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The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#72"When octopuses are social, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" "Maybe octopuses don’t regard us so much as friends or associates as giant, elaborate levers they can manipulate for their own benefit. " Both these statements read as if it's a settled question that human aren't doing the same thing.
The notion of sentience is something that's unsurprisingly well-trodden in both philosophy and neuroscience. Your statements presumes that such is flippant.
While there's not a single well-agreed on definition, there are different things like ability to see and project oneself into the future and to assign value to those projections, the ability to empathize, the ability to miss things that are no longer there, etc. are often metrics used for higher levels of sentience.
We know that humans and some other mammals do these things. I believe I remember that there's some debate about crows and some other birds. While octopuses are the only invertebrate that has passed the "mirror-test", part of what this article is getting at is that we don't know much about their emotions and extended sense of self, and assigning them to a high category of sentience may be premature. (Or not; asking that question is what this article is about.) But human sentience isn't trivial.
Your argument is basically, "We're all chemical systems, eh?" And sure, at some level that's true, but it's not really enlightening to the discussion.
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#73"When octopuses are social, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" "Maybe octopuses don’t regard us so much as friends or associates as giant, elaborate levers they can manipulate for their own benefit. " Both these statements read as if it's a settled question that human aren't doing the same thing.
The notion of sentience is something that's unsurprisingly well-trodden in both philosophy and neuroscience. Your statements presumes that such is flippant. While there's not a single well-agreed on definition, there are different things like ability to see and project oneself into the future and to assign value to those projections, the ability to empathize, the ability to miss things that are no longer there, etc.…
Philosophy says none of those assertions are provable. You could very well be an automaton in a simulation and all your presumptions about the world are false.
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion of sentience is something that's unsurprisingly well-trodden in both philosophy and neuroscience. Your statements presumes that such is flippant. While there's not a single well-agreed on definition, there are different things like ability to see and project oneself into the future and to assign value to those projections, the ability to empathize, the ability to miss things that are no longer there, etc.…
Philosophy says none of those assertions are provable. You could very well be an automaton in a simulation and all your presumptions about the world are false.
Those are very different corners of philosophy. Things can be epistomogically unprovable, but at the same time ethically relevant.
Put another way, your counterargument applies equally to genocide as it does to octopus intelligence. That doesn't mean we should proceed as if genocide is ethically neutral.
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#75"When octopuses are social, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" "Maybe octopuses don’t regard us so much as friends or associates as giant, elaborate levers they can manipulate for their own benefit. " Both these statements read as if it's a settled question that human aren't doing the same thing.
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Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#76Hesiod in his Works and Days (c. 700 BC) talks about the behaviour of octopuses, saying that when octopuses get hungry they will eat their own tentacles. Amazingly, Hesiod was right about this behaviour (octopuses do sometimes eat their own tentacles) but it's not because they're hungry, but because they're stressed.
Apparently this was a matter of much debate, with further takes by (at least) Aristotle, Athenaeus, Oppian, Pliny and Plutarch:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Tun_DwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA61&dq=O...
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#77I'd say ask the Octopi first. Wait, can't do that? But you were about to do it anyway ? That's why you can't be friends.
" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I regret my shallow dismissal of this most thoughtful article.
All I can say is: I felt triggered by my recollection all of of the cruel and nonconsensual things our species has enacted upon theirs, since the dawn of time.
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#78"When octopuses are social, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" "Maybe octopuses don’t regard us so much as friends or associates as giant, elaborate levers they can manipulate for their own benefit. " Both these statements read as if it's a settled question that human aren't doing the same thing.
The notion of sentience is something that's unsurprisingly well-trodden in both philosophy and neuroscience. Your statements presumes that such is flippant. While there's not a single well-agreed on definition, there are different things like ability to see and project oneself into the future and to assign value to those projections, the ability to empathize, the ability to miss things that are no longer there, etc.…
Well trodden yet nowhere close to being understood.
I'll say it again - whether or not we are deterministic is not a settled question.
I didn't take a position on that either way. My point was that because of our present (poor) understanding there's no reason to assume a human and an octopus have different degrees of agency, so questioning whether or not an octopus is deterministic is inconsequential to whether we can relate emotionally with one:
- If we both are then friendship, bonding, emotions etc. are just an illusion that our wiring compels us to entertain, and so we will proceed to do so.
- If we both aren't then friendship may be just as real for both of us and we'll proceed the same way.
An answer to this would have consequences for moral choice, and as long as it's open we should act ethically, even if only as a precaution. But the outcome here is the same. This isn't about ethical ramifications.
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#79Hesiod in his Works and Days (c. 700 BC) talks about the behaviour of octopuses, saying that when octopuses get hungry they will eat their own tentacles. Amazingly, Hesiod was right about this behaviour (octopuses do sometimes eat their own tentacles) but it's not because they're hungry, but because they're stressed.
A bit like how we bite our fingernails perhaps :)
Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction. Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree. The topic is the social behavior of octopuses. It's not always bad for HN threads to go off topic—for example if there's an unpredictable direction which is more interesting than the original topic—but it's pretty much always bad for them to go in generic, pseudo-profound directions like this. It makes discussions more predictable, and therefore more (yes) shallow. p.s. Please don't use…
It's not pseudo-profound. It goes to the heart of what social behaviour is and provides another angle for interpreting the personal experiences shared by the researchers. There's nothing shallow about it.