What the article doesn't highlight at all is the octopus' very short lifespan (the longest-lived species has a maximum lifespan of 5 years) and that they die shortly after breeding, which means it's not possible for young octopuses to learn from their parents the way other relatively intelligent animals (cats, dogs, monkeys, dolphins etc.) do. Having these handicaps (growing up without parents and short lifespan) is one possible explanation for why they developed their high intelligence.
I just finished reading Eric Hoffer's Ordeal of Change. It's a great book exploring the behavior and psychology of people who make change happen. In the last few chapters he summarizes it by saying:
"The severing of the individual from a compact group is an operation from which the individual never fully recovers. The individual on his own remains a chronically incomplete and unbalanced entity. His creative efforts and passionate pursuits are at the bottom a blind striving for wholeness and balance. The individual striving to realize himself and prove his worth has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology."
It clearly applies to many apex predators that spend most of their lives on there own.
Given how smart, versatile and dextrous the octopus is, its impressive array of senses, and its highly creative use of tools, I can only conjecture that the ocean environment is not conducive to an accretion of technology.
I.e. the corrosive ocean water makes the possibility of complex technology difficult, so the octopus hasn't been able to evolve into a longer lived, more socially cooperative creature.
Fire, chemistry, long term construction ... impossible or difficult.
Because otherwise they seem to have everything. Even latent social ability, despite their typical loner existence.
Another impediment is that hiding (their unshelled tasty soft bodies) really well is one of the hallmarks of their intelligence. That would tend to preclude tight cooperative social groups.
If you can't learn from your parents then the more you can figure out on your own, the better your chances of survival. And intelligence allows each individual to figure out things on their own and adapt to new situations even better than if they just repeated whatever they learned from their parents.
I doubt this is how nature works - with the exception of octopuses, it seems. In most environments, you probably get eaten or starve to death before you have time to figure it all out yourself.
> Or are you proposing only the smartass octupuses survive?
Yes, that's how evolution works. Some octopus is a little bit smarter than the others and is able to escape a predator by hiding in a hole. She doesn't get eaten today and so is able to reproduce tomorrow. Some of her 100,000 eggs have her genes for higher intelligence.
The octopus kids who are slightly more intelligent are also slightly more likely to survive and reproduce. And if the genes for intelligence build on each other then at some point the smart octopusses will have a kid or a few kids who are even a little bit smarter and survive a little bit better. Maybe they're smart enough to figure out they can hide under a shell.
If you're able to learn "hide under a shell" from your parents then you don't need to be that smart. But if each individual is able to figure out "hide under a shell" from first principles then that's a huge advantage. Maybe you ended up far from home and the shells look different here. Congrats, your octopus can still figure it out, but your imprinted animal is now dinner. The octopus can still reproduce and pass along his "smart" genes.
I don't think this is not how evolution works. Octopuses are most likely as dumb (or, by maritime standards, clever) as they were millions of years ago.
> Having these handicaps (growing up without parents and short lifespan) is one possible explanation for why they developed their high intelligence.
That argument makes sense, but is exactly the opposite of what we see in nature in every case except the octopus.
Intelligent animals tend to live a long time (apes, elephants, dolphins). One assumes that it's because the advantages to intelligence accrete over long periods.
If you're only going to live a few years, you want to devote all your energy to being strong and fast.
This is one of the things that makes octopuses so baffling.
You picked three mammals for your example of an age-intelligence correlation. Maybe it's just a large mammal thing? I think most large mammals live a long time.
And it isn't just a "normal" short lifespan - The octopus lifecycle ends with self-harm and what in humans would be called depression, in addition to other more typical hallmarks of senescence, and this is a complicated process involving a whole bunch of signaling systems which is centrally coordinated by an endocrine gland!
I read the paper "On being an Octopus" by Peter Godfrey-Smith in "Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings" (2021). This book contains a lot of interesting material on consciousness.
Previous to that I had been meditating a lot on what it is like to be a rock.
No sense of time, no memory, no input at all. For all the rock knows, time would run in reverse, or jump all over the place. Obviously, the rock doesn't know about space either. Now if you are able to think up a universe without animals or humans, this opens up a lot of room to doubt some basic beliefs.
I recently found out that someone [1] ridiculed the philosophy on "what it's like to be" by using a rock as well. I was slightly disappointed by this, because the rock metaphor works fine for me. Perhaps I misunderstood the article.
Yeah I seem to recall that essay was intended to mock Nagel's famous thoughts on the perspective of a Bat [1]
You may be aware you are on safe philosophical ground, ponderers of the hard question have pointed out there is not obviously reason to think consciousness is special to beings more complicated than thermostats. [2]
I write a lot about geology and to me rocks are anything but static entities. Their timescales are different, but their memory structures are deep and long-lasting. To me, being a rock is to see millions of years of constant change in a single arc… well, unless you are an Archean outcrop.
Why do you think that there's something that it's like to be a rock? Assuming panpsychism, you still need to come up with a reason that consciousness is aggregating at the "rock" level, rather than at the mineral crystal level or what not.
