typically, octopuses mate when the male shoots a package of sperm called a spermatophore at the female through the water. The barbed package burrows into her skin and releases the sperm. No touching is required.
But I also read that they don't get along with other octopuses most of the time. And in this article too they fight over territory. But Humans do that too, and we're social.
If forming social relations are evolutionary advantages, then I wonder would perhaps Octopuses start developing more social tendencies as a means of adapting to these new environmental changes. As noted in the article, the areas contained surplus food. Which is also interesting, but maybe this is just a local phenomenon, because there were many headlines in recent years about overfishing.
And outside of teaming up to thwart predators, but I don't think that would help against sharks unless they have a much higher intelligence and can outsmart them like how humans have evolved to do. So not really clear to me why they are living nearby, aside from abundant food and no pressure to explore new areas. So it comes back to maybe they are social. Next thing you know, they'll playing underwater pickleball with each other.
They even use to torture and eat themselves after mating.
Early death after reproduction probabbly increases the chances of survival for the offspring.
Neither intelligence nor consciousness are goals of evolution, only some possible ways.Their way of life is the behavior that ensures the temporary optimum for passing on their genetic information.
> The first time that divers discovered a "city" of octopuses off the coast of Australia, it seemed like a fluke.
I learned from Kevin Malone what 'fluke' means: https://youtu.be/b8KbWAMJk1g?t=275.
https://www.theonion.com/dolphins-evolve-opposable-thumbs-18...
Back in the day, it used to have a subheading too:
“‘Oh shit,’ says humanity.”
And also get out of the water given it's pretty hard to make chemistry in there.