Reminds me of the children of time books - think it’s the second book with the octopus
Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
41–50 of 195 posts
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
eating any meat is morally questionable. (I say this as a person who does eat a lot of meat).
octopus passing a intelligence test does not keep it above the fold, neither does cattle go below the fold because they don't clear the bar (surprise, cattle are equally emotional, smart, curious etc.).
sounds wrong when I type it out but that is just the truth. milk is actually more ethically wrong when you think about it (isolating a calf from its mom to steal its food.)
doing one or the other does not absolve us. because one is more commonly accepted than the other
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're too delicious to consider how smart they are.
I cannot judge too harshly, since I still eat many kinds of animal. However, I never ate octopus growing up, and I learned of their intelligence before I tried it more than a few times. It was easier to "never start" than to quit. And besides, octopus is not that great and if you insist on eating seafood I find pretty much any other item to have more enjoyable texture.
Octopus is the only animal I've ever stopped eating due to ethical concerns (not that I'm against examining my relationship with other animals). That being said, it's really delicious if you get it fresh. It just so happens that it's very rare (in the US) to get fresh octopus. I liked tako nigiri and grilled octopus, Mediterranean style. The taste and texture difference between fresh and not fresh is huge though. Probably another great reason not to eat them!
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#44I would imagine their intelligence is directly proportional to the so many degrees of freedom the arms have for grasping, but don't ask which one came first, chicken or egg?
the history of how people have conceived of causality between human intelligence and human hands (and in which direction dependency may lie) is quite interesting. "It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals." —Anaxagoras, circa 450 BCE.
Very insightful given that hands do have massive over representation in our brains:
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#45Reminds me of the children of time books - think it’s the second book with the octopus
Children of Ruin is about advanced Octopi, not as good as Children of Time, but interesting. That series or Fire Upon the Deep are really good for conceptualizing truly alien intelligence.
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#46It is a pity they have such a short lifespan
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#47I 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.
Yep, they do some cognition in their arms. You also do some processing in your ears and your eyes. There is a lot of evidence that you learn to recognize certain stimulus in the neurons outside of the "brain".
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#48I 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.
In some sense this (not as literally as this case, but in measurable scientific tests) is true for other species. Processing is demonstrated to be distributed through sense organs in the frog in What the Frogs Eye Tells the Frogs Brain https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065609, i.e. in frogs at least, the eye is not like a camera sending pixels to its brain
Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#49Re: Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot judge too harshly, since I still eat many kinds of animal. However, I never ate octopus growing up, and I learned of their intelligence before I tried it more than a few times. It was easier to "never start" than to quit. And besides, octopus is not that great and if you insist on eating seafood I find pretty much any other item to have more enjoyable texture.
Octopus is the only animal I've ever stopped eating due to ethical concerns (not that I'm against examining my relationship with other animals). That being said, it's really delicious if you get it fresh. It just so happens that it's very rare (in the US) to get fresh octopus. I liked tako nigiri and grilled octopus, Mediterranean style. The taste and texture difference between fresh and not fresh is huge though. Pro…
This is almost certainly equally or more valid for pigs. Pigs have the unfortunate property of being much tastier than octopus, though.