eating any meat is morally questionable. (I say this as a person who does eat a lot of meat).
octopus passing a intelligence test does not keep it above the fold, neither does cattle go below the fold because they don't clear the bar (surprise, cattle are equally emotional, smart, curious etc.).
sounds wrong when I type it out but that is just the truth. milk is actually more ethically wrong when you think about it (isolating a calf from its mom to steal its food.)
doing one or the other does not absolve us. because one is more commonly accepted than the other
> Compared with meat-eaters, vegetarians were more likely to have a higher educational level, whereas vegans had a lower education level
I think it’s good to question these things but the people who go full black/white on everything is where that whole movement died. Saying something strong like “eating any meat” will generally not win over hackers. But “we won’t bring cows to Mars” might work better.
you mean you don't think it's right to make a creature take an IQ test before deciding to eat them or not? "Yes, right, well, you seem sufficiently stupid enough to ingest."
There are hazards to doing it on an individual level, but on a species level sure why not? Between a talking plant and a brainless bovine I know which one I'd say is the obvious right answer to eat (assume both species occurred naturally for this thought experiment).
My wife stopped eating octopus after seeing the giant Pacific octopus in the Monterey aquarium. The way it stares at you hints at a real intelligence. Maybe the smaller species aren't that smart, but why take the chance?
I cannot judge too harshly, since I still eat many kinds of animal. However, I never ate octopus growing up, and I learned of their intelligence before I tried it more than a few times. It was easier to "never start" than to quit. And besides, octopus is not that great and if you insist on eating seafood I find pretty much any other item to have more enjoyable texture.
Octopus is the only animal I've ever stopped eating due to ethical concerns (not that I'm against examining my relationship with other animals). That being said, it's really delicious if you get it fresh. It just so happens that it's very rare (in the US) to get fresh octopus. I liked tako nigiri and grilled octopus, Mediterranean style. The taste and texture difference between fresh and not fresh is huge though. Probably another great reason not to eat them!
Some people enjoy eating live baby octopuses. To me that is an odd delicacy -but then some Americans like shucking Oysters too, so I can't be critical.
In some sense this (not as literally as this case, but in measurable scientific tests) is true for other species. Processing is demonstrated to be distributed through sense organs in the frog in What the Frogs Eye Tells the Frogs Brain https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065609, i.e. in frogs at least, the eye is not like a camera sending pixels to its brain
Yep, they do some cognition in their arms. You also do some processing in your ears and your eyes. There is a lot of evidence that you learn to recognize certain stimulus in the neurons outside of the "brain".
It's like 9 brains, one central one in the head and 8 semi-autonomous ones in the arms. Makes one wonder what an octopus consciousness is like. Is it distributed among the nine brains, or focused on the central one? If the latter then the arm-brains would be zombie minds. It's also possible the 8 arms have their own separate experiences.
We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine. We experience ourselves as a unified hole, allowing exceptions for certain conditions.
> We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine.
Mostly yes. But we do have some processing that bypasses the brain: reflexes for example. The classic example is the kick reflex that doctors test with a small mallet on your knee. Or when you blink as something flies towards your eyes. It happens and your brain gets informed afterwards.
But there are degrees of non-conscious processing, from the heart beating by itself and your guts doing their things, to the breath which will be on autopilot until you take control over it, to entirely voluntary things like moving about your limbs (for healthy individuals).
Maybe the octopuses experience their disconnected brains somewhere on that spectra, where the limbs are semi-autonomous unless it focuses on them? (All we can do is speculate, there is no known way to learn the qualia of being an octupus.)
While the specifics of octopus experience are hard for us to fathom, we do say our stomachs have a mind of their own, and science has backed that up mostly. The enteric nervous system is complex and large and intimately in touch with gut microbes (of which there are trillions), and is connected to the brain. Both speak to each other, but the gut does a lot of independent stuff, and we’re learning a lot of the chemicals the gut microbiome releases shapes our moods and behavior.
For an octopus, it must be something similar but with all 8 of their appendages. Some specialize for hunting vs moving, so that’s at least easy to understand, but given they can act independently, I wonder if the octopus feels like the conflict between gut and brain with respect to food.
