No biological process is 100% precise. DNA copying being imperfect is the driver of evolution, which is the prime example of this. What I assume they're referring to is that their ribosomes just "make fewer mistakes" when creating proteins from mRNA.
These "mistranslated proteins" are normally infrequent and benign, and their material is recycled eventually. But that whole process wastes energy, so making a "better ribosome" makes all cellular processes more energy efficient and allows the energy budget to be reallocated.
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
Yes I don't get it why milk is considered more ethically sound than eggs in my country. Milk is stolen baby food extracted industrially under not so nice conditions.
Precision-Fermented (animal-Free) milk does exist but it is not easily available.
Unfertilized eggs are products that come out anyway and cannot become a chick till it is successfully fertilized outside of the hen. Granted that these two are extracted industrially under not so nice conditions.
> 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.
> Compared with meat-eaters, vegetarians were more likely to have a higher educational level, whereas vegans had a lower education level
this is such a... wrong conclusion to make from the study. the study has found a correlation and by no means is it a causation. there are so many cultural, societal reasons for this to be the case. (eg. in india, upper caste people are usually vegetarians who generally have more access to education.)
I wonder how many of these "self-reported" vegans were true ethical vegans vs instgram influencer, "I eat chicken once a week" vegans.
Also, what's your point? Is there a proven direct correlation between ethics/morals and educational level? And even if there were, does that imply that this less educated group is as a whole completely wrong? And are you implying that ethics and morals were even objective and measureable? I mean, completely no idea what you are getting at here.
The linked study does show that correlation. But I personally believe it’s more of a second-order effect.
Vegetarianism selects for openness and analytical/reflective thinking but the extra step to veganism selects for absolutism/purity and rigid category-based thinking. Reflective thinking and openness are definitely correlated to IQ so I believe the result in the article.
The point here is to know your audience. The people on this site are perfectly primed to respond well to a vegetarian/environmental point of view.
>eating any meat is morally questionable. (I say this as a person who does eat a lot of meat).
I think this is very wrong. Doesn't account for when you don't have a choice, to be healthy. You need to eat more, you need to consider all possible situations, construction work people need to sustain all that physical labor somehow. It's a more serious chore to even attempt to build a non meat based diet, let alone sourcing everything.
If we could have a healthy alternative that accounts for everything (taste included) then maybe you can make that argument. Until then it's quite shortsighted and ignorant.
Verfiably false statement that you need meat to do physical labor.
Lazy statement that “sourcing” a vegetarian meal is difficult.
Eating less meat is better for your health and better for the planet.
The few exceptions I think worth noting are if you were born into and continue to live in largely/culturally hunter culture (Inuit, bushmen) or where you live is not sustainable for agriculture (Tibet.)
Most folks could just cook more rice, beans, greens and be fine.
by design eating meat is morally questionable. (as do so many things with our modern society.)
all meat is fair game, because all animal dependent diet is questionable anyway.
Interesting that you think having any drawbacks whatsoever to not eating meat is sufficient to justify eating it, I would've thought the drawbacks had to at least outweigh the suffering involved.
Your excuse for participating in one of the most vile enterprises in human history, factory farming, is that it's too much effort to collectively figure out a less barbaric diet?
And literally no vegan has a problem with people who medically need to eat meet doing so. I own several cats, they are carnivores. The problem is scale: The fact that some people medically must eat meat does not give a free pass for apathetic barbarism to the rest of society.
Even collectively cutting out a single meat or dairy-based meal a week would contribute to a massive reduction in demand. You have no excuse. Use this energy to build a fairer world for all animals instead of using it to get defensive whenever someone brings up how massively inhumane modern factory farming is.
Farm animals wouldn't even have existed in the first place if it wasn't for farming them. They wouldn't have experienced their life at all. I personally think hunting is horrible, that's going after something that is alive without you having a say in it.
But say for farmed cows, living in a field for a while, that's better than not existing at all. You cannot judge if it's worth it from the cow's perspective, it got to live, enjoy the sun, eating in the field, doing cow stuff, same as us. Even with the hardships in my life I'd rather have existed, for however long I can, than not existing at all.
So you see it's not as simple to look at and judge farming. If it was for you those animals wouldn't even have experienced this reality. It some cases you may be right, depending on their conditions obviously.