And what about as the rock crumbles? Rocks are constantly eroding and re-amalgamating. What is it like to be sandstone? What is it like to be a magma flow?
Is there something it is like to be a severed limb? What about a clipped toenail? A pile of leaves? It is not obvious that just because we as humans identify something as “an object” that it must follow that that object has an internal experience.
I personally don't think that the rock has consciousness. I merely try to ponder what it would be like to be a rock.
There is so little to hold on to, given that the rock has no brain, no senses. To me, that implies that there are no concepts, there is no abstraction. Given that most of the universe is gas and rocks, and not brain, it makes me wonder a bit.
My approach is not scientific in a direct way, but I think that, in the long run, it might be helpful to come up with new ideas about reality.
That was required reading when I was studying Philosophy back in the day. I guess that's what made so much science fiction interesting: knowing how others experience things is a great antidote against solipsism.
I don't go so far as to boycott restaurants which serve octopus but I refuse to eat them myself. I did try it once. It was not bad. But not so good as to be worth the destruction of a fascinating creature.
And yes, I eat pigs, cows and sheep on a regular basis. I am also not advocating that anyone mimic my food choices (which may be weird to see on a public internet forum).
There's lots of things that happen in the wild that us humans shouldn't use as a moral compass. Also eating them involves causing these great creatures mass amounts of pain and suffering before they die. It's best to just leave them alone and let them live their lives in peace.
Check out the new science fiction novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler https://www.raynayler.net/
It's about minds and intelligence (octopus and otherwise).
> "When you're dealing with an octopus who's being attentively curious about something, it is very hard to imagine that there's nothing experienced by it," says Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. "It seems kind of irresistible. That itself is not evidence, that's just an impression."
> "Octopi are sentient, they will kill us all"
> "Octopi are glorified -t-e-x-t---g-e-n-e-r-a-t-o-r- reproduction machines, they only act curious because it leads to more sex, they can't kill us."
'Eight legs' in Latin is 'octo pedes' which is really not that different. Octopi is euphonious, because it balances two broad syllables with a narrow one, although octopoda is more onomatapaeic.
Recently read a New Yorker article that was arguing for "free-range" lab mice which may actually be better for the experiments themselves. I hope there's enough oversight for these programs.
The first book in the series, Children of Time, is also fantastic. It's regarding a species of artificially intelligent spiders (intelligence accelerated by an "ancestral memory" based down genetically). He provides some really great takes on how their technology differs from humanity. Almost all of their scientific progress happens biologically instead of using silicon, so things like computing is achieved through manipulating ants using their pheromones', and combustion/metals don't really exists in any meaningful way, replaced instead with ultra-light-but-strong materials with tensile strength as the energy method.
I really enjoy Adrian Tchickovsky's work in general. Just a couple of weeks ago I finished his Shadows of the Apt 10 books series, and his world building is fantastic. I'd highly recommend his books for the Fantasy/Sci-Fi enthusiast.
I've only read his Dogs of War, which was also about animals with artificially enhanced intelligence and other abilities --this time a dog, a bear, a lizard of some description, and a swarm of bees with a hive mind, working as soldiers for a private military company with questionable ethics.
Man oh man, if you like stories about sentient dogs and dubious military groups, you'll love We3 by Grant Morrison. It's easily one of my favorite graphic novels.
Tchaikovsky's books convey an extraordinary depth of empathy and intellect, knowledge and imagination. I just finished the 10-book Shadows of the Apt series... highly recommended.
I came to say this, excellent book. And to add to user rob74's comment in this thread: If memory serves, in the book, one of the procedures to uplift the species was to lengthen their lifespan artificially so octopi could enter some "teaching feedback loops".
Add Iain M. Banks The Algebraist (his only non-culture sci-fi, as far as I know). Much of the book takes place in a gas giant populated by a race of long-lived creatures that are basically two octopi glued together.
Came here for this. He is unparalleled IMHO at putting you in the mind of the creature. His latest Children of Memory is eerie with its timing with ChatGPT getting big.
i was going to say that i've read most of his books and enjoyed all of them, but i i keep coming across new ones (and enjoying them)! golly, is this guy ever productive!
I was born into a vegetarian family. I still am a vegetarian, but I accept that one species eats another in this world and that is how nature has evolved.
What has stopped me from ever eating meat was this: if we encountered an alien race which slaughtered and consumed humans the way humans consume other animals, how would I feel? The answer was always that I would feel disgusted/horrified/angry.
Shouldn't we all feel the same about another sentient species? We could argue forever about what 'sentience' means, but beyond a certain point it just feels callous to not stop.
My main objection to meat eating is the way we raise animals for meat, especially on an industrial scale. These animals are suffering immensely throughout their whole lives. I find it difficult to reconcile thinking of ourselves as ethical while we support these practices.
I have less of a problem with people hunting for food. The animals can live their normal lives and one day it's over, either because of a mountain lion or a human. That's the way nature works. Of course there is the problem that there are too many humans and they would quickly kill all wild animals.
I agree with you on all counts. I have no problem with a person hunting for meat and consuming it.
