So octopuses are very intelligent, and very alien. Anyone who has even casually read or watched videos about them will know this.
But their potential is cut short by their incredibly short lives (like 5? years at the higher end) which seem to be caused by a very bizarre self-destructive behavior after mating (starving themselves, eating their own arms), which in turn is caused by an "optic gland" and removing that gland completely eliminates that self-destructiveness and increases their lifespan.
It makes you wonder if that gland was artificially engineered into them.
The sci-fi nerd in me likes to think there is a cosmic conflict between axial-symmetry species and radial-symmetry species, which may be overall more common in the universe given how life evolves at the microscopic scale, and Earth was chosen to give apes a chance.
If I recall correctly, one theory is that octopuses are such voracious cannibals that a swift demise after reproduction evolved to keep them from eating the next generation.
> It makes you wonder if that gland was artificially engineered into them.
There is a comment below by biztos imagining that if octopi lived longer, they would be the apex species that was failing to fight the climate change - in place of humans.
Made me think that maybe they were at one point, and then the octopus civilization itself decided to "solve the problem" by engineering a shorter time-to-live into their species and preventing intelligent behavior :)
In regards to sci-fi, it sounds like the inverse of A Mote In God's Eye. Where [Spoiler Alert] the alien "Moties" had a biology that killed them if they went too long without mating.
If it was engineered such that humans win out over octopuses, why not, just not include octopuses directly? Then again this wouldn’t Mae a good sci-fi novel...
That's awesome. I don't find it hard to believe that the octopus is dreaming, but I am a little skeptical of the interpretation of the evidence. Humans get erections throughout the night which have nothing to do with sexual dreams, so maybe the chromatophores cycling are just like that.
Experiments with mice have shown that if you shock mice at certain times during sleep, their fear conditioning will change. https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/26/5/527/2707886 This seems to indicate that sleep acts like an unsupervised learning reinforcer.
Sleep might be required for a certain level of consciousness.
You might be interested in "hippocampal replay" and "sequence reactivation" during sleep
TL;DR during sleep, most critters' brains actively "re-play" waking experiences, and this contributes to learning+memory. I can't find the paper right now, but at a talk in ~2013 some guy presented work in which spatial trajectories run by rats were reconstructed from hippocampal place cell activation sequences during sleep
If you spend enough time in a sensory deprivation tank, you will usually start experiencing abstract thoughts and sensory hallucinations. Dreaming is likely similar in that it's just the natural result of a few moving parts:
1. An eager sensory network with no inputs can introduce phantom inputs into the network, which can evolve through feedback loops in networks not being stimulated by real sensory phenomena
2. The brain and body's tendency to actively "simulate" its internal representation of the world, by creating mental scenarios and then playing them out.
When you throw a baseball, your CNS & muscles run simulations which adjust your motor neuron activation profile and the way your muscular cells function based on feedback from the brain about the success of the action.
When you practice a speech, you visualize the place you will be delivering it, visualize the audience and their potential reactions, so that you can plan accordingly. This is another kind of mental simulation.
Dreams might be the same thing, generating sensory feedback loops from brain activity resulting from memory organization and compression during the sleep cycle, simulating a world and then running through the simulation.
This can greatly increase an organism's survival if the organism's entire life revolves around finding food and avoiding predators / catching prey. While they are hidden and safely sleeping, animals are still able to "train" themselves completely unconsciously.
Seeing as how evolutionarily useful it is, I'm not surprised to see it crop up in multiple kinds of brains and would be very surprised if advanced aliens do not dream as well.
Probably that offline training is a significant boost to an intelligent creature's fitness function? (Where all mammals and quite a few other animals qualify as 'intelligent').
The more you can learn from that near-death experience without having another one, the less likely you are to become something's lunch.
that is absolutely gorgeous. i was watching this all day yesterday...and playing Ringo's Octopus' Garden.
Cephalopod intelligence is a thing. I have often wondered if only intelligence/sentience is connected to dreaming. octopi dream..cats dream, but do insects dream?
1) Octopuses have a "vertical lobe", which is very similar in function and organization to our hippocampus.
2) Mammalian hippocampuses have the ability for something known as "longterm potentiation" (LTP), which is believed to play a crucial part in memory and learning. Experiments found a similar longterm potentiation mechanism in the vertical lobe of octopuses.
Quoting the article: "The discovery of LTP in octopuses provides evidence for convergent evolution that has led to the selection of similar synaptic activity. Though not yet agreed upon in the scientific community, the existence of LTP in both mammals and octopuses strengthens the concept of LTP as a cellular basis for learning and memory and may be a general mechanism for associative learning".
I'm not sure if that counts as well but Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee Rama series includes "octospider" species but that would be more for "alien" part in the article title.
Yeah, it was a fantastic deep dive into how a creature like that perceives and operates within reality. Not as enjoyable as Children of Time IMHO as I preferred the evolutionary journey of the Portiids more, but still excellent. Ending was lacking though. Hope he does a third book.
