May I suggest a book to anybody that finds cephalopods interesting, especially given the connection with consciousness which is a recurring topic in these circles:
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
My only critique is that the plural spelling is octopuses and not octopi, just like the article. Octopuses just looks wrong and sounds funny, I stand my ground. Yes yes I know that it's not a Latin word.
I'd have to give an anti-recommendation to this book. The author never explains his thesis and the book reads like his thesis was "Octopuses are cool" and spends the entire time listing fun facts and interesting stories about his interactions with cephalopods.
He spends very little time drawing connections to consciousness or speaking about what octopus life can tell us about consciousness. There is a whole chapter where he talks about the influence of language in human action (like self-talk), and then ends the chapter by with something like "and octopuses don't have this ability". What was the point of that whole chapter then?
Maybe my expectations were miscalibrated, and I thought he would spend more time drawing connections between octopuses and humans, and what those similarities could tell us about consciousness. Instead of that, the writing about consciousness in this book is quite shallow.
Having read that book, yes, "Octopuses are cool" is a pretty good summary. It's worth reading it for that.
On the biology part, if you never have heard of terms like "efference copy" it will be interesting food for thought about what consciousness might be, but no "solution" really. And you'll learn that an octopus is a ten megapixel screen, but that's just the first point again. If you only want that first point, there is also a "My Octopus Teacher" on Netflix, which is great in its own way.
If you wanted to read about human intelligence, I suggest "The Secret of Our Success" by Henrich instead.
> if you never have heard of terms like "efference copy" it will be interesting food for thought about what consciousness might be
Can you expand on this? I think I kind of understand where you're going with this: consciousness might be an efference copy of our actions? (so our actions don't "surprise" us? rather than consciousness creating actions?)
No expert, but the way I remember it from the book, it's one idea how an evolutionary path towards consciousness might start.
First it's just a nerve-path to prevent flinching back from the contact with something you wanted to manipulate. But once you have a fancy neural path that tells the visual cortex what light/objects to expect after you move your head left/right (maybe flee if it's unexpected), it's only a small evolutionary step to re-purpose this path, "execute" the same path while suppressing the head movement. So now you can process further what you are expecting if you move left vs right. Which could be interpreted as a step towards being conscious of your surroundings. (This is not 100% what the book says, but the idea I got from that chapter.)
Same. I had huge expectations. Basically what you learn is that octopuses are intelligent and for a long time we didn't realize because they are smart enough to know they are in custody when we catch them and they're pretty social. I mean, it's OK, but the whole book feels a bit like a preface to the thing which never came.
> the book reads like his thesis was "Octopuses are cool" and spends the entire time listing fun facts and interesting stories about his interactions with cephalopods.
Well thank you for the anti-recommendation! I’m looking forward to reading it. I get that it wasn’t your thing, but your description sounds very much up my alley and I hope I can enjoy what you didn’t.
If you're just curious about octopuses, I think you can probably learn much more in much less time by doing your own research and finding articles like this.
If you're more interested in consciousness a good place to start is "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" by Annaka Harris.
"virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English.
"surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should be whatever plurals were in Old French. However it also originates in Latin as "superplus", which is the prefix "super" + the adjective "plus". The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura".
Well, nothing technically, from what Latin I remember. I meant it in the not-technical sense that the nominative form is different from the word stem and it looks superficially like a standard 1st/2nd declension adjective.
Google it a few more times, google will start feeding it back to people who will also google it in disbelief; two years from now they're using it in NYT headlines.
If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right?
I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule pages for crawling.
These days, I imagine they have one ML model for the expected time until a given page shows up on the first page of search results for some query, another ML model for guessing how much the page has changed (cosine distance of some semantic embedding or something), and schedule based on the product of the two estimates. It's still probably lots of black magic heuristics, just now it's probably heuristics nobody can read.
Can you give an example of "arcane black magic heuristics"? I cannot imagine, what weird rules you could even come up with, aside from the normal "sensible" ones you already listed.
I was on a different team, but my third-hand knowledge from 20 years ago (notably, before deep learning became mainstream, even at Google) was that Google crawl scheduling had a bunch of heuristics to guess at the update frequency of a given page. The probability that a page has changed since you last crawled it is an important factor in the expected utility of crawling it now.
