161–170 of 170 posts
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Maybe I have a only a loose grasp of how those words are defined but in my interpretation 'art' and 'smut' are not mutually exclusive
Fair enough. In my understanding "smut" is typically a synonym for pornography, and pornography is generally only valued for its ability to arouse or titillate.
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Can we comprehend them? From what I've read about it, consciousness in octopuses has to be completely alien to ours, because it's spread out over multiple brain centers, including one for each arm. So the arm is a semi-intelligent entity of its own. No idea to what extent the article discusses this; part of it is blocked by a paywall, after which it continues about eating moluscs. But just like people eat octopuses,…
To be fair, our brain is also split into two halves that have limited bandwidth to communicate. It's not clear how much bandwidth is needed to "feel" like a single entity.
When asked if I have any dietary requirements, I’ll always respond, I don’t eat octopus. Tales of Diogenes aside, this is why. I don’t eat my peers.
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Rhetorical question to make you think: where do we draw the line between smut and art?
smut is gratituous and without meaning and has a singular purpose. It is pretty easy to tell apart.
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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
Incorrect. It's erotic art, but art nonetheless. Otherwise we wouldn't be discussing it.
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Yes. But I'd reverse these questions: why so much intelligence, with seemingly few opportunities to use it?
They live in complex environments. Often on the boundary between water and land. And some octopuses, do seem to make good use their intelligence - for example the mimic octopus.
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…
They are delightful, inquisitive, smart creatures who seem to really enjoy engaging with these huge ungainly creatures from the land that occasionally stop by. I made acquaintance with one octopus on my local reef by introducing it to gold goins - they can't seem to resist shiny gold things, and indeed in this case, I gave the coin to the octopus and it swam off to its hidden midden (which I was able to find after a while), where it had also collected bottles-caps and lost fishing tackle.
Another time, I watched a smaller octopus playfully baiting whitefish by dangling an empty crayfish husk out of its hole .. just idly floating it in the current until a dumb whitefish came along for a nibble, and then BAM out came another tentacle from the hole, and the world was less one dumb whitefish.
Fantastic article. Superb writing and makes me ponder about our species in general. I do have a general take on how humans perceive or judge other organisms through a very human lens. We characterize organisms based on their social structure, longevity, 'cleverness' etc. While looking at how humans compare with octopuses at a meta level, octopuses seem to be not waging wars, more peaceful, seem to have survived for m…
> octopuses are more peaceful female octopi like to eat male octupi http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150223-mysteries-of-canniba...
However, it is my understanding from previous reading that male octopuses die within months of mating and that female octopuses die after laying its eggs. I am surprised this article doesn’t mention it because it puts the cannibalism into perspective. It seems the biologically triggered death after mating and laying eggs is an evolutionary strategy, so it makes the female eating the already dying male less cannibalistic and more strategic.
https://www.sciencealert.com/mother-octopus-senescence-death...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/01/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…
Too many speculative versions of really weird aliens throw out constraints that are likely to be universal in an attempt to emphasise strangeness. Things like basic constraints such as the conservation of energy and matter, evolutionary pressure, information theory, game theory. 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…
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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.
Set aside what we know about human technological progress. You need some energy source to be the base of your technology pyramid, and it needs a few properties: it needs to be naturally occurring so that you can discover it by accident; it needs to be controllable or predictable enough that you can use it selectively; and it needs to be fast/intense enough that you can transform materials without massive time investment. What do you pick? On land, you have fire, flowing water, and, at a stretch, the muscles of large herbivores. Underwater, you have... ???
Also, that's not what "anthropic principle" means.