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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I find this absolutely fascinating. For a long time we thought that humans had a monopoly on abstract thought and problem solving, then we realized apes have it, then pigs, and now octopi. It's weird to think that humans might not be the only truly intelligent creatures on the planet, but it does show to me that "intelligence" isn't this simple black and white system.

I have to say though, this article did kind of make me feel guilty for eating as much octopus as I have.

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and now octopi.

I don't think this is recent. I had a relative who raised octopi for sale in his garage in the 1970's.

His most time-consuming task was that he had to play with the octopi every day to keep their brains engaged or they'd get depressed and sad and die.

One of their favorite games was "jar." Where he would put various jars and other vessels in their tanks and they would figure out how to open and close them.

Eventually they would love the game enough that they would unscrew a jar, swim inside, and then screw it closed again with themselves inside. Then they'd look(?) at each other in the other jars and switch jars and basically frolic in the containers.

It was really odd.

That would have been a great video.

I found this which is pretty close to what is described:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=209&v=ZU_2CzHnbd...

Thanks

Octopus species are frequently cannibalistic, even while well-fed. How did your uncle manage to keep more than one in a tank?

That's adorable.

I think it's useful to think about evolutionary pressures forcing species to be "smart". Brain is an incredibly expensive organ, so it better be more useful than its energy consumption. We don't even quite know why primates have larger brains; we have some theories such as primates, being arboreal, might have evolved to process snakes and spiders visually (this also explains why they have poor olfaction compared to other mammals) [1]. Afaik, and please prove me wrong, we have fewer evidence why great apes have even larger brains and humans have even even larger brains. Might be better communication, group hunting, problem solving (using tools), caring for babies better, or something else, or a combination. It's interesting to think these questions with respect to pigs, octopi, dolphins, cats, dogs etc... Every mammal comes with their own supercomputer pattern matcher that is neocortex, and it's interesting to think that earlier mammals needed more computational power to survive than other animals.

[1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/did-snakes-help-build...

What's especially interesting about octopus is that while they do communicate with each other, they aren't social in the way we are AFAIK. And, as discussed in the article, relatively short timespans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Pacific_octopus), and parents do not raise their young the way we do.

Octopi are apparently a lot more social while high on MDMA:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/20/6487881...

I don't know why you're getting down voted. It's somewhat shocking to me that MDMA would have any kind of even slightly similar effect on such a wildly different animal.

Serotonin as a biological utility has been around since the beginning of multi-cellular life, maybe even sooner!

We organisms tend to share many of the same neurotransmitters. It's always pretty cool to observe similar pharmacological effects to those which humans experience as a result of a certain drug, and then watching a lobster react in a similar way!

their lifespans don't overlap with their offspring's very much

When natural selection doesn’t explain an expensive trait, chances are sexual selection is at work. Social creatures often have bigger brains, but my guess would be sexual selection, mixed with some other traits that made it feasible to fuel such a hungry organ, are behind our inordinately large heads. :)

> When natural selection doesn’t explain an expensive trait, chances are sexual selection is at work.

Sexual selection is an element of natural selection (which is about fitness measured by ability to have offspring that reproduce), so if it is at work, natural selection does, in fact, explain the trait.

Make no mistake, Humans are still far, FAR ahead of other animals. We even have the advantage of thousands of years of backed up knowledge and infrastructure. We still mostly have a monopoly on higher order intelligence.

I am not sure about Dolphins for example. Bats do 3d navigation and echolocation with tiny brains, so there is some reasons dolphins use that many resources to support a larger brain than ours.

We don’t have a great ability to communicate with them, but they also have a very different sensory world.

Size is not the only factor. What about density, specific areas, interconnects? I think edge count is a common measure in graph theory.

Dolphins have more neurons than us in their neocortex speaking to specific areas and the size vs density argument. Overall they have more interconnects than human brains.

The real question is what exactly they are spending all that energy maintaining a lot of processing power, it does not map into tool use but it maps into something.

Suppose you were born an octopus, with your current level of intelligence.

What would you do? How would you demonstrate it?

Note how difficult it would be to communicate.

I think many animals are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

I am inclined to agree; we're only semi-recently seeing that animals other than humans and chimps use tools in some fashion, and I don't even know that that by itself is a great measure.

If anything it's evidence of our anthropocentric perspective. Use of tools used to be a proof of our intelligence, until people actually started studying tool use by animals and found some birds, chimps, and octopi all use tools naturally, and seals and dogs can be trained to use certain tools. Rather than declare those animals intelligent we seem to have collectively decided that tool use no longer indicates intelligence...

Octopuses are actually quite social - sending visual and tactile signals at each other. You can also spot them lying (less and more obviously) in those signals.

https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live...

The main difference is that they aren't pack animals like dolpins or most primates, so you get a less condensed sample.

Interesting! I'd always heard that octopi lead a life of solitude. Thanks for sharing.

It's hard to distinguish your current level of intelligence with all the stuff you've learned. Knowing what I know now I'd probably go for tapping prime number sequences on the glass, but it took millenia of humans that were basically as intelligent as me to figure out that prime numbers are interesting.

That is true. I was thinking that morse code or writing would be effective, but my knowledge of these things is not really intelligence but rather things that I learned by participating in human society.

If you were magically transformed into an octopus, communicating with humans would be easy; you could still write.

If you were born an octopus, you wouldn't know how to write, but presumably you would be a lot more familiar with communicating with other octopuses.

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