Way to make me feel worse about eating them.
The females of the species eat the males after mating if they can, so ...
Just how smart is an octopus?
101–110 of 329 posts
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#102Animals have always seemed to me smarter than humans in some (important) ways. Squirrels, for instance, are extremely resourceful and can survive in conditions few, if any, humans could. If that isn't being "smart", I don't know what is. In any case, the smart/brain weight ratio is not in humans' favor here, that is for sure!
Algae can also survive in conditions human couldn't. That isn't a very meaningful bar for intelligence.
True, algae (or rocks, for that matter) do not require intelligence to survive; it's the higher organisms that do.
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems fundamentally to be an argument against ethics in general. Whatever your personal values may be, a viewpoint that would justify nearly any atrocity is not very useful.
It is an argument against an absolute truth. Ironically, the absolute truth is, under an agnostic view, there is no Truth. Every ethics system that we have is a might makes right. People need to realize this. When someone makes any ethics claim they have to realize that it is at best only useful for a specific location and point in time. Eating animals or not is a preference. Who we keep alive and who we don't is too…
The words "truth" and "god" are not synonyms. I don't know if there is a god, but I feel quite certain there are things that are true.
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#104Animals have always seemed to me smarter than humans in some (important) ways. Squirrels, for instance, are extremely resourceful and can survive in conditions few, if any, humans could. If that isn't being "smart", I don't know what is. In any case, the smart/brain weight ratio is not in humans' favor here, that is for sure!
The natural range of humans is far more expansive than the natural range of squirrels.
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. In the comment above I played it from two world views. The one you espouse is the same (or similar enough) as the Christian view I mentioned. The agnostic view is there since I think, or at least assume, the majority of people on HN are agnostic. From such a view point, there is no tenable, logical reason that one should not eat meat or, in this specific case, a creature of intelligence. Such an argument com…
This seems a bit ethnocentric. Judeo-Christianity did bring some novel moral requirements, but the ones that it shares with most agnostics and atheists are not Judeo-Christian inventions. For example, Buddhists have been practicing compassion without any need for the Hebrew god for thousands of years, and Jains are some of the most extreme animal rights wonks you'll meet.
That is a valid critique of my context. I presumed a Post-Enlighment Western world view of a European atheist bent.
Unfortunately Buddhists and Jains don't get away any better. They have an underlying belief in a Universal truth. The Universe can punish (at least for Buddhists; I have trouble pinning Jains down on from a karmic perspective since I'm not terribly familiar with them).
Edit: critic -> critique
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#106Way 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.
All ethics are entirely manmade, so this is not particularly helpful. Are you ok with torturing criminals, as long as they seem like they'd be willing to torture you?
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#107Total 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…
> Obviously if we came in one day to see an octopus in the flounder tank the mystery would be solved day 1.
It's hard not to speculate that the octopus had a sufficiently sophisticated model of its keepers in relation to itself (which implies self-consciousness) that it knew this.
I can come up with other theories (some territorial affinity, perhaps), and I'm sure people have. I wonder which have been tested/explored...
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
All ethics are entirely manmade, so this is not particularly helpful. Are you ok with torturing criminals, as long as they seem like they'd be willing to torture you?
No, because we've found empirically that torture doesn't work. If it did, why not?
I know many will not like that conclusion, but again, presuming an amoral universe, and I have little evidence outside of a religious world view that I'm wrong to presume such, there is no right or wrong. You admitted in your first sentence. Comment is helpful in that many people, from all backgrounds, assume that ethics are absolute. An atheist will never claim otherwise in discourse. However, they act contrarily to this view. They get mad when someone violates one of their rules.
Edit: corrected to empirically.
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#109Way 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…
Great article on eating lobsters by the inimitable, late David Foster Wallace:
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_l...
Re: Just how smart is an octopus?
#110Total 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)
According to James Bond it should be octopussies (or is it octopussys?).