"She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play
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With hands in the tank, I was able to play catch with a small plastic ball and a roughly 2 month old octopus. It was definitely catch — I could scoot the ball anywhere and the octopus would grab it and throw it back.
Possibly a trained behavior, who knows? It was really charming and delightful.
In other words, it was probably fun for the octopus too.
One of my dogs is the same. She knows exactly what you want her to do, but if there is no rewards involved, it's impossible. But as soon as you hold a snack in your hand, anything and more is possible.
Maybe the scientists haven't found a good enough snack to give them?
At any farm where animals are bred as commercial food sources we don't treat them with dignity. Another farm on the way - https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/1229233837/octopus-farm-spain...
So if you argue against all meat consumption by humans, then it is true: no keeper of animals can be considered "fit for keeping humans". Even a small farm purely for the owner's own consumption places restrictions on the livestock's freedom and ultimately keeps them so they can be eaten. Even animals that we keep as pets could be considered to live in inhuman conditions, because we restrict their freedoms.
I can't think of another situation in which one could choose to kill an animal for pleasure at 10% it's lifespan, and think that this was kind or respectful. Can you?
No, it's just part of the "circle of life".
Humans also interact with their environment and eat non human life forms (plants, cows, etc).
If we prove that trees have consciousness, will we need to stop killing them as well? Where does it end?
As for the tree hypothetical, why don’t we cross that bridge when we get there.
Humans have a capacity of reasoning about their actions, which places a certain responsibility on us to do better than nature. But where do you draw the line?
Ultimately we shouldn't eat animals at all - we should eat lab grown meat. But lab grown meat is still far away. So what do we do in the mean time? Ban all meat consumption? Is that even realistic?
Those with access to all the makings for a healthy plant-based diet should stop paying for animal products. It's that simple.
Is growing vegetables also inhumane, since we're controlling every aspect of those plants' lives?
Is doing pest control in your own house a mass murder, because you're killing a colony of cockroaches or termites?
Is washing your hands a genocide, because you're killing millions bacteria and tiny parasites on your hands?
That kind of extremist empathy is fatal to humanity. I'd rather choose to be cruel than dead.
> Imagine your children being born into one of these farms.
> You might argue non human animals are different, but why does that matter? Black and white people are different, why would that difference justify enslaving one group?
I don't claim to know where the exact line is, but thankfully, I don't have to, because the world doesn't run on ethical guidelines, it runs on power struggle. Grandparent was quick to draw the analogy to black slavery - I'd like to point out that black slaves were powerful enough to fight for their own freedom. Cows and chickens aren't. We're gonna eat them because that's just how the world works.
Of course, if someone very powerful becomes obsessed with animal rights, and uses political power to ban meat, I guess we'll stop eating them. I'd be very sad if that happens, but again, that's just how the world works.
What practices are used that constitute good treatment with dignity? And what animals are you talking about, and producing what goods?
I ask because I find that most people who say stuff like this think that a dairy cow with access to open pastures is treated well, and with dignity, but then overlook the fact that the animal is routinely artificially impregnated, separated from their calf over and over and over again, and then killed at a quarter of her natural lifespan because her milk production is no longer economically beneficial to the company that "owns" her.
I'm not trying to say that that's the case here, just trying to get specific because I talk with a lot of people who say similar things as you, and I want to know if you're saying something substantially different or not.
There’s no rational reason to believe this, of course, but it’s still fun to imagine in a sort of Erik von Däniken way.
On a more on-topic note, our growing understanding of animal intelligence has definitely made it harder for me to justify eating certain kinds of meat. My day-to-day is a bit too stressful to make the switch entirely to vegetarianism, but once my financial and personal situations have settled I'm looking forward to a less guilty lived experience. (This is of course not to say that you should feel guilty for eating meat - just my personal take)
As you say, not a really rational belief, but I always like it when disperate ideologies point in similar directions.
I think rationally, it's far more likely that Kashrut laws were designed to protect humans from eating certain more risky animals, especially 3-4,000 years ago in a place with high heat and little refridgeration, but I'll never actually know.
The journalist is hopefully misunderstanding a more correct explanation by the scientists. That most certainly isn't demonstration of foresight and planning. Nature is perfectly capable of encoding that sort of information as an instinctual response. Something like [trying to sleep] -> [get distressed by exposure to open ocean].
It is like how humans feel cold and put on a jumper. It isn't a demonstration that we all understand heat flow equations and have modelled out that we need to consume less food if we put another layer between us and the outside world, increasing the long term economics of our survival, demonstrating an advanced knowledge of thermodynamics and economics. Our body has encoded "heat leaking through skin" -> "feel uncomfortable" into our senses and that is all we need to respond to without considering the consequences of the response.
It just happens that the leading example was not correct. That sort of thing turns up all the time in creatures that are effectively thoughtless automatons.
For example, being uncomfortable might be an instinctive response to being cold, but it’s hardly thoughtless. Some people choose to swim in icy water as a form of recreation. Some sit outside on a cool night and enjoy the crisp air. We write songs and poetry about the deep frost. It means something to us.
I know our nervous systems are far more complex than eg: a bivalve mollusc, who are probably not composing poetry about the sensation they get that makes them close their shell.
I don’t really disagree with you about the observed behaviours in TFA, but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton.
I feel very weird about this too.
This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system, an article of faith, as the many alternatives are.
Saying this doesn't imply that every belief system is equally valuable or scientifically verifiable. But I think it's important to recognize one's axioms and/or biases.
The mechanistic view is certainly compelling and has the appearance of being all-encompassing.
