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What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

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Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#121

Post by bmitc »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #110
bmitc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 agree with all of this and also want to add, we only recognize octopi as intelligent because they are operating on our timescales. What would happen if we encountered nearly crystalline life. They might have a rich culture, art, and scientific understanding.. but it might be only for phenomenon that they have any hope of interacting with. I often wonder about plants. Suppose a forest and/or its network of fungi was…

Yea, we simply don't know about the intelligence of other things, and so I don't get the perspective that other things are the thing less intelligent when we're in the same boat as them as not being able to communicate with them. There are symbiotic relationships like cats and dogs, and mammals generally share a certain something, but we still have little to no knowledge of what's going on, even in mammals, much less more exotic things. For the octopus, we recognize intelligent of things we notice, but what about intelligence they have that isn't noticed by us.

Your description reminded me of a book called The Dragon's Egg. I haven't read it but need to. The gist is that there's a species that somehow thrives on or in a neutron star. However, their time scales are not slow but extremely fast. That's all I know about it other than it apparently being a tutorial on neutron stars masquerading as a novel.

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#122

Post by ncmncm »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #75
jbotz wrote: post #3

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…

The last common ancestor had eyes. The same genes control development and placement of eyes. I.e., you can stick a human put-an-eye-here gene into a fruit fly, and an eye grows there.

Fun fact: death after mating is controlled by a single gene. If there were any net benefit to not dying after, one or other species would have it turned off.

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#123

Post by jelliclesfarm »

sradman wrote: post #23
jbotz wrote: post #3

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…

Cephalopods are magnificent. I knew they were smart and curious but I was caught off guard the first time I realized that a curious cuttlefish was making eye contact with me. No other reef animals exhibit anything like this kind of intelligence; the dissimilarity is striking. When you start to doubt your interpretation they quite literally flash their emotional state through color changes that seem as telling as huma…

I absolutely love love love love 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife'...I saw it for the first time online almost twenty years ago and even then without knowing what it meant or the language, i just knew that it would be the most erotic thing that I will ever see.. two decades since, I still stand by that assessment.

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#124

Post by crooked-v »

powersnail wrote: post #68
nico_h wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gorillas can use sign language, dogs can use speaking buttons, I’m sure dolphins or orcas could be taught something we would recognise as language, maybe even chimpanzé

In the case of Gorilla, I think it wasn't quite the level of sign language that it learned, but vocabularies and phrases. I had a psychology professor who was part of the research teaching Koko sign language. And according to him, what Koko learned was really impressive, more than they anticipated. But it was still fundamentally different from human language. It was a long time ago, and I don't recall what exactly wa…

> In contrast, human children, even with limited vocabulary, could grasp and even invent grammars.

The most prominent example would be Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was spontaneously invented over only a few years by deaf schoolchildren, ages four to sixteen, who had little or no other language.

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#125

Post by kranner »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #17
deforciant wrote: post #5

I would recommend these scifi books https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim... And https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-rui... Lots of fun reading them, great author :)

For context so that people don't need to click on links: the first book is about uplifted, sentient spiders; the second one is about uplifted octopii. Both are absolutely great, I highly recommend them!

There is also his Dogs of War [1] which is about uplifted dogs.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35827220.Dogs_of_War

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#126

Post by goatlover »

mongol wrote: post #83
spaetzleesser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally believe that at some point civilizations will stop using their bodies and live in something like computers or whatever it will be by then. So we may already be living in a highly networked universe without noticing it. With all the technological progress I can’t imagine why someone would want to deal with our very flawed bodies in the long run. We are already getting more and more of our experiences thou…

I don't understand how that could happen. It is something descibed in fiction from time to time. But I don't see how you can move your consciousness from your body somewhere else. Copy perhaps. But the consciousness that remain in the body will want to live on, I am sure. So that is why I cannot see us "stop" using our bodies. Certainly, we can become extinct, but that is something else.

We also don't know that a digital copy will be conscious. That's an assumption based on thinking functionalism is correct. But we simply don't know what the correct theory of consciousness is and what sort of limits that places on reproducing it artificially.

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#127

Post by billiam »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #107
jbotz wrote: post #3

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…

I draw the exact opposite conclusion from the same premise. 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?

TBH we haven't really tried very hard to communicate with cephlapods. A few dozen scientists max have worked on this in the last 50 years.

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#128

Post by Hamuko »

pbk1 wrote: post #10

The opening of this article references Hokusai's "Great Wave" woodblock print. There's an easter egg in this print I never noticed, which is that Mount Fuji is nestled in the trough of the wave. Learned this from a great NYT article on Hokusai focusing on another print from the same series: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/h...

>There's an easter egg in this print I never noticed, which is that Mount Fuji is nestled in the trough of the wave.

It's literally part of the "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series, so I don't really know if it can be regarded as an easter egg.

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#129

Post by DiffProg »

The_Colonel wrote: post #85
quercusa wrote: post #2

The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts considers the issues humans would face in contact with similarly alien aliens. It's an intriguing read. Available under CC: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#CC

Coincidentally (or not?), Peter Watts is also marine biologist.

Interesting! From reading the book I started to think that was the case!

Re: What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

#130

Post by totetsu »

e40 wrote: post #49
sradman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cephalopods are magnificent. I knew they were smart and curious but I was caught off guard the first time I realized that a curious cuttlefish was making eye contact with me. No other reef animals exhibit anything like this kind of intelligence; the dissimilarity is striking. When you start to doubt your interpretation they quite literally flash their emotional state through color changes that seem as telling as huma…

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)

There is a less know man with stingray(?) version of this from the same era.
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