As I mentioned, I expect that even more arcane heuristics, in the form of ML models, has largely or completely replaced the hand-written heuristics.
In latin the word virus does not have an attested plural[1] but if we model it from the other neuter nouns of the second declension it would be "vira".
The plural of surplus is surpluses[2]. It would be *surplures/surplura in latin, so it is an English/French original. It doesn't make sense from an historical linguistic perspective to have a stem in dental "d" when in latin was in liquid "r": plus, pluris[3].
Cactus is a masculine name from the second declension: its latin plural is "cactī"[4]. Again, it would be unexplainable how that stem in dental would appear in a second declension name (stem in "o").
It may be a word like "fishes". I once saw "fishes" on an interpretive sign at an aquarium and some folks were mocking such and obvious grammatical error. Turns out, "fish" is the correct way to refer to multiple individual fish as a group, whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish.
I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are or are not the same species, whereas 'octopodes' deliberately speaks across speciation? I dunno... I'm just spit-balling here. I probably should have done more research before commenting. Downvote if I'm way off base. :)
There’s no right way. Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there.
It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns.
It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling anyone there’s a right way because there isn’t. It’s a greek, latin, and english word, but also none of them. No usage is standard or ultimately correct.
> Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there.
I recall reading that back in the day, there were criticisms that the neologism "television" would never catch on ... because it combined Greek and Latin roots.
Is it true the majority of imperial Rome personal names had -anus endings and they are not in vogue in Modern English for the obvious soundalike to Uranus?
And given the time available to an octopus while she waits for her eggs to hatch, what is the recommended reading list from the Loeb library for the octopus's consciousness if there were a universal translator babelfish she could use?
There may be no universally agreed right way, but there are certainly wrong ways. "Octopuses" and "octopodes" are both acceptable, but "octopi" is wrong. "Octopuses" can be justified using Fowler's rule (from 1913!) "there is a tendency to abandon the Latin plurals, & that when one is really in doubt which to use the English form should be given the preference". "Octopodes" can be justified on etymological grounds. There is no basis to use "octopi" other than an erroneous application of the Latin rule to form plurals for second declension nouns.
There's a wrong way, though - anybody smugly telling somebody they're an idiot for saying 'octopuses' when it's actually 'octopi'.
I think 'octopodes' is 'most correct', but 'octopuses' is fine. And most will mispronounce 'octopodes' if they choose it anyway, so 'octopuses' probably would've been better.
so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold.
so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive!
Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is)
Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species
Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s
Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out
octopi arises because people have learned Latin 2nd declension masculine nouns, by accident or repetition, where pluralizing (nominative case) turns the -us to -i.
It's a pattern matching phenomenon.
It would be less weird if there were not spelling irregularities, since the -pus is meant to be foot (like pes, pedes...in Latin, or pos, podes,... in Greek).
Basically, the spelling irregularity triggers a sensible pattern match, which happens to of course not honor the spelling irregularity.
And then nerds like me write too much about such, but i had years of Latin (and a little Greek) for something!
Maddeningly, it doesn't even apply to all Latin -us nouns. For instance, the plural of apparatus should be apparatūs if we're applying the Latin rules. Apparati, as it might seem, makes no sense! So even when the pattern match correctly identifies the language, it can be misleading.
apparatus is a past participle from apparare, so as an adjective plural would follow second declension, not fourth, i thought.
used as a noun, it's an (implicit thing) prepared (which preparatus would describe, but i guess we don't have any other word in English other than apparatus.
apparatus is first/second as a past participle. I suppose it could be used as a substantive, but there is also a fourth declension noun with the same lemma meaning implements, tools, etc.: https://logeion.uchicago.edu/apparatus
Ironically, when not used as a word ending, but as a single word... "I" is a singular way to talk about a person (namely, oneself), where as "us" is a plural way to talk about multiple people.
one that I often hear foreign speakers struggling with is “hair”. 1 hair, 2 hairs, a whole head of hair. seemingly, if it’s countable it follows normal rules, if it’s not, it goes back to singular form. but then it could be absolutely correct to say “the many hairs on my head”, an uncountable which retains the plural.