This is an interesting thought experiment, though I generally come to opposite conclusions. I personally think that hunting a wild animal situates the hunter in the broader context of the natural world, in which organisms live by their wits and try to outrun others doing the same.
Conversely, farmed animals owe their existence as you say to our cultivating them. But where you see a moral release in that connection, I see a corruption of life into industrial inputs. A hunted animal many times will catch scent or sound and take flight, winning their life for another day. Livestock can't change their destiny by wit or will. Their entire existence is within the technological apparatus of our species.
The corruption becomes evident in evolution cleaved from the organism's interest and placed in service of our appetites. In turkeys with breasts too large to be able to balance standing up, let alone walk. Such animals can only reproduce by artificial insemination and only eat when food is placed directly in front of them.
Power dynamics such as these tempt us to tell just-so stories about lives well lived. Can we say for them that their lives are preferable to not existing at all? We're surely not neutral.
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).
Based on not having a realistic choice. The only person I personally know to successfully pull it off is an acquaintance that's rich by local standards, doesn't work, spends a lot of time sourcing and cooking it, and also eating it. He needs to eat more for same energy. It's so involved that most of his life revolves around it. It takes a good bit out of his time. The rest of the people from that friend group couldn't afford it, couldn't afford spending the money, couldn't afford spending the extra time on it.
I personally wouldn't eat meat if I had a good alternative. I rarely do, I eat it for health related reasons, considering my setup.
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.
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".
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
the mountain in the sea is also a good read. focuses specifically on ingredient octopus, I didn't enjoy it as much as children of time but still an interesting read.
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?
Why should intelligence _other_ than motor-planning be tied to the degrees of freedom of their movement?
- snakes have a high number of degrees of freedom but aren't especially bright
- squid have 2 more limbs than octopuses and aren't as smart
I think the shallow-water vs deep-water thing mentioned in the article is important; reef and similar environments give a lot more opportunities for smart camouflage, complex navigation, tool-use opportunities etc than the open ocean.
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.
most likely the enormous control surfaces their biology acquired required distributed neuronal mass and once that mass existed further intelligence became advantageous because it was a minor change at that point (switches during embryology increasing neuron counts and other aspects).
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
Indeed, AFAIK. I've never seen an explanation for this. Most things that reproduce successfully want to do it again - or at least their DNA does. Perhaps octopuses are simply disappointed by the experience.
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.
What does it mean to “produce proteins with about twice their usual accuracy”? Smaller feature size, essentially?
No biological process is 100% precise. DNA copying being imperfect is the driver of evolution, which is the prime example of this. What I assume they're referring to is that their ribosomes just "make fewer mistakes" when creating proteins from mRNA.
These "mistranslated proteins" are normally infrequent and benign, and their material is recycled eventually. But that whole process wastes energy, so making a "better ribosome" makes all cellular processes more energy efficient and allows the energy budget to be reallocated.
I found the article very interesting. Not click bait at all.
I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.
Not only that, they have the highest ratio of brain-to-body-mass of any invertebrate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence
Yes, so maybe think twice before eating one.
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
Yes I don't get it why milk is considered more ethically sound than eggs in my country. Milk is stolen baby food extracted industrially under not so nice conditions.
Precision-Fermented (animal-Free) milk does exist but it is not easily available.
Unfertilized eggs are products that come out anyway and cannot become a chick till it is successfully fertilized outside of the hen. Granted that these two are extracted industrially under not so nice conditions.
Waiting for good lab grown meat to become cheap.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28926931/
> 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.
> Compared with meat-eaters, vegetarians were more likely to have a higher educational level, whereas vegans had a lower education level
this is such a... wrong conclusion to make from the study. the study has found a correlation and by no means is it a causation. there are so many cultural, societal reasons for this to be the case. (eg. in india, upper caste people are usually vegetarians who generally have more access to education.)
Except that the study is from France?
it was an example of a correlation != causation
the parent comment was basically creating a causational logic for why vegetarians are more likely to be "smart"-er. which is not true.
I wonder how many of these "self-reported" vegans were true ethical vegans vs instgram influencer, "I eat chicken once a week" vegans.