If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. It's fiction which explores different intelligences, with the second novel[0] dealing specifically with octopuses.
How sure are you that you have a unified embodied experience? Have you ever caught an unexpected ball? Run (I mean, really run)? There are a lot of situations where you conscious self isn't in charge so much as it is a really good storyteller convincing 'you' that you've done something yourself that you had no part in. Cut the interface between brain hemispheres and 'you' will still have the absolute self assurance that 'you' are the one in charge.
You might find the recent Theories of Everything podcast interview [0] with Peter Godfrey-Smith interesting. Godfrey-Smith is the author of "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness," which is a great read to delve further.
Two other interesting aspects of cephalopods:
* Make many more changes to RNA than other invertebrates [2]
* Have only one type of light sensing cell in eyes, so may detect color by chromatic aberration
Children of Ruin is about advanced Octopi, not as good as Children of Time, but interesting. That series or Fire Upon the Deep are really good for conceptualizing truly alien intelligence.
I would imagine their intelligence is directly proportional to the so many degrees of freedom the arms have for grasping, but don't ask which one came first, chicken or egg?
the history of how people have conceived of causality between human intelligence and human hands (and in which direction dependency may lie) is quite interesting.
"It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals."
—Anaxagoras, circa 450 BCE.
I have this headcanon that an ancient ape civilization was at war with cephalopods and they created a weapon of mass destruction that artificially gimped octopus lifespans :'(
There is only one species of octopus that lives socially (LPSO are rare and incredibly intelligent but their lifespans are like 3 years)
Maybe your headcannon should be that apes did a "tower of babel" type thing to make all the octopus individualistic and unable to organize into a civilization
It's more complex than that. The famed octopus city[1] was populated by the gloomy octopus, a species which prior to the discover was believed to have been exclusively solitary.
Well the LPSO is the only consistently social octopus. "Octopus city" was actually 2 cities (the second one being discovered in 2016) and they were groups of about 15 gloomy octopuses. There are a couple of other examples of octopus sociality but on a species-wide level only the LPSO can be comfortably described as social
Almost all octopuses are cannibalistic but Abdopus have also been found living close to and tolerating each other
mutations that occur after reproduction are never weeded out since the genes are passed on already, so natural selection on its own can result in this, just like cancer or lower safeguards against cancer such as short telomeres in humans
I mean it's a gene that helps them build a protein. It would be nearly impossible to say there's a "direct" link to that and intelligence. I think they are validly qualifying the article
A lot of science journalism has, for better or worse, a mandate to increase public interest and excitement about science. If you want a dry and totally accurate account of the science you should read the paper directly. If you want your curiosity and imagination excited, articles and programs like these are great.
Here's their proposed link later in the article:
> The findings hint that the rRNA adaptation might be connected to the evolution of the shallow-water octopuses’ large nervous systems. Their brains—which are spread throughout their bodies—had to expand quickly as they learned to keep up with predators and increased competition in this environment. Nerve cells, or neurons, are long-lived, study co-author Rishav Mitra tells Scientific American’s Cody Cottier, which means protein misfolding is particularly bad for them. By preventing that, the rRNA break “might help these neurons to work well,” he adds.
A conjecture like this probably has no place in a scientific article but absolutely has a place in pop sci magazines like Smithsonian
>If we “use nature as a guide to understand how that happens naturally,” she says, “then we can probably find ways to put it into human cells.”
Oh boy! Please hurry up with this. I want brains in all my appendages so I can adapt in real time to all the environmental conditions that I am encountering moment to moment.
Test it first though, maybe on a rat or a planarian. Your choice.
EDIT: I know this is great research. Understanding how evolution has allowed other species to adapt to their environments and overcome conditions that would be dangerous helps us assemble the pieces of the puzzle of the origin of life. I just don't think that the first thing we should be considering when we find something that makes an organism unique is the question of how we can insert genetic change into the human genome. If humans had ever needed it the mutation would already be present through natural selection.
