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Comment by yawpitch | Hacker News Reader

> but probably nothing beats it in complexity

Spend a little while seriously watching an octopus, and you may move that needle.

They're very intelligent for sure, but their neurons are also a lot bigger. About 500 million neurons in an octopus (whole body) vs 86 billion in a human (just the brain.)

Size and quantity of neurons isn’t known to determine intellectual capacity, plus for all we know that’s just RAM… they live a few years, max, we live considerable longer, maybe they literally don’t need as much long term storage to fill with, for example, misplaced nostalgia for 1980s toy commercials?

I would argue that having so much capacity for memory retention that our brains can spare space on frivolous things like that is marvelous in and of itself. Retention of information is arguably as important as the capacity for information. Humans passing down stories for generations, then inventing the written word to preserve ideas for years and year, is itself a beautifully complex thing.

Marvelous, certainly… unique, not necessarily. Some corvids appear capable of passing down skills (tool use) and memories (which humans have harmed previous generations), and just because we lack the ability to understand their stories doesn’t mean dogs, birds, and octopi aren’t passing down just as immense and marvelous communal knowledge via scent, sound, and touch.

As for the written word… I’d call that a running experiment. It’s capable of beauty, certainly… but it’s also capable of Meta (née Facebook) and X (née Twitter). Of course the fact that we can readily coin new terms for new situations — I hereby dub the use of X by its current owner _muskturbation_ — is intrinsically complex, but I’m not sure it isn’t also a direct pathway to both babble and Babble and, ultimately, species-ending atrocity.

Are you intimating that an octopus is more complex than human cognition? Or just that an octopus is complex?

I mean that it appears that octopus “cognition” — dangerously a word we control and can easily twist to only apply to us — is almost necessarily more complex than human cognition, if for no other reason than they seem to have distributed their “thinking” — another dangerously solipsistic word — into their arms and out into their body, well away from merely their brains.

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