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I found the article very interesting. Not click bait at all. I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.
It's like 9 brains, one central one in the head and 8 semi-autonomous ones in the arms. Makes one wonder what an octopus consciousness is like. Is it distributed among the nine brains, or focused on the central one? If the latter then the arm-brains would be zombie minds. It's also possible the 8 arms have their own separate experiences. We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experi…
Mostly yes. But we do have some processing that bypasses the brain: reflexes for example. The classic example is the kick reflex that doctors test with a small mallet on your knee. Or when you blink as something flies towards your eyes. It happens and your brain gets informed afterwards.
But there are degrees of non-conscious processing, from the heart beating by itself and your guts doing their things, to the breath which will be on autopilot until you take control over it, to entirely voluntary things like moving about your limbs (for healthy individuals).
Maybe the octopuses experience their disconnected brains somewhere on that spectra, where the limbs are semi-autonomous unless it focuses on them? (All we can do is speculate, there is no known way to learn the qualia of being an octupus.)
lets splice in a gene fix for cephalopod senescence and get the invasion over with
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Not only that, they have the highest ratio of brain-to-body-mass of any invertebrate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence
Yes, so maybe think twice before eating one.
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Yes, so maybe think twice before eating one.
They're too delicious to consider how smart they are.
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Yes, so maybe think twice before eating one.
I find it interesting how people justify (or not) whether to eat another animal.
lets splice in a gene fix for cephalopod senescence and get the invasion over with
I have this headcanon that an ancient ape civilization was at war with cephalopods and they created a weapon of mass destruction that artificially gimped octopus lifespans :'(