If the end game is always to modify the human genome then there is no reason to do the research on other organisms.
Set up the conditions with humans and run a few generations through. The ones who make it likely have some genetic difference that predisposes them to winning that part of life. No need to rush things. Do it once, do it right.
I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence
octopus passing a intelligence test does not keep it above the fold, neither does cattle go below the fold because they don't clear the bar (surprise, cattle are equally emotional, smart, curious etc.).
sounds wrong when I type it out but that is just the truth. milk is actually more ethically wrong when you think about it (isolating a calf from its mom to steal its food.)
doing one or the other does not absolve us. because one is more commonly accepted than the other
> Compared with meat-eaters, vegetarians were more likely to have a higher educational level, whereas vegans had a lower education level
I think it’s good to question these things but the people who go full black/white on everything is where that whole movement died. Saying something strong like “eating any meat” will generally not win over hackers. But “we won’t bring cows to Mars” might work better.
We justify everything we do.
We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine. We experience ourselves as a unified hole, allowing exceptions for certain conditions.
Mostly yes. But we do have some processing that bypasses the brain: reflexes for example. The classic example is the kick reflex that doctors test with a small mallet on your knee. Or when you blink as something flies towards your eyes. It happens and your brain gets informed afterwards.
But there are degrees of non-conscious processing, from the heart beating by itself and your guts doing their things, to the breath which will be on autopilot until you take control over it, to entirely voluntary things like moving about your limbs (for healthy individuals).
Maybe the octopuses experience their disconnected brains somewhere on that spectra, where the limbs are semi-autonomous unless it focuses on them? (All we can do is speculate, there is no known way to learn the qualia of being an octupus.)
For an octopus, it must be something similar but with all 8 of their appendages. Some specialize for hunting vs moving, so that’s at least easy to understand, but given they can act independently, I wonder if the octopus feels like the conflict between gut and brain with respect to food.
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Ruin
Two other interesting aspects of cephalopods:
0. https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/peter-godfrey-smith-thi...1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...
2. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/octopus-squid-rna-editin...
3. https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
Maybe your headcannon should be that apes did a "tower of babel" type thing to make all the octopus individualistic and unable to organize into a civilization
[1] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
Almost all octopuses are cannibalistic but Abdopus have also been found living close to and tolerating each other
They don’t raise their offspring
> Although there is no direct evidence that the adaptation is linked to expanded octopus brainpower,
I.e. the entire connection between this mutation and octopus intelligence is made up. Not even a shred of justification.
A lot of science journalism has, for better or worse, a mandate to increase public interest and excitement about science. If you want a dry and totally accurate account of the science you should read the paper directly. If you want your curiosity and imagination excited, articles and programs like these are great.
Here's their proposed link later in the article:
> The findings hint that the rRNA adaptation might be connected to the evolution of the shallow-water octopuses’ large nervous systems. Their brains—which are spread throughout their bodies—had to expand quickly as they learned to keep up with predators and increased competition in this environment. Nerve cells, or neurons, are long-lived, study co-author Rishav Mitra tells Scientific American’s Cody Cottier, which means protein misfolding is particularly bad for them. By preventing that, the rRNA break “might help these neurons to work well,” he adds.
A conjecture like this probably has no place in a scientific article but absolutely has a place in pop sci magazines like Smithsonian
Oh boy! Please hurry up with this. I want brains in all my appendages so I can adapt in real time to all the environmental conditions that I am encountering moment to moment.
Test it first though, maybe on a rat or a planarian. Your choice.
EDIT: I know this is great research. Understanding how evolution has allowed other species to adapt to their environments and overcome conditions that would be dangerous helps us assemble the pieces of the puzzle of the origin of life. I just don't think that the first thing we should be considering when we find something that makes an organism unique is the question of how we can insert genetic change into the human genome. If humans had ever needed it the mutation would already be present through natural selection.
If the end game is always to modify the human genome then there is no reason to do the research on other organisms.
Set up the conditions with humans and run a few generations through. The ones who make it likely have some genetic difference that predisposes them to winning that part of life. No need to rush things. Do it once, do it right.