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Just how smart is an octopus?

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Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#71

Post by enraged_camel »

howlin wrote: post #38
jnbiche wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Pigs have personality too. But most people would never know it given how livestock are treated.

Dogs have co-evolved with humans for tens of thousands of years, and demonstrate traits and behaviors that makes it much easier for humans to empathize and socialize with them. For example, you can tell when a dog is happy because their facial expressions resemble a human smile. Not so with livestock. Sure, you can figure it out after spending time with them, but it's inarguably not the same thing.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#72

Post by pacaro »

komali2 wrote: post #64

Total anecdote here, but when I volunteered at our aquarium in Charleston, SC (amazing aquarium, go check it out), we had a problem where our flounder were vanishing from their tank. We suspected theft and so put a camera up in the back room. The next time flounder disappeared we checked the feed - one of our octopi was escaping from his tank that we thought we had already anti-octopus'd, climbing over the walls, bre…

Pedantic mode here: linguistically it should be octopodes (but nobody who isn't speaking Greek would say that); by usage it should be octopuses; octopi or octopii are just wrong (it's not a second declension noun, despite the 'us' ending)

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#73

Post by eduren »

gcr wrote: post #60
Nexxxeh wrote: post #9

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…

If you like reading about minds that are fundamentally different from our own, you might also enjoy the science fiction novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Exploring the space of possible minds in the universe is a fundamental theme of that work.

To give a bit more context for others, the novel is a really well done first contact story. I'd highly recommend it, especially because Watts makes it available online for free.

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#74

Post by sdfjkl »

komali2 wrote: post #64

Total anecdote here, but when I volunteered at our aquarium in Charleston, SC (amazing aquarium, go check it out), we had a problem where our flounder were vanishing from their tank. We suspected theft and so put a camera up in the back room. The next time flounder disappeared we checked the feed - one of our octopi was escaping from his tank that we thought we had already anti-octopus'd, climbing over the walls, bre…

You're lucky all he wanted was to eat a flounder and then return peacefully to his tank instead of going full Dawn of the Planet of the Octopuses on you.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#75

Post by fibbery »

ch4s3 wrote: post #3
overcast wrote: post #2

Way to make me feel worse about eating them.

Well pigs are smarter than dogs, and many people eat them.

Personally, I don't eat anything above a certain (arbitrarily defined) intelligence threshold. So octopus and pig are out. Chicken, however...

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#76

Post by cicero »

virmundi wrote: post #43
overcast wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the side effect of being self conscious beings, with the capacity of understanding things deeper than survival 101. If other animals had this capacity, you can't say it's just man made thing.

You've made it a side-effect. As a conscious being I know that there is a circle of life. I know that animals eat each other. I know that without getting into franen-foods, the human body evolved to eat other animals too. You picked an ethic. Probably because it felt good. I too picked an ethic. Mine is Christian with a good deal of Epicurean infusion. Religiously I believe we can eat animals, but need to care for th…

Christianity (at least Catholicism) has an animal ethic that is not man-made, but comes from divine revelation. Genesis says that man is given the responsibility to care for creation, and while since the time of the flood we have permission to eat animals, the general (at least Catholic) interpretation is that doesn't mean we can be cruel to animals. In other words, if we have a reasonable need to kill an animal for food, it may be done in as humane a way as is practical. Otherwise, we should care for them.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#77

Post by Cybiote »

Nexxxeh wrote: post #9

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…

My favorite part of the second article was how the octopus was able to attend to 3 or 4 people at once and still manage to steal the bucket of fish. It's part hivemind, part single entity and I agree, very alien. What's also interesting is that despite having diverged a very long time ago, chromatophore lobes of octopus are surprisingly sophisticated and mammal like (especially for a mollusk).

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#78

Post by pacaro »

enugu wrote: post #33
overcast wrote: post #2

Way to make me feel worse about eating them.

Apart from cognitive skills, an important factor is the capacity of suffering. So even dumb animals might be able to feel intense pain. In humans, while forms of suffering like loneliness, depression can be bad, pure physical pain can itself a terrible thing. For instance severe torture for 10 minutes can be worse than months of depression. Now even if cognitive aspects are diminished in animals, the physical senses…

In her book "Animals make is human" - Temple Grandin makes the argument (among many others, this is not the main thesis of the book) that we can have a symbiotic relationship with animals, wherein we provide secure food supply, protection from predation and the associated stress, etc. and in return we eat the animal. Factory farming, by contrast has more in common with a parasitic relationship.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#79

Post by eduren »

Koshkin wrote: post #18
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using analytic thought to problem solve? That's probably a pretty common definition. And most animals don't do that.

This may be true (but what do we know?). Animal don't solve problems for fun, though; those that they do have to solve, they solve pretty well, it seems.

Isn't your statement a bit fallacious? The animals that couldn't "solve problems" aren't exactly around for us to study. The difference between the two comes down to luck doesn't it? The animal that survives is far more likely to have done the right thing by random mutation rather than some weird semi-intelligence that you are attributing to them.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#80

Post by danans »

virmundi wrote: post #30
overcast wrote: post #2

Way to make me feel worse about eating them.

Why worry? They'd eat you. Realize that all animal ethics are entirely manmade and foreign to the background of the Universe's amorality. Edit: Really down voting because you don't agree? The comment was on topic, provided a view, and contributed to the conversation in some way. If you want to down vote, please be responsible enough to say why.

That seems like reductio ad absurdum. You could argue amorality in the specific case of you vs. the octopus, in the wild, but that's now how most of us get the octopus or other animals we eat.

The instinctual human ability to mentalize about another creature's state of being is likely where our capacity to, for example, domesticate animals and keep them as a food source came from in the first place. That same ability is what enables us to consider the ethics of whether or not, or how much, to eat them.

Unless one is strictly involved in a predator-prey food relationship (i.e. hunting is your only means of procuring animal-based food), you can't separate the practice of mass-production or collection of animals for food with the "worry" about their welfare, both at an individual and population level.

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