The thing that I keep wondering about is, why don't octopuses have higher aspirations? Like building octopus cities, and forming an octopus empire. Or figuring out how to pass on information from generation to generation. Could an octopus be taught English?
As I understand it they have very short lifespans (3-5 years) and octopus mothers only lay eggs once. They die of starvation after guarding & tending the eggs right up to hatching.
I think they just don’t have the opportunity to produce culture. Maybe they could be taught but it seems like generational learning would be extremely unlikely.
Edit: their situation has always struck me as very poetic and sad. If they are conscious their existence seems so lonely. But maybe that’s just my mammalian bias!
Maybe they would be a better candidate for uplift than dolphins then? We could start out by fixing their lifespans (apparently it's a surgically resolvable problem, see [0]), and seeing what happens.
This remind me of a great quote from the film "Man From Earth":
* I mean,
assuming normal intelligence. Well, we think men
of the upper Paleolithic were as intelligent as
we are. They just didn't know as much.
John's man would have learned as the race
learned. In fact, if he had an inquiring mind,
his knowledge might be...astonishing.*
Octopodes may very well suffer from this, they may be very intelligent but just don't have the means to gain sufficient knowledge. If you think about it, take the average human, and private him from all of our current body of knowledge, and it will have a hard time achieving anything in earth's environment.
Anyone interested in thinking about this should read Children of Time and the sequel Children of Ruin.
The first is about the (accidental) future uplift of spiders via genetic engineering and evolution, the sequel about octopuses. The author does an excellent job of imagining how this might come to pass.
It takes almost 20 years for a modern human to become a productive member of society. In 3 years, we are barely able to communicate properly. Octopuses simply don't have time to learn and instead must rely on innate skills.
I think about this Douglas Adams quote about Dolphins a lot:
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
While satirical, this doesn’t really make sense as an answer to question at hand. Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. There are some limits to this — humans in many cases clearly have other goals — but it should be true to a large extent. The wheel, New York, and wars are pretty clearly aligned with this goal.
If the octopus possessed sufficient intelligence, something along the lines of an octopus city would presumably be in the cards. Or if they do possess such intelligence, the question again is why not form civilizations (which would presumably boost survival and fertility rates)?
Well they have always been considered solitary. We don't even have a collective noun. So they may consider such things their idea of nightmare.
That said, we have discovered some areas where they gather[1], so it really comes down to us not knowing nearly enough. Much of life in the oceans remains a mystery.
"Or figuring out how to pass on information from generation to generation."
The marine biologist at a aquarium told us (semi-jokingly) that this is the reason they haven't taken over the world yet.
They just leave their children to their own and don't teach them anything at all. So every octopus born has to relearn everything and once done, they die.
Historically humans have asked this of other humans which typically are the darkest parts of our history where we devalued one another. Perhaps the Octopus is just happy with its lot. They also don't live very long only a handful of years, which is also testament to just how smart they actually are.
> The octopus conundrum is an instructive example of how an animal can be complex and intelligent, and yet we are, so far, unable to answer the question of its subjective experience or even whether the question has any meaning for that creature.
I'm not sure, but I think that the author is arguing that we can't say for sure whether any other creatures are conscious. There are the mirror experiments, but ultimately, we know that humans are (in general) conscious because we (personally) are conscious.
There's a bio professor at my university, Michael Dickinson, who is one of the world's leading experts on flies, so much so that his email handle is "flyman". His group is trying to understand the relationship between the fruit fly's biological structure and it's behavior. They do all these zany experiments with motion tracking where they observe a bunch of flies interacting and try to figure out what's going on in their brains. Really cool stuff. I've always felt that if we could understand the genes -> cells -> systems -> behavior pathway much better then our understanding of the world might be completely transformed... I think octopuses would be an especially interesting model organism to study.
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But their potential is cut short by their incredibly short lives (like 5? years at the higher end) which seem to be caused by a very bizarre self-destructive behavior after mating (starving themselves, eating their own arms), which in turn is caused by an "optic gland" and removing that gland completely eliminates that self-destructiveness and increases their lifespan.
It makes you wonder if that gland was artificially engineered into them.
The sci-fi nerd in me likes to think there is a cosmic conflict between axial-symmetry species and radial-symmetry species, which may be overall more common in the universe given how life evolves at the microscopic scale, and Earth was chosen to give apes a chance.
There is a comment below by biztos imagining that if octopi lived longer, they would be the apex species that was failing to fight the climate change - in place of humans.
Made me think that maybe they were at one point, and then the octopus civilization itself decided to "solve the problem" by engineering a shorter time-to-live into their species and preventing intelligent behavior :)
Deleted Comment
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http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
it's 1982's "the thing", from the perspective of the, well, thing :)
The original limits were symmetrical. They just haven't yet noticed humans started living long enough to develop into a technological species.
If you eliminate a radial intelligence somewhere they eliminate an axial intelligence somewhere. Roundabout hindering them is clearly allowed.
