What it’s like to be an octopus? This review of Peter Godfrey Smith’s book, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, captures perfectly why I’ve been fascinated by them — they’re the closest thing to aliens we’ve got.
Unlike cetaceans – whose sentience it is possible to imagine, partly because they demonstrate our mammalian connections so vividly and physically – cephalopods are entirely unlike us. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over,” says Godfrey-Smith. “This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” The fact that they have eight legs, three hearts, and blue-green blood allies them more with The Simpsons’ gloopy extra-terrestrials than anything earthly.
I think we look through coloured glasses when we assess the “intelligence” and “sentience” of beings unlike us. I myself would say a tree is intelligent since it somehow knows perfectly well how to make another tree and so far as I know no human knows how to do that except in the most sketchy way. It’s not “intelligence as we know it” of course, but really what do we know about “intelligence”?
Before we start talking about what is and what isn’t intelligence or sentience perhaps we need good testable definitions of these things, but I am unaware of any such definitions which may, of course, only be a demonstration of my own ignorance of which I have a plentiful store.
Are trees and fish aware? I suspect trees aren’t and at least some fish are, but then I don’t really know what “awareness” really means, so why should my opinion be of any importance? I also don’t understand why or if “awareness” is a requirement for “intelligence”.
I seem to perhaps have refuted my own argument, but what the heck, I’ll post it anyway.
If humans learn how to make a tree, do trees stop being intelligent?
“they’re the closest thing to aliens we’ve got.”
No, there are still Republicans.
Some VERY IMPORTANT, GROUNDBREAKING, WORLD-CHANGING science, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science itself!
Who’d have guessed?
http://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/3074.abstract
# 3 busterggi
That is an insult to Cephalopods and Aliens.
# 4 hansomemrtoad
A rather interesting paper judging by the abstract and probably quite suitable for Accident Analysis & Prevention.
What on earth is it doing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science /i> ? Clearly the follow-up study will appear in Science or Nature.
jrkrideau @ 5
Xenomorphs and xenophobes, always getting them mixed up.
Hmmm. I thought its been common consensus for a long time (at least half a century) that humans will always be more closely related to cephalopods (or any other terrestrial organism) than to anything else extraterrestrial it might ever possibly encounter, just on the grounds of the ultimate extension of the principle of geographic isolation on variation. On that perspective cephalopods are close kin – and depending on how we identify ‘ourselves’, ARE a small subset aspect of earthly ‘us’.
On the other hand, a fair argument can be made that we don’t even understand ourselves well enough to escape the category of alien: we already are the aliens. So what’s the big popular hoopla going around like the season’s sniffles that we won’t be able to understand ET’s? We haven’t even begun to figure ourselves out yet.
Rich Woods@2
“If humans learn how to make a tree, do trees stop being intelligent?”
Ask me again when that happens. If, of course, I am still alive, though I rather suspect that I won’t be.
So is self-replication the only prerequisite for intelligence in your model, Ed Seedhouse? If so, it looks more like you’ve just redefined it to mean “alive”.
Seems a waste of a perfectly good word, really.
Snoof@10
‘it looks more like you’ve just redefined it to mean “alive”’
I think this is a fair criticism based on what I said. However I also think that you need to provide a straightforward definition of “intelligence” for your criticism to have any weight for me. “Intelligence” is to my mind a fairly vague word and I haven’t seen any definitions that seem coherent to me.
Google presents this as one: “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”.
But if so may not the universe may be said to be intelligent? After all it has somehow acquired me, who has the (somewhat limited) ability to acquire knowledge. But that itself is misleading since I am not suggesting that there is somehow an intelligent “god” behind it all, nor do I mean to advocate Pantheism.
OK, that’s a bit silly, but my point is that words and definitions are slippery and many (most?) of them don’t describe the physical world properly, so we should be careful how we apply them. The word is not the thing and the map is not the territory.
Words are abstractions, but the physical world itself is not an abstraction. Of course words are necessary for human beings and very useful tools that give us a lot of power. But still I think it’s good to keep in mind that any abstraction is, by it’s nature, incomplete.