Also, what's your point? Is there a proven direct correlation between ethics/morals and educational level? And even if there were, does that imply that this less educated group is as a whole completely wrong? And are you implying that ethics and morals were even objective and measureable? I mean, completely no idea what you are getting at here.
The linked study does show that correlation. But I personally believe it’s more of a second-order effect.
Vegetarianism selects for openness and analytical/reflective thinking but the extra step to veganism selects for absolutism/purity and rigid category-based thinking. Reflective thinking and openness are definitely correlated to IQ so I believe the result in the article.
The point here is to know your audience. The people on this site are perfectly primed to respond well to a vegetarian/environmental point of view.
> Vegetarianism selects for openness and analytical/reflective thinking but the extra step to veganism selects for absolutism/purity
I don't follow how you conclude this at all. there is nothing to indicate this is the case.
>eating any meat is morally questionable. (I say this as a person who does eat a lot of meat).
I think this is very wrong. Doesn't account for when you don't have a choice, to be healthy. You need to eat more, you need to consider all possible situations, construction work people need to sustain all that physical labor somehow. It's a more serious chore to even attempt to build a non meat based diet, let alone sourcing everything.
If we could have a healthy alternative that accounts for everything (taste included) then maybe you can make that argument. Until then it's quite shortsighted and ignorant.
Verfiably false statement that you need meat to do physical labor.
Lazy statement that “sourcing” a vegetarian meal is difficult.
Eating less meat is better for your health and better for the planet.
The few exceptions I think worth noting are if you were born into and continue to live in largely/culturally hunter culture (Inuit, bushmen) or where you live is not sustainable for agriculture (Tibet.)
Most folks could just cook more rice, beans, greens and be fine.
I didn't suggest sourcing a non-meat diet.
I'm suggesting the opposite.
by design eating meat is morally questionable. (as do so many things with our modern society.) all meat is fair game, because all animal dependent diet is questionable anyway.
Interesting that you think having any drawbacks whatsoever to not eating meat is sufficient to justify eating it, I would've thought the drawbacks had to at least outweigh the suffering involved.
Your excuse for participating in one of the most vile enterprises in human history, factory farming, is that it's too much effort to collectively figure out a less barbaric diet?
And literally no vegan has a problem with people who medically need to eat meet doing so. I own several cats, they are carnivores. The problem is scale: The fact that some people medically must eat meat does not give a free pass for apathetic barbarism to the rest of society.
Even collectively cutting out a single meat or dairy-based meal a week would contribute to a massive reduction in demand. You have no excuse. Use this energy to build a fairer world for all animals instead of using it to get defensive whenever someone brings up how massively inhumane modern factory farming is.
I heard this many times before, same thing with the pigs as well, which are another very smart species of animal.
Based on the same logic, is it ethical to eat a human if they are mentally disabled or not passing some IQ test?
The flip side is that they have very short lives. But I can see space aliens saying the same thing about humans.
I hope people say the same about all animals, but especially mammals.
Octopi essentially consent. They are avid cannibals. In the octopi universe eating an octopi is clearly ok.
is there a case for a long lived animal being a cannibal? I would imagine that prion risk will select for aversion.
I find it interesting how people justify (or not) whether to eat another animal.
First time talking to humans? We distinguish murder from killing because the latter is sometimes justified (e.g., in war or self-defense).
We justify everything we do.
Farm animals wouldn't even have existed in the first place if it wasn't for farming them. They wouldn't have experienced their life at all. I personally think hunting is horrible, that's going after something that is alive without you having a say in it.
But say for farmed cows, living in a field for a while, that's better than not existing at all. You cannot judge if it's worth it from the cow's perspective, it got to live, enjoy the sun, eating in the field, doing cow stuff, same as us. Even with the hardships in my life I'd rather have existed, for however long I can, than not existing at all.
So you see it's not as simple to look at and judge farming. If it was for you those animals wouldn't even have experienced this reality. It some cases you may be right, depending on their conditions obviously.
This is an interesting thought experiment, though I generally come to opposite conclusions. I personally think that hunting a wild animal situates the hunter in the broader context of the natural world, in which organisms live by their wits and try to outrun others doing the same.
