61–70 of 329 posts
I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...) I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ And the follow-up: https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/intervie…
Saving you a click: "Are they capable of conscious thought? Godfrey-Smith treks through some rather testing philosophical and psychological terrain to conclude in the negative. While cephalopods are capable of exceptional complexity in their signalling, the machinery of interpretation is too limited. Humans, perhaps uniquely, have gained the ability to step outside ourselves, to think about our thoughts by means of a…
"And yet... could we be missing something here? While they can’t see much of their own kaleidoscopic skins, they can clearly sense inside what they are doing. Remote cameras on the seabed show octopuses crackling with color changes, even when there is no other creature present to observe them. Godfrey-Smith believes this is just a byproduct of neural activity, no more than an expressive quirk. But maybe it isn’t. Perhaps they are talking to themselves."
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Yeah, but a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Having dealt with both I would rate pigs higher in personality than dogs. They are very smart, learn stuff quickly and definitely have individual personalities. I always find it very hypocritical that the same people who have no problem eating pork are outraged over people eating dogs in Asia.
The weird thing isn't that he went to go eat a flounder, it's that he broke back into his own tank after, leaving us scratching our head for weeks over where the flounder were going. Obviously if we came in one day to see an octopus in the flounder tank the mystery would be solved day 1.
Anyway we put carpet on the walls so his little suckers couldn't stick and let him carouse around the aquarium like some sort of aquatic monkey.
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Pigs have personality too. But most people would never know it given how livestock are treated.
As someone who has been around beef-cattle and also had milk cows growing up, cows are much the same way. They have a lot of personality and are not altogether different than dogs or anything else. Cattle raised for beef have a lot less human interaction and therefore have less "personality". Our cows knew their names and were very affectionate but they also had been interacted with since birth.
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Well pigs are smarter than dogs, and many people eat them.
I don't feel great about that either, but octopuses have shown repeatedly their problem solving abilities.
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Yeah, but a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Having dealt with both I would rate pigs higher in personality than dogs. They are very smart, learn stuff quickly and definitely have individual personalities. I always find it very hypocritical that the same people who have no problem eating pork are outraged over people eating dogs in Asia.
> And yet . . . could we be missing something here? While they can’t see much of their own kaleidoscopic skins, they can clearly sense inside what they are doing. Remote cameras on the seabed show octopuses crackling with color changes, even when there is no other creature present to observe them. Godfrey-Smith believes this is just a byproduct of neural activity, no more than an expressive quirk. But maybe it isn’t.…
Isn't Godfrey-Smith's belief in fact also "just a byproduct of neural activity"?
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Perhaps that would be an interesting area of study. I think the lack of dexterous limbs probably inhibits the pig's ability to solve certain problems they would otherwise be mentally capable of tackling.
I've seen an experiment in which pigs controlled an object on a screen, using a 'joystick', by controlling it with their snout. It certainly looked as if they were demonstrating a level of intelligence.