131–140 of 170 posts
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smut is gratituous and without meaning and has a singular purpose. It is pretty easy to tell apart.
Then this is art.
I don't see any hectocotyli so it's possible The Fisherman's Wife passes the Bechdel test.
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> 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…
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I can think of a couple more major disadvantages they have. 3. Living underwater. Fire is the easiest way to extract energy from raw materials, and there's no real substitute. On land, there's a lot of local, controllable dynamism, but when you put things down they tend to stay where you put them, at least on short timescales. Water is exactly the opposite: lots of changes you can't control, but no way to get a lot o…
3 seems to be the an argument from the anthropic principle. Oxidation happens in water too, in different forms. Perhaps not as rapid. I would imagine someone from Mon Calamari would have came up with a completely "easiest" way to extract energy.
The point of fire is rapid oxidation that provides enough heat to melt metals.
Octopus intelligence is phenomenal achievement when you consider the restrictions they have: 1. No social interaction or learning. Octopuses[1] live alone. 2. Short life span. Most of them live only few years in the wild. ---- [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
I can think of a couple more major disadvantages they have. 3. Living underwater. Fire is the easiest way to extract energy from raw materials, and there's no real substitute. On land, there's a lot of local, controllable dynamism, but when you put things down they tend to stay where you put them, at least on short timescales. Water is exactly the opposite: lots of changes you can't control, but no way to get a lot o…
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…
Take Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, who apparently has no understanding whatsoever of the reasons why humans do the things they do. What sort of superintelligence doesn't even get the simplest principles of competitive behaviour and dysfunctions that can arise from competition for resources? But no, we are incomprehensible to him and it all has to be explained by the humans, even though his own civilization went through _exactly_ the same problems.
It's fine for fiction, but taking that way of thinking and applying it to speculations in the real world as though it's valid science is an error.
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> 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.
" But our last common ancestor with the octopus was probably some kind of wormlike creature with eye spots that lived as many as 750 million years ago; " [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/10/how-the-freaky-octopus-can-hel...
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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…
Our bodies are extremely powerful and versatile. If we actually understood how they work and how to build/modify them, we'd get way more mileage out of them than an electromechanical alternative. Imagine a body with perfect physique, maximum strength, a bigger/denser brain, programmable immune system, etc. It could even be adapted for deep sea or outer space life. We haven't even begun to understand biotech at this l…
Our immune systems do that too and for a reason.
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…
Turing Completeness is pretty mundane. You just need GOTOs and IF statements, and registers/variables. Thats it really. Its not hard to acheive at all. 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…
> 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…
How do you know that? Specifically, that they are capable of two way communication, which is suitable for establishing, for lack of a better word, diplomatic relations.
For ethical reasons we need to presume that they indeed are capable of that. But it's different from knowing that they are capable.
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…