Conversely, farmed animals owe their existence as you say to our cultivating them. But where you see a moral release in that connection, I see a corruption of life into industrial inputs. A hunted animal many times will catch scent or sound and take flight, winning their life for another day. Livestock can't change their destiny by wit or will. Their entire existence is within the technological apparatus of our species.
The corruption becomes evident in evolution cleaved from the organism's interest and placed in service of our appetites. In turkeys with breasts too large to be able to balance standing up, let alone walk. Such animals can only reproduce by artificial insemination and only eat when food is placed directly in front of them.
Power dynamics such as these tempt us to tell just-so stories about lives well lived. Can we say for them that their lives are preferable to not existing at all? We're surely not neutral.
What's not existing like?
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).
Personally that justification is based heavily on the taste.
Based on not having a realistic choice. The only person I personally know to successfully pull it off is an acquaintance that's rich by local standards, doesn't work, spends a lot of time sourcing and cooking it, and also eating it. He needs to eat more for same energy. It's so involved that most of his life revolves around it. It takes a good bit out of his time. The rest of the people from that friend group couldn't afford it, couldn't afford spending the money, couldn't afford spending the extra time on it.
I personally wouldn't eat meat if I had a good alternative. I rarely do, I eat it for health related reasons, considering my setup.
...just buy some beans/lentils and learn to cook those? It's not a herculean effort or particularly expensive.
Can you explain?
I find it interesting how people vaguepost without managing to make any semblance of contribution to the discussion
I like to see where they are farmed before I decide... and having seen much of that in the US I've landed on "maybe some bugs are ok to eat."
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'm pretty convinced we could discuss philosophy with octopus friends if they didn't all die immediately after reproducing.
Don't kid yourself Jimmy, if an octopus ever got the chance he'd eat you and everyone you cared about!
So would a primitive human.
That's why cannibalism was so popular back in the day.
So would a cow
They're too delicious to consider how smart they are.
I don't eat octopus or veal. Delicious or not, there are some lines that perhaps should not be crossed.
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!
This is almost certainly equally or more valid for pigs. Pigs have the unfortunate property of being much tastier than octopus, though.
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.
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".
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
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.)
I don't know if you could consider what the AV node in the heart does as "processing". It's more like a clock, to my understanding.
>to the breath which will be on autopilot until you take control over it
Thank you for making me breath manually.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [excellent]
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...
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.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Ruin
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.
Mind != Consciousness
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:
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...
Reminds me of the children of time books - think it’s the second book with the octopus
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.
the mountain in the sea is also a good read. focuses specifically on ingredient octopus, I didn't enjoy it as much as children of time but still an interesting read.
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?
Why should intelligence _other_ than motor-planning be tied to the degrees of freedom of their movement?
- snakes have a high number of degrees of freedom but aren't especially bright
- squid have 2 more limbs than octopuses and aren't as smart
I think the shallow-water vs deep-water thing mentioned in the article is important; reef and similar environments give a lot more opportunities for smart camouflage, complex navigation, tool-use opportunities etc than the open ocean.
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.
Very insightful given that hands do have massive over representation in our brains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
most likely the enormous control surfaces their biology acquired required distributed neuronal mass and once that mass existed further intelligence became advantageous because it was a minor change at that point (switches during embryology increasing neuron counts and other aspects).
It is a pity they have such a short lifespan
If they lived longer they might develop complex social structures, and then we might be in trouble.
lets splice in a gene fix for cephalopod senescence and get the invasion over with
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.
[1] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
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
This isn’t quite true, is it? A mutation that killed 5 years after childbirth would result in higher mortality rates for the child.
Octopus have extremely high mortality rates and extremely large litters, so there’s that
They don’t raise their offspring
Though FWIW, they do protect their eggs quite well.
Isn't this tied to the senesce? Where their digestive tract has closed and they starve to death at the nest
Indeed, AFAIK. I've never seen an explanation for this. Most things that reproduce successfully want to do it again - or at least their DNA does. Perhaps octopuses are simply disappointed by the experience.
Ah yeah, I was thinking humans
Pure, shameless clickbait as usual from Smithsonian magazine.
> 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.
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
Correlation does not imply causation and it's not even clear this qualifies as correlation.
what about it is not correlation, that you imply?
>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.