It may even have been a compensation for the seemingly barren corner of the galaxy we're in.
Like, even for giant octopus? How do they get so large, in such a short amount of time?
Usual adult giant octopuses are similar (in weight) to 3 year old humans, so it's not really surprising they get that big over a 3-5 year lifespan.
Octopus Dreaming - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vKCLJZbytU
Some of the best imagery I've ever seen of chromatophores (and other *phores) in action.
But Wikipedia suggests that there is some controversy around the exact causes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_penile_tumescence
It’s hard to imagine what reason a sleeping octopus would have for cycling through colors if not related to their dreams.
Sleep might be required for a certain level of consciousness.
TL;DR during sleep, most critters' brains actively "re-play" waking experiences, and this contributes to learning+memory. I can't find the paper right now, but at a talk in ~2013 some guy presented work in which spatial trajectories run by rats were reconstructed from hippocampal place cell activation sequences during sleep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampal_replay
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/31/7883
http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2019.01.0...
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(17)31441...
1. An eager sensory network with no inputs can introduce phantom inputs into the network, which can evolve through feedback loops in networks not being stimulated by real sensory phenomena
2. The brain and body's tendency to actively "simulate" its internal representation of the world, by creating mental scenarios and then playing them out.
When you throw a baseball, your CNS & muscles run simulations which adjust your motor neuron activation profile and the way your muscular cells function based on feedback from the brain about the success of the action.
When you practice a speech, you visualize the place you will be delivering it, visualize the audience and their potential reactions, so that you can plan accordingly. This is another kind of mental simulation.
Dreams might be the same thing, generating sensory feedback loops from brain activity resulting from memory organization and compression during the sleep cycle, simulating a world and then running through the simulation.
This can greatly increase an organism's survival if the organism's entire life revolves around finding food and avoiding predators / catching prey. While they are hidden and safely sleeping, animals are still able to "train" themselves completely unconsciously.
Seeing as how evolutionarily useful it is, I'm not surprised to see it crop up in multiple kinds of brains and would be very surprised if advanced aliens do not dream as well.
The more you can learn from that near-death experience without having another one, the less likely you are to become something's lunch.
Cephalopod intelligence is a thing. I have often wondered if only intelligence/sentience is connected to dreaming. octopi dream..cats dream, but do insects dream?
In a nutshell:
1) Octopuses have a "vertical lobe", which is very similar in function and organization to our hippocampus.
2) Mammalian hippocampuses have the ability for something known as "longterm potentiation" (LTP), which is believed to play a crucial part in memory and learning. Experiments found a similar longterm potentiation mechanism in the vertical lobe of octopuses.
Quoting the article: "The discovery of LTP in octopuses provides evidence for convergent evolution that has led to the selection of similar synaptic activity. Though not yet agreed upon in the scientific community, the existence of LTP in both mammals and octopuses strengthens the concept of LTP as a cellular basis for learning and memory and may be a general mechanism for associative learning".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)
I think they just don’t have the opportunity to produce culture. Maybe they could be taught but it seems like generational learning would be extremely unlikely.
Edit: their situation has always struck me as very poetic and sad. If they are conscious their existence seems so lonely. But maybe that’s just my mammalian bias!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Pacific_octopus
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21086642
* I mean, assuming normal intelligence. Well, we think men of the upper Paleolithic were as intelligent as we are. They just didn't know as much. John's man would have learned as the race learned. In fact, if he had an inquiring mind, his knowledge might be...astonishing.*
Octopodes may very well suffer from this, they may be very intelligent but just don't have the means to gain sufficient knowledge. If you think about it, take the average human, and private him from all of our current body of knowledge, and it will have a hard time achieving anything in earth's environment.
The first is about the (accidental) future uplift of spiders via genetic engineering and evolution, the sequel about octopuses. The author does an excellent job of imagining how this might come to pass.
It takes almost 20 years for a modern human to become a productive member of society. In 3 years, we are barely able to communicate properly. Octopuses simply don't have time to learn and instead must rely on innate skills.
Very short lifespans. A tragedy, when you think about it...
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
You could apply the same idea to octopuses.
If the octopus possessed sufficient intelligence, something along the lines of an octopus city would presumably be in the cards. Or if they do possess such intelligence, the question again is why not form civilizations (which would presumably boost survival and fertility rates)?
http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html
That said, we have discovered some areas where they gather[1], so it really comes down to us not knowing nearly enough. Much of life in the oceans remains a mystery.
[1] https://ourblueplanet.bbcearth.com/blog/?article=are-octopus...
The marine biologist at a aquarium told us (semi-jokingly) that this is the reason they haven't taken over the world yet.
They just leave their children to their own and don't teach them anything at all. So every octopus born has to relearn everything and once done, they die.
I'm not sure, but I think that the author is arguing that we can't say for sure whether any other creatures are conscious. There are the mirror experiments, but ultimately, we know that humans are (in general) conscious because we (personally) are conscious.