Japanese is worse. You count "1 thing", "2 thing", "3 thing", except the word for "thing" changes depending on the shape of the thing you are counting.
So thin flat things like paper or shirts are 1 mai, 2 mai, 3 mai, while to count books you say 1 satsu, 2 satsu, 3 satsu.
Long round things like pencils or umbrellas go 1 pon, 2 hon, 3 bon, 4 hon, 5 hon, 6 pon, etc (yeah you read that right).
There are different counter words for different kinds of animals, small things, vehicles, shoes, drinks, people, etc.
That's just consonant mutation[0][1], like how english speakers say "a pencil" but "an umbrella"[2]. (Ie, "hon", "pon", and "bon" are all the same word, just pronounced differently due to environment.) The fact that ほ ぼ ぽ (ho bo po) are all the same underlying letter, just with different diacritics, kind of hints at this.
> it’s countable it follows normal rules, if it’s not, it goes back to singular form.
You'd have a hard time counting all the stars, but "sky of star" doesn't work like "head of hair" does. I love how expressive English is, but it's got issues for sure.
All languages are a mess. Imagine instead of specific noun rules, every single noun had a rule by way of a gender. And to conjugate “boat” or “table” you need to know its arbitrary gender.
English, unlike a lot of the big European languages, doesn’t have a central controlling body and hasn’t gone through powerful standardisation efforts - beyond dictionaries (i.e. consistent spelling and meaning). many (most?) European languages follow pretty consistent conjugation and pronunciation rules. yeah there are a few exceptions in each case, but nowhere near the scale of English.
grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves
> grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves
That's a really good point actually, one I've not heard before.
I think it's still harder learning from an ungendered language, since you naturally think of mapping word:word, but you also need word:gender now. With your point though, maybe I can have an easier time of it by trying to consciously think of it instead as word:(word, gender), if that makes sense.
Mass noun is the term for that. Octopus is generally only a mass noun if talking about their meat.
As far as the plural goes, it is just a weird corner of the language where there is no consensus on what the right word is. merriam-webster lists all three variants as plurals.
The correct form is to sum up the legs involved. So two of the eight-legged creatures whose plural is in doubt would be hexadecapods. And if you have an octopus eating a kangaroo you'd then have a decapod, and so on.
Virus is the only neuter second declension Latin noun in -us (as opposed to -um). It means "poison" in Latin. I assume this was all meant tongue-in-cheek, but in case anyone is curious, the Latin plural is not virodes.
All of this is recalled from my high school Latin, which was a long time ago.
Either is fine. Octopuses or octopodes. The latter is the technical answer, but the former is acceptable and probably even more common. Although it is based on a Greek word, English isn’t Greek.
All the attested uses of the word virus in Latin are only in the singular number.
Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem.
(Originally it would have been visos => visosa, but the final vowel in virus has become closed, while the intervocalic s has become r due to rhotacism.)
You have been thinking at the masculine words whose stem ends in -u, like fructu (fruit), where the singular is fructus and the plural is fructuus. There -s is not part of the stem but it is a marker of the singular masculine nominative case.
In virus and the other neuter nouns that end in -s, the -s is a part of the stem of the word, not a case marker. There are also masculine word where the stem ends in -s, like muus (mouse), in which the -s must also not be confused with the marker of the nominative case that is applied to some of the words with other kinds of stems.
It is true that there are a few cases of a word "viri", which might have been the genitive of "virus".
Nevertheless, the meaning of the word is not certain, at least in the examples that I have seen.
Even if the word "viri" was really intended as the genitive of "virus", that is just another example of many cases when even the native speakers of Latin were not certain about the gender and declination class of certain seldom used words.
Whoever has used "viri" as the genitive of "virus" was believing that it is a masculine word of the 2nd declension. Most attested uses of virus are consistent with it being a neuter of the 3rd declension (i.e. "virus" was used for the accusative case). The word virus cannot be a neuter of the 2nd declension (in that case it would have been "virum").
Actually it is possible that in very old Latin the word virus was indeed a masculine of the 2nd declension, like its cognate word in Greek, but due to its meaning as a name of a substance it was transferred to the neuter gender in the 3rd declension.
