101–110 of 170 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're all home (probably), but that [1] is NSFW! (it wasn't totally obvious to me before clicking, I thought it would be a text description)
Funny enough, there is a text description on the woodcut itself. If you click through to the photo on Wikipedia I believe there's a translation in the description. For the lazy: it's pure, unadulterated smut
It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution…
> the product of parallel evolution. Famously, their eyes are almost identical to ours, and are purely the product of parallel evolution. One difference, though is that at some point during our evolution there was a glitch, or at least it took a less-than-optimal turn, that resulted in our retina being 'inverted', i.e. light must traverse the nerves and some tissue before reaching the light receptors, while theirs is…
It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution…
In my opinion, this is a stretch. By comprehend and recognize, what do you mean? For an octopus, ant, or orca, we have little to no comprehension of their intelligence, philosophy, or consciousness. All of those things are a black box to us. We can observe behavior and take notes, but I think it's a huge leap to say we comprehend their intelligence.
It's an even bigger leap to say we could establish communications and relationships with an alien species. What is our relationship with orcas? We starve them, kill them with boats and pollutants, and we imprison them for entertainment. We try to rid the world of ants and attack and poison them on sight. We eat octopuses and also pollute their environment. I wouldn't call those things a relationship.
As for communication, how do we do there? We have almost no capability of talking to orcas or octopuses. And it's not a fault of theirs. It's because we are indeed different. There is even less hope for ants.
The existence of orcas, ants, and octopuses on Earth is the exact evidence I need to form the opinion that it is probable that there are alien species that we simply can't comprehend and vice versa.
Is it really that hard to believe there's a species out there such that we humans are their ant?
I wonder about the relationship between consciousness and Turing completeness. Although we don't have infinite tapes inside our heads, it seems that one could imagine a succession of progressively richer finite approximations to Turing-style computational universality. Perhaps "degrees on consciousness" as discussed in the article have to do with the depth of the approximation a creature with a given physiology can m…
The Emperors New Mind by Roger Penrose discusses the opposite idea, that consciousness has a non-computational element that could never even be approximated by a turing machine. I don't really agree with it but its an interesting book.
It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution…
It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution…
Octopuses (cephalopods) are our direct relatives; we have physical contact with them; we easily observe to be intelligent; we know them to communicate with each other, and yet we can't meaningfully communicate with cephalopods.
How do we have any hope of communicating with an extra-terrestrial intelligence?
Could an octopus learn to play Super Mario Bros or Pac-Man to beat levels for crab?
If we could find a reliable way to teach an input language to an octopus we could start probing what classes of problems are easier or harder for them solve. We could develop octopus input devices that maximize the size of the 'octo-bus', and find ways to give them an "immersive experience" by modulating their environment (temp, salinity, pH, etc) as feedback.
Anyone with me on this? I haven't found anything, but I don't know if my "dorking" is up to par.
One amazing snippet that is contradictory to human beings: octopuses are color-blind across their entire body (with their physical eyes as well as their "body" eyes) but they are excellent camouflage artists! How is that even possible. Don't you need to perceive color to be able to take it??
It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution…
> We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a healthy or productive relationship. In my opinion, this is a stretch. By comprehend and recognize, what do you mean? For an octop…
I often wonder about plants. Suppose a forest and/or its network of fungi was "intelligent" in some sense. It may well be that the intelligence only manifests on extreme scales and contexts well beyond human's ability to see. Perhaps forests engage in millenia long chess games to reshape their environment more favorably in battle with other species or something. Perhaps its in a way that relies on very old memories passed down from their ancestors stored via genetics or some other means, and involves very complex decisions we can't even hope to compute on our best computers. We'd barely even be able to recognize that, and certainly wouldn't have much hope of seeing the intelligence in action. We don't know the first thing about "how to tree".