Its all-encompassing appearance may actually be an artifact of how used to the story we've grown. A clockwork universe. We know that one by heart, whether we're scientists or not. We can apply that template to anything, and set about exploring (or reading about) the mechanisms. The fact that there are mechanisms everywhere doesn't prove that mechanism is all there is. That last part is an implicit belief system, a hidden article of faith, and that's how you get Descartes vivisecting dogs, and conscious experience necessarily (as though no other possibility could exist) having to be an "emergent" property.
That doesn't mean we have to give up on understanding the mechanism. Nor does it mean we shouldn't try to find out if it isn't a sufficient explanation. But calling it an unsupported belief system goes a bit far. It certainly isn't proven scientific theory. And there is room for it to be wrong. But there are good scientific principles behind this belief.
Intelligence and consciousness are two of the things we don't understand.
I agree it would be going too far to call it an unsupported belief system. I don't think I implied that it's unsupported, but it is a belief system. My point is that even with support, the underlying, unproven or unprovable assumptions should not be glossed over.
I'm skeptical that we have a mechanistic explanation of intelligence. I think we have sensible-but-unproven hypotheses, partially supported by observations, for how intelligence might evolve/arise. There's a lot of hand-waving between mechanistic principles and an outcome of general intelligence. One can imagine Occam's razor applying, if the hand-waving eventually resolves to something coherent. Until then, it's a combination of good science and fantasy.
Intelligence is just one of many human experiences that are believed/assumed to have mechanistic explanations. We should be careful to recognize the assumptions, however sound they may seem, and not turn them into dogma.
They picked an extremely mediocre example by octopus standards. Play is more interesting but this happens with primitive mammals as well, like squirrels and such. And fish, btw.
It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of magnitude less sophisticated[1] than what is obvious from having pets, watching a basic nature doc, or just observing wildlife for a tiny bit.
[1]: I tend to avoid words like intelligence etc both because they’re ambiguous as hell, and because people jump to anthropomorphization, backwards-rationalizing etc, in exactly the fashion you mention.
I would go further and claim that basically everybody holds the assumption that animal cognition lives on a scale of not sophisticated to very sophisticated, and also that human cognition holds the top spot on this scale, and that therefor anything else is below us in sophistication.
The idea that conscious thoughts are what makes our cognitive abilities so good is merely an assumption. It's very possible that in million year of evolution humans evolve a way to do everything we do today on instinct without the need for energy hungry consciousness. That would probably allow the brain to become much smaller and efficient over time.
With our assumptions we would conclude that the smaller brain and instinctual behaviors would signify a less sophisticated brain.
Certainly instinctual responses are a form of planning, but more automated. For example, people often forego reaching for a jacket (that is well within reach or even in their literal hands) if they are quickly going from one warm place to another. And idk about you, but I've done this without a moment's thought about how the other end will be warm. The action feels fairly automatic in the same way walking outside in winter has an automatic response of grabbing a jacket.
Of course, this could be because (and likely is) a more complex equation is formulated in my mind but just operated outside the conscious part. But I think that just illustrates how the lines blur. Especially since many conscious actions turn into unconscious ones. Think about when you first learned to drive a car and how involved you were compared to now many years later. In fact, you WANT to have automated responses as these are quicker, but they come through experience. Do we call this foresight and planning? I think you can argue either side. You can easily argue that some algorithm with explicit foresight and planning was encoded into the subconscious.
I guess I'm just trying to say that it is quite complicated and we should be ensuring this complexity is known (the existence of complexity, not necessarily all the details), or it will be difficult to interpret.
While the Stone Age people who first came up with clothing certainly didn't understand heat flow equations, they still had to think in advance about the coming cold snap and make preparations: hunting down some game for its coat, skinning it etc. Quite a sophisticated set of actions, not a mere instinctive response to changing temperature.
This is actually a bad example. Although cold being uncomfortable is instinctual, the way how people deal with feeling cold is not instinctual at all. People use different methods of dealing with the cold depending on situation, culture, experience.
In this way your example actually speaks for the claimed forethought, because in this analogy the octopus knows (from experience or speculation) that he will be uncomfortable when trying to sleep if he's exposed and he decides to 'put on a jumper' by putting rocks in front of the entrance.
Also instinctual behavior is in general much less sophisticated. Like an infant animal starting sucking when encountering a nipple shaped object or a moth circling a light bulb because it always tries to keep the brightest source above it. It could be that pulling debris around him before sleeping could be instinctual, but it would be very unlikely for that to include the process of looking for suitable rocks beforehand.
The author (Toomey) is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches courses in writing and in the history of science.
Also, I don't follow what lifespan has to do with anything. Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most other animals, including animals with very long lifespans, such as turtles.
Not to mention that the article was specifically regarding an octopus species that lives longer than that; I take it you did not actually read it?
A human bounces the ball: the connotation of play. Something or an animal bounces the ball: mechanical movement. Somehow, it feels like a different action.
In a more drastic version: a human is learning = self-fulfillment, becoming a better person and better member of society, advancement and progress, basic right; machine learning = consuming a dataset to create a black box that can “predict” the next token if you give it one.
If you see “bounces the ball” accompanied by “play” when talking about an animal, it can feel like the intent is to use one version of bouncing in place of another to anthropomorphize an animal (although it’s not clear what would be the alternative for the same mechanical action). I think it can be true that animals play, but someone who doesn’t think so can see it as sensationalizing and misleading public into being taken literally.
In a similar vein, a statement “LLM learns” could seem normal to some, but rub someone else wrong if they think attributing humanness to LLMs is sensationalizing and misappropriating industry term into being taken literally (probably to benefit the big tech).
Nope, it's about the common octopus. That is what Octopus vulgaris is. Yes, I did read it.
> Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most other animals
Rats are not popularly deemed "highly intelligent" animals, unlike octopi. If we thought them to be on their level we wouldn't be sharing these articles all the time.