The mystery of social behavior in octopuses • Hacker News Board

Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses

#101

Post by igorkraw » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 12:29 PM UTC

macilacilove wrote: post #98

igorkraw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a misunderstanding that evolution leads to only positive behaviours remaining. Eating your own tentacles might be similar to humans cutting themselves, or the stress response behaviours spillover by zoo animals: a spillover réaction that turns adaptive behavioural patterns (eating) into maladaptive (eating yourself)

Very few humans cut themselves and it has very limited health consequences for those who do. Evolution predicts that self-harming behaviour will be observed less frequently compared to self benefitting behaviours. So whenever an apparently self-harming behaviour is observed it is quite useful to ask: "is it really self-harm or secretly useful somehow?". And also: "how often does that really happen?"

You also need to ask yourself "is there a way to do a useful thing without this". Like, evolution can't jump, if the same gene expression gives you better pattern matching and improved chances of hallucinations, depending on the selection drift, you might go for this, and then you are stuck with hallucinations long after the benefit of pattern matching might be lost.

Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses

#102

Post by erwald » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

sadly, a spanish multinational is planning to open up an octopus farm this summer -- the world's first commercial octopus farm -- which is to breed and kill something like 300,000 - 600,000 octopuses per year.

(i wrote about this development here: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/against-octopus-farming...)

Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses

#103

Post by datameta » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 1:55 PM UTC

animal531 wrote: post #97

datameta wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An even better aquarium owner wouldn't have them at all. My Octopus Teacher is a fantastic look into the life of an octopus, their intellectual capacity, and their propensity to interact with humans.

I don't know if that is true. For example dogs have acclimated extremely well to captivity, but on the other hand we know that orcas do extremely poorly. I was watching Clint's Reptiles on Youtube where he's reviewing an octopus staying at an aquarium. It gets all the food it needs, entertainment via puzzles, interaction with the keepers etc. For an octopus it seemed like a very safe and easy life as compared to the…

Dogs have been highly domesticated, but only some smaller breeds are "ok" with not getting regular walks outside.

I think it would fall on being able to empirically test whether the animal is content or perhaps even happy. It seems possible to satiate most needs and basic desires but you bring up a good point as to whether we can truly replicate the audiovisual and tactile richness of their usual habitat.

Got to thinking about VR for aquatic animals...

Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses

#104

Post by 1024core » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

ck45 wrote: post #93

1024core wrote: post #52

I read these articles about octopuses, and then lament the fact that we hunt them down and eat them. Given all of the other sources of nourishment available to us, why eat them?

That’s a good question. I have always liked pulpo, but when I learned about what an incredible species octopuses are, I swore to never even consider eating it again. It’s a bit hypocritical to not feel the same about every animal, but then I’m as irrational as all humans

This is why I became a vegetarian. I watched cows take care of calves, and could not think of eating meat again.

We have the ability to thrive without meat (or at least, animal meat). It's time we took the next step in our evolution and eschewed killing other animals.

Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses

#105

Post by Sporktacular » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

wheels wrote: post #86

Sporktacular wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

You're right that whether we're deterministic or not isn't settled, but that argument is mostly a physics question, not a biological one. (It reduces to: is the universe deterministic? And it is a very much a debate at the center of different interpretations of quantum physics.) But we still find it useful to talk about different strata of intelligence and to make predictions based on that. Like I said, your argument…

Yes reality exists in layers etc. and this is all fine and frankly almost obvious, but it's not a response.

Again, I am not taking an existential position - whether it's all just chemicals or otherwise is NOT relevant or useful. It's that it's also useless for analysing animal behaviour and it's similarity and compatibility to our own, since the case for humans is not settled either. I don't know how else to say it.

Re: The mystery of social behavior in octopuses

#106

Post by dang » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

vanusa wrote: post #77

dang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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.

Understood. It happens.