Comment by Nexxxeh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nexxxeh | Hacker News Reader

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I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...)

I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine.

https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/

And the follow-up:

https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus...

(Edit: Si -> Sy)

If you like reading about minds that are fundamentally different from our own, you might also enjoy the science fiction novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Exploring the space of possible minds in the universe is a fundamental theme of that work.

To give a bit more context for others, the novel is a really well done first contact story. I'd highly recommend it, especially because Watts makes it available online for free.

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Just to run down this alley, highly seconded. It is a great, if somewhat depressing, novel. _Echopraxia_ is a continuation of the themes/story, and is just as good (and also depressing).

I personally put Watts near the top of the list of first-rate, active science fiction authors.

His eye for hard science is very keen. I love that he has notes at the end of Blindsight that try to dig deeper into the approaches he had taken in the writing and add background.

I couldn't put Echophraxia down. I might hazard that I like it more than Blindsight but it'd be hard to put in words.

Which do you enjoy more?

I just read the whole thing. Wow! Thanks for the recommendation.

> ... reading about minds that are fundamentally different from our own...

so is 'a fire upon the deep' by vernor vinge. where you have 'tines', iirc, a race of canids comprising 4-10 (or thereabouts) members sharing a group mind (new members can be added when old ones die etc.)

Tine culture is explored in much greater depth in "Children of the Sky", the sequel to "A Fire upon the Deep".

Solaris is another good novel about this.

Yes - I was young when I read, but here goes, it is REALLY alien life.

Also, the recent movie "Arrival" (or the short story it's based on).

> The first problem was keeping the octopuses alive. The four-hundred-gallon tank was divided into separate compartments for each animal. But even though students hammered in dividers, the octopuses found ways to dig beneath them — and eat each other. Or they’d mate, which is equally lethal. Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs, but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia. “They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed, they won’t look you in the eye.. (o)

the mating ritual is very alien as well

it's fascinating

first of all sex can be identified in octopodes(i) checking the 8th appendage

on the males this appendage has a small portion at the end without suckers, this is because the male uses this appendage to reach inside his head.. mantel cavity(ii).. remove a sac of sperm.. spermatophore.. and then place it inside the head of a woman (iii)(iv)

and i was told by a worker at an aquarium that if other males have already placed their spermatophore into a females mantel a later male can remove those when inserting his own

(o) https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/

(i) http://grammarist.com/usage/octopi-octopuses/

(ii) http://www.asnailsodyssey.com/IMAGES/OCTOPUS/octopusMate.gif

(iii) http://www.asnailsodyssey.com/LEARNABOUT/OCTOPUS/octoRepr.ph...

(iv) https://youtu.be/4fkQZrfeYXQ?t=132

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

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

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

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

I think you've identified precisely why tribal culture would have helped octopodes: (never thought I'd be saying that today)

1. Before writing, technology was passed down through word of mouth from elders to younger generations in tribes.

2. Rearing/protecting young is assigned to specialized members of the tribe while others hunt/gather resources.

As an experiment, I wonder if octopuses could be taught rudiments of culture that would have evolutionary advantages...

"You were so busy wondering if you could do it, you never stopped to ask if you should"

That's going on your headstone come the Great Octopus War of 2033.

Nah, evolution will take a while to produce killer octopodes. I figure I'm good for a few million years, until after humanity has already gone full star-robot.

I also suspect it's a lot harder to advance technologically when you live underwater. One of the big boosts to human evolution was the mastery of fire and development of cooking.

Depends on whether or not cooking would expand an octopode diet the way it did with humans. They're also technically "cold" blooded.

Also booze. The desire to make our own alcohol is what triggered the spread of agriculture, if I remember my old history classes correctly.

Agriculture predates history.

Recorded history, perhaps. Doesn't mean we can't still figure things out about what happened before recorded history.

But don't ask me how we figured out that humans switched to agriculture in order to make booze, because I'm not qualified to answer that, all I can tell you is that I learned this at some point from someone else who is more qualified than I am to talk about this.

Well, essentially cooking is trying to dissolve food in water - a non existing problem for octopi, mussels taste raw, too!

Cooking is about breaking down cell walls, allowing us to expend less effort digesting food, making more calories available.

I have never heard of that reasoning. What's the advantage of dissolving in water? There are other advantages of cooking such as producing shelf stable foodstuffs and increasing the bioavailability of nutrients.

It's hard to light a fire under the water. You're not going to do much industry there. The deck is stacked against water-based intelligence developing technology.

Might be a good thing for us. I bet they could evolve into awesome tool users.

This being said, they have the 'third hand' that every technician dreams of. Two hands to hold the work steady, and the third to do the action.

But I can just see octopuses hankering for that fourth hand. You probably can't have too many hands, and wanting N+1 is going to be universal . . . :-)

How do you know the parents don't psss on information chemically or genetically? There's studies in humans suggesting trauma can alter the genome (see https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/holocaus... for a skpetically-minded overview of the paper), and it's not like we know genetics backwards and forwards. I'm wary of assuming other species should have to follow a recognizable parallel to human development. After all, fish that live in schools are essentially tribal but it doesn't seem to have led to an increase in sophistication.

I assume evolution would eventually take its course by selectively choosing the ocotopodes whose mothers lived long enough to pass some sort of knowledge down. The longer and longer mothers live, perhaps the more those types of octopodes get selected because they outcompete orphans.

>I love how completely alien they are compared to us.

If you want to read a book which takes this idea to the extreme check out Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. It deals with a living ocean which has been completely incomprehensible to humans for hundreds of years - a neat thought exercise on the limits of knowledge.

My favorite part of the second article was how the octopus was able to attend to 3 or 4 people at once and still manage to steal the bucket of fish. It's part hivemind, part single entity and I agree, very alien. What's also interesting is that despite having diverged a very long time ago, chromatophore lobes of octopus are surprisingly sophisticated and mammal like (especially for a mollusk).

Others have already recommended Blindsight, but if you want a short story by Peter Watts specifically dealing with octopus consciousness, Colony Creature is a good read: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5875

Those are shorter forms of pieces in her long-form book:

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Octopus-Surprising-Exploration-C...

Quick read, and also recommended for more good octopus anecdotes that inform this question.

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