Such interconversions of the words ending in -us between 2nd declension masculine, 3rd declension neuter and 4th declension masculine have happened for many words during the history of the Latin language, because even some native speakers guessed wrong the word class after hearing a rare word just a few times, and then others imitated them.
That all makes sense. What I know of virus is all from books like Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, which is basically a 19th century understanding: languages have particular rules one can enumerate and deviations from these rules are errors.
Actually we're speaking English, and not Greek or Latin, so we add an 's' or 'es'.
Just because some English professor assholes wanted to show off their knowledge of foreign languages in the 17-19th centuries, doesn't mean we should follow those rules now. They are responsible for a lot of the confusion and horrible English rules that users of English now have to deal with. I say shit on their horrible legacy.
>The Latinate plural form campi is sometimes used, particularly with respect to colleges or universities; however, it is sometimes frowned upon. By contrast, the common plural form campuses is universally accepted.
English plural vs Latin vs Greek. Since its origin is Greek I’d take the anglicized plural or the original plural over the superimposed Latin plural which makes absolutely no sense to me.
In ancient Greek πολύπους (polypus) is the more common and generic term, ὀκτάπους (octapus) the term for the animal, and ὀκτόπους (octopus) a possible synonym that seems to be used more often for the scorpion (which also has eight legs) or as an adjective for anything that is eight feet long or of eight square feet in size. Really, the English should be "octapus" or "polypus," and curmudgeons who want to feel superior to hoi illiterati polloi should cherish this treasure of pointless trivia.
It's American to my British ear. I think they sometimes distinguish 'pizza pie' as being the deeper-pan Chicagoan style, which to be fair is a lot more like what I would call a pie than what I would call a pizza. (But also not really either.)
"Pies" is most certainly not American. I have heard that it is supposedly specific to New York, but if you watch Friends (set in New York), you'll see frequent references to the Joey Special, "two pizzas".
It's always possible that there are zero people who think of "pies" as an appropriate way to refer to pizzas, but the myth persists that weird foreign people do it. People will believe anything about weird foreigners. Or there might be weird foreign people doing it right now. It's hard to know.
Not? I'm confused who you're saying does call pizzas 'pies' (or 'pizza pies') then?
I assure you some Americans certainly do, wherever they got it from, 'American' or not. I've only been exposed to it via American film/TV, including food shows - most recently Somebody Feed Phil in Chicago.
I've never heard it in the UK. I'd be surprised to learn that Italians call them something else too that in other contexts translates as 'pie', but I'm not sure how relevant that would be anyway.
> I'm confused who you're saying does call pizzas 'pies' (or 'pizza pies') then?
I'm not saying anyone does that. I said so in my comment just above you. If I knew there were someone doing it, it would be hard for me to claim it was possible that zero people do it.
You've never heard it in the UK. I've never heard it in the US. It's not a normal thing to say. None of that adds up to a claim that some people say it.
Ok well I am claiming some American people do say it. Neither of us can speak for the entirety of our respective countries, but certainly I have heard Americans saying it on television and film.
In addition to the TV citation I gave above, see Wiktionary:
The full thing is worth a read, but when you steal a word from one language that it also stole from a third, the pluralization rules are pretty much anything goes.
For pedants it's octopodes because its a Greek root, but the sort of people who think that way are the worst and are responsible for screwing up English a lot, so fuck those nerds.
If you're speaking English then you just add an s or es. So Octopuses is right.
Octopuses, octopodes, and octopi are all prefectly valid in modern English. There is an argument to be made that we should respect the greek root, but Octopi has been used for so long that it is a modern English word
Or you can choose not to use the inflectional morphology of another language on a loanword. Especially in a case like octopus where it (arguably) isn't a loanword
As a counterpoint, The Atlantic ran an interesting article[0] yesterday suggesting that it's not really clear what the Octopuses' aims are when they do this, and that we do really like to anthropomorphize them.
Yes, people tend to over-anthropormphize in the sense they map to specific human concepts. But otoh, we tend to greatly underestimate the complexity of animal behavior. Sometimes people mix these up. So, just because an anthropomorphization isn't correct, doesn't mean that the behavior isn't complex.