That said, most humans will not hunt, just as they will not grow fruits and vegetables to consume. But by outsourcing the hunting (which essentially has led to the industrial farming of meat), everyone who eats such meat is complicit in the cruelty meted out to animals.
There was an interview I watched recently that said the whole factory animal farming industry basically relies on maintaining a distance between the consumer and the farms, as the average consumer doesn't want to think or consider how the meat arrived, etc.
Also what is jaw dropping, is the scale of slaughter of many different animals. Perhaps none more than chicken. I don't remember the exact number(can easily google) but it is massive. I do think we need to consider how all this scale has helped drive down costs and availability of food which further helped alleviate human hunger around the world. Though, I feel sad every time I hear of a story of a barn fire at one of these farms killing like 50K chickens at once. Or the recent bird flu cases, where they need to cull all the birds to stop it from spreading. And I remember the stories during the onset of Covid, where they had to basically cull huge numbers of animals, because restaurants, etc would shut down for the near future.
One other thing that has felt awful to me is that of mink farming. I don't understand how that business still exists(some places it's banned, but not everywhere). Especially with all the textile technology, and means we have in today's world, it seems morally wrong to subject these these animals to suffer needlessly, and also get affected by these flu's, etc. which leads to massive culls.
A reasonably common theme in SF stories is that after we encounter some other intelligent, star-faring, race, that both races find each other delicious.
After reading about intelligence and feelings in other animals, I find myself eating less meat. Even fish & insects have been shown to experience pain.
While people aren't eaten today (mostly), it doesn't mean they're not consumed. They're conscripted and forced to die in trenches. Many live menial laborious lives so the few can live in opulence.
In simpler times, at least we could identify our rules. The Indians could easily identify the white British as their exploiters. Today we have an amalgamation of international corporations, billionaires, royalty, and dictators (did I repeat myself?) exploiting us.
This is the appropriate response to the thought of your species being slaughtered for food. Happily, there's no reason to assume that any other species is capable of contemplating such a thing!
They are capable of feeling pain, of course, which is a good argument against eating veal or foie gras. But it's hardly a reason to not eat any meat. If you're eating free range chickens or pasture-raised beef, it's likely that the animal you're eating lived a pretty good life and had one bad day.
> This is the appropriate response to the thought of your species being slaughtered for food
not necessarily. there are a lot of assumptions you're making here
> there's no reason to assume that any other species is capable of contemplating such a thing!
you don't know this
> If you're eating free range chickens or pasture-raised beef
in case that by "free range chicken" and "pasture-raised beef" you mean the same that the indurstry does by using those terms, you should do some research into how those animals are actually raised and the lives they live
There’s plenty reason to suspect other animals are capable of this experience. We know for example that elephants will mourn their dead. Spend any time with a dog and you’ll realize they too are clearly affected when their loved ones are gone.
As far as I’m aware, the overall trend is that as we learn more and more about animals, they consistently have richer and more complex lives than we thought they had previously.
“Non-human animals can’t experience complex emotion” is the bold claim that relies on unproven exceptionalism. That is the claim we have no evidence for.
Incorrect; many human pleasures revolve around other humans, and those are (in all important regards) as much a part of our environment today as 100kya.
For the rest, I distain only those which violate my sense of empathy, which asks "would I be OK if the tables were turned?": that we enjoy games of skill involving throwing things is seldom important but morally neutral, that we act as though calories is scarce is bad on a personal level but again not a moral concern (I don't think hunger is generally caused by others overeating).
Ignoring the actual question you pose, I think it's really unlikely some aliens come here to eat us. We eat for energy and raw materials.
I doubt humans will eat for much longer. In 1000 years we'll have solved the problems with these meat contraptions housing our compute. We'll probably work on sunlight by then.
Maybe we'll borrow the genetics from plants. Fun times.
Well, sure, if you were a wild human. But what if you were one raised on the alien's human factory farm. Maybe they had a taste for human babies (like humans do for cow babies), or human fois gras ... But I guess there's not much you could do other than stoic acceptance.
Yes, but if say tigers (or any other species) started "farming" humans and slaughtering them well before the end of their natural life span, would you still be ok with it?
I did grow up in a religious vegetarian family but my rationale for remaining vegetarian is simple. We derive all our energy from the sun. The more hops between myself and the source, the less efficient the energy transfer. For now plants to me is the most efficient way I know. I still eat dairy and eggs but no meat for that reason.
What if plants are sentient too? after all, they react to stimulus and grow towards light, etc. Maybe we are just more keen on protecting life that is more like us.
Bears eating elk seems okay to me, partly because it seems like they are born that way and they haven't evolved beyond their basic instinct to eat and survive. It seems that as human beings, we have a higher order skill named empathy. We feel pain and suffering and are able to relate to the pain and suffering of others - even if they are animals.
Once this evolution has happened, is it still right to continue inflicting pain and suffering for ones own benefit?
Would we? the Predator film franchise is popular because the alien visitor is an obvious dark reflection of ourselves. Ridley Scott's Alien franchise is considered more horror than action because the creature is parasitical and asocial. (Incidentally you should check out his TV shows Raised by Wolves for yet another perspective.)
