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Just how smart is an octopus?

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Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#81

Post by virmundi »

cicero wrote: post #76
virmundi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've made it a side-effect. As a conscious being I know that there is a circle of life. I know that animals eat each other. I know that without getting into franen-foods, the human body evolved to eat other animals too. You picked an ethic. Probably because it felt good. I too picked an ethic. Mine is Christian with a good deal of Epicurean infusion. Religiously I believe we can eat animals, but need to care for th…

Christianity (at least Catholicism) has an animal ethic that is not man-made, but comes from divine revelation. Genesis says that man is given the responsibility to care for creation, and while since the time of the flood we have permission to eat animals, the general (at least Catholic) interpretation is that doesn't mean we can be cruel to animals. In other words, if we have a reasonable need to kill an animal for…

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 comes from emotion. That's as equal as anything else in an agonistic, amoral universe. I just want to people to realize that it's a simple choice, not an absolute. Further, I prefer people coming from such a world view to ponder what they view properly. I find many pull from a Judeo-Christian ethic without realizing it. I'd like people to either break from it for a new model, or, at least, realize there is common ground between them and their theistic peers.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#83

Post by chc »

virmundi wrote: post #30
overcast wrote: post #2

Way 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.

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.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#84

Post by tzs »

bduerst wrote: post #49
Nexxxeh wrote: post #9

I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...) I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ And the follow-up: https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/intervie…

I went diving with a retired marine biologist who said, half-jokingly, that if octopodes had ever formed the same tribal culture as primates that we would have been competing with them for dominance at some point.

Fortunately for us, they have two biological strikes against developing that kind of culture.

1. They have short lifespans, limiting how much knowledge and wisdom an individual can acquire over its lifetime.

2. Reproduction is fatal. Males dies a few months after mating. Females spend all their time after the eggs are laid guarding them, and neglect to eat. They die of starvation around the time the eggs hatch. The octopus young are on their own, with no living parents to pass on learned knowledge and wisdom.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#85

Post by cicero »

virmundi wrote: post #81
cicero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christianity (at least Catholicism) has an animal ethic that is not man-made, but comes from divine revelation. Genesis says that man is given the responsibility to care for creation, and while since the time of the flood we have permission to eat animals, the general (at least Catholic) interpretation is that doesn't mean we can be cruel to animals. In other words, if we have a reasonable need to kill an animal for…

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…

I certainly agree that many people today hold to Christian ethics while rejecting the supernatural basis for it, not realizing that their worldview doesn't support their ethics.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#86

Post by itp »

pacaro wrote: post #72
komali2 wrote: post #64

Total 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)

I basically agree with you, but this also reflects where you are on the prescriptivist/descriptivist split.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluraliz...

Anyway, while I wouldn't put it like you have, I agree with the bottom line -- spread the message of "octopuses"!

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#87

Post by Koshkin »

eduren wrote: post #79
Koshkin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true (but what do we know?). Animal don't solve problems for fun, though; those that they do have to solve, they solve pretty well, it seems.

Isn't your statement a bit fallacious? The animals that couldn't "solve problems" aren't exactly around for us to study. The difference between the two comes down to luck doesn't it? The animal that survives is far more likely to have done the right thing by random mutation rather than some weird semi-intelligence that you are attributing to them.

Sure, but it's the end result that matters. Incidentally, the human brain also has evolved by natural selection (which involves random mutation).

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#88

Post by virmundi »

danans wrote: post #80
virmundi wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

That seems like reductio ad absurdum. You could argue amorality in the specific case of you vs. the octopus, in the wild, but that's now how most of us get the octopus or other animals we eat. The instinctual human ability to mentalize about another creature's state of being is likely where our capacity to, for example, domesticate animals and keep them as a food source came from in the first place. That same ability…

Actually, I argue amorality in all things from an agnostic view. There is no such thing as a universal ethic. There is only force and its decay.

For the general concept of animal herd vs people collective (effectually herd vs herd), this doesn't much matter. The best argument one can muster its that we, being rational, should preserve a reasonable food chain. The idea goes like this: A stable, sustainable food chain allows us to continue living; continue living is a good thing; therefore we will manage the food chain. Nothing here says that we should exclude from the food chain anything with an intelligence. Such a pronouncement is merely a feel good. It's an extension onto the animals of the view that we, ourselves, would not like to be eaten. If such a measure were carried out without hypocrisy, one would not eat any animals. Drawing an arbitrary line is ok for the individual. It has no weight as moral imperative or generalizable postulate.

Re: Just how smart is an octopus?

#90

Post by JumpCrisscross »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #32
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using analytic thought to problem solve? That's probably a pretty common definition. And most animals don't do that.

One interesting aspect of this is that, as a human species, we are discovering over time more and more animals that do use analytic though to problem solve. I wonder if many more than we currently know about do actually do that, we're just unaware of it at the moment. Dystopian sci-fi incoming: maybe all animals are totally aware and intelligent, and maybe we'll understand that one day ...

> we are discovering over time more and more animals that do use analytic though to problem solve

Source?

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