Even animals like spiders and ants demonstratw incredible complex behavior, for social, hunting, sanitation purposes etc. So don't feel bad about anthropomorphizing, as long as you are aware it's just fun speculation. There are infinite mysteries in animal behavior and it's absolutely fascinating. There is so much left to explore.
Yep. I've kinda gone full circle on this. My view now is that it's increasingly difficult to say exactly what makes humans special or unique, if anything [0]. So it's overly anthropocentric to deny the possibility that other species have analogous experiences of the world, or experiences which are richer than ours, or completely inconceivable by us [1].
Sure, there will be people that do anthropomorphise the octopus' actions, but this doesn't deny the possibility that an octopus can experience something analogous to feeling pissed off. (See: my table has four legs therefore it's a dog.)
To preempt those who might say "ah, but you can't prove that an octopus does have any form of consciousness" I'd point out that it's practically impossible to do that with humans too.
[0] It's certainly not one single ability. Perhaps some fuzzy superset of fuzzy sets.
[1] I include consciousness in "experiences", and I'd suggest that human-type consciousness is just one among very many.
> it's increasingly difficult to say exactly what makes humans special or unique, if anything
Absolutely. Every trait previously thought unique to humans that I know of have been found in animals, such as deduction, tool making, intra-species warfare, delayed gratification, play, language, dialects, curiosity, mischieviousness, boredom, empathy, grieving rituals, etc etc. The only generic trait missing from my bingo card is humor (but monkeys seem close).
It may very well be that humans just got a constellation of traits that happened to fit really well together. If I was a betting man, I'd say:
- Very long brain development time. At birth, our skulls aren't even hard yet, and we're blind. This lets the brain develop at a slow pace towards general purpose problem solving.
- Hands are extremely helpful for tool making.
- Knowledge sharing. Yes, we're quite smart, but more importantly we can combine our findings through language and persist it over time through writing. This is an incredible change in the topology of knowledge. Even an animal with 3x intelligence would not stand a chance without language.
Generally speaking, very good points, just wanted to point out that writing is extremely recent in evolutionary terms. Modern humans are at least 10,000 years old (but more typically viewed as 100,000 years old). Writing, as you probably know, is only around 3000 years old (at least that we can verify).
There can be little doubt that octopodes routinely complain to one another about cephalopodizing humans. The low number of appendages, inflexible bodies, and erratic self-destructive behaviour make it hard to take seriously any claims that homo sapiens is anything but the simple-minded, land-bound, fear-driven mammal it appears to be.
It makes me wonder if they engage in "play" does it evoke some "emotion" in them such as joy etc? some reward maybe? and if it does does other scenarios evoke other emotions we consider to be human centric. Anyone have a link to a good paper regarding it?
Octopuses have been known to nuzzle favored humans with their tentacles, and to spit water at disliked humans through their siphon.
Do they really feel affection for their favored humans? I don't know. Discussions of this sort tend to devolve into debates about "qualia". What I do know is that octopuses appear to manifest signs of affection, and of contempt. And that I'd be honored to be nuzzled by an octopus, and I'd surely prefer that to being spit at by one.
It's amazing that some people are so arrogant that they think humans are the only species capable of playing and being anything but bots that respond to stimulation.
It's equally ignorant to assume they don't have emotions as it is to assume they do. We literally don't know, but the harm in assuming they don't is people get a free pass to be cruel without guilt. If you assume they do then maybe you'll think twice about torturing animals or destroying their habitats.
Anthropomorphizing animals is probably a good thing. Maybe we can gain some sympathy for fellow living things. The people like Joe Rogan that say it's 'dangerous' to anthropomorphize are, well, people like Joe Rogan.
The worst that can happen is you have empathy for them.
On the other hand, evolutionary pressures and constraints of communication and game theory are frequently similar, and hence often lead to similar functional behavior even if the underlying systems are not homologous.
What looks intentional to one observer may seem accidental to another. “A lot of animal-behavior analysts would look at the same sequence of behavior and give a different interpretation,”
Reminds me of that video of the two fish spitting sand at each other. One is digging a hole by spitting sand out, the other spits sand back at it just because.
Apparently that's common behavior for all fish, not just octopuses. Here are 2 fish, each borrowing their own tunnel, and each spitting on each other, trying to block opponent's tunnel:
Was snorkeling with my 4yo in July and came across a decent sized octopus curled up under a small bit of coral substrate on the reef flat, in about 40cm of water. Wasn't able to id it properly, but we sat there for 15 minutes watching each other. Longest the kid has ever sat still in one spot. Cephalopods are without doubt the coolest fish in the sea.
When I first read the title for some reason I envisioned the throw to look like a sentinel throwing a bomb in The Matrix. Nothing like that, obviously.
My question is: was it throwing the shells out since it’s done eating them or in response to the other octopus that’s sort of messing with it?
"... although some of the time it seemed that they were just throwing away debris or food leftovers, it did sometimes appear that they were throwing things at each other."
That one instance is kinda hard to tell, but it sounds like they saw similar behaviour across observations.
Really cool, though a reminder(?) of how we don't give other life forms enough credit for their thinking ability. I looked out in my backyard the other week and saw two foxes playing together with my kids' volleyball they left in the yard. Like grasping it with mouth, tossing it, going to get it, wrestling each other. Amusing stuff.
I adopted a dog (for the first time in my life!) a few months ago and I am surprised in how she learns some stuff and how she behaves, reacts to triggers and inputs, etc. Of course, _it is only a dog_, but it is also a living thing with reduced communication skills and still she absorbs and learns a lot, and remembers, etc. Animals are truly amazing.
Out on a hike once I came across two coyotes that were playing some elaborate games. They would chase each other around obstacles and after separating would try to ambush or sneak up on the other. It was a blast watching them.
There was also a raven who started flying around in the mix and would land next to one, vocalizing at it. There was no aggression on either side, it honestly looked like the bird was joining the play but I have no idea if that's true.
I did some research and couldn't find anything on ravens and coyotes playing together, but crows/ravens have been known to hunt with coyotes and wolves.
My head-canon for this has always been the universal translator also translated the physical appearance of beings so that you could read their body language. This explains why everyone looks like humans with a slightly different color and head shape. In some cases, like energy beings and giant slimes, it simply cannot translate anything and displays the original being.
This head-canon melts in the face of the actual lore, but it helps me suspend disbelief.
Steven King's lesser known From A Buick 8 is a surprisingly good slow-burner that has one of my favorite depictions of extradimensional creatures to date.
> “The environment for these specific octopuses is such that they have this interaction between individuals,” she says. “It’s communication, in a way.”
Watching it, I immediately classify the behavior as aggression. Why they would stop at "communication" is not clear to me.
My wife loves These guys! Has a massive half-sleeve tat on her shoulder. my favorite exhibit of the Georgia Aquarium was the octopus. He came out and waved to us. pretty cool.
> “The environment for these specific octopuses is such that they have this interaction between individuals,” she says. “It’s communication, in a way.”
It seems naive to assume they don't have communication (more frequent and more complex), even though we may not have noticed or been able to detect it.
Every time I see one of these types of studies I always wonder if they controlled for all the spectrum detectable to the creature in question or the olfactory senses of the test subject when it is not explicitly mentioned.
it's interesting how the constraint of being in water limits inhabitants from developing technologies like fire and throwing projectiles for hunting. octopuses seem like they have the physiology and neurology to figure out projectiles and even grinding a sharp point, but that strategy wouldn't give them the same boost it did early humans because of the drag of water. construction and engineering is also made difficult by tides and erosion so they don't take it much farther than piling up some shells and rocks for a little sleep spot.
Since the mother dies at hatching of the eggs, there can be no culture where knowledge is transferred. There would need to be some evolutionary change where the mother does not die at that point or the father does not die after insemination. They still can be very intelligent but they have to learn everything in their short lifespan that is not instinctual. The species also has a tool that humans do not possess - extensive RNA editing to adapt.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-00612-y
It's interesting then to contemplate what kind of society we would have if we had developed our level of sentience but done so under water. Anybody know of any good sci-fi that explores that?
Or maybe, they are actually quite intelligent. Just because they're not bipedal, land dwelling mammals doesn't mean they don't hold some intelligence of their own kind.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
My only critique is that the plural spelling is octopuses and not octopi, just like the article. Octopuses just looks wrong and sounds funny, I stand my ground. Yes yes I know that it's not a Latin word.