> Some octopuses did not like being removed from their tanks. They would hide. They would squeeze into a corner where they couldn’t be pried out. They would hold on to some object with their arms and not let go.
> Some would let themselves be captured, only to use the net as a trampoline. They’d leap off the mesh and onto the floor — and then run for it. Yes, run. “You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat,” Warburton said. “It’s so weird!”
> [..] “Catching her for the maze always took twenty minutes,” Warburton said. “She’d grip onto something and not let go. Once she got stuck in a filter and we couldn’t get her out. It was awful!”
What seems far more awful is using these apparently-highly-intelligent animals for laboratory experiments, against their will.
This isn't the usual argument of animal rights. Here we have a highly intelligent and inventive creature repeatedly trying its best to escape - it's hard not to identify with it! - and the scientists just recapture it by force. They actively oppose the animal's attempts to liberate itself, again and again.
>and the scientists just recapture it by force. They actively oppose the animal's attempts to liberate itself, again and again.
I guess you subscribe to deontological ethics? I wonder how would you reconcile it with the following questions.
What's your stance on police actively opposing the [offending] human's attempts to liberate itself?
What's your stance on doctors actively opposing the [considered mentally ill] attempts to liberate itself?
Obviously humans are highly intelligent and inventive creatures. Prison torture, rape and humiliation may not be on the same level of cruelty as laboratory experiments but mental institutions procedures are definitely comparable.
That's a false equivalence surely. Animals don't have a stake in the law- and policy-making process, whereas humans do - including all those potentially subject to those actions in the future.
In essence, humans have agreed to do these things to themselves. Animals do not have that opportunity.
Glibly, subgroups of humans called "the government" institutionalize procedures for the treatment of other humans. Without going into which groups of people are represented by these governments, which is a very important discussion in its own right, the species has its own voice. That's not the case with octopuses or lab rats or what have you.
It is the argument for animal rights (as opposed to animal welfare).
For example the "Nonhuman Rights Project" works for the bodily liberty and integrity of great apes, dolphins, and elephants within the US legal framework.
Most wild animals lack the cognitive and spatial abilities of octopodes, or match their use of tools. There is a difference between sprinting away and making planned, sapient decisions to escape.
The intelligence of some cephalopods is a controversial topic, as their limb dexterity and brain-to-mass ratios makes them unique, and they have some protection from research in the E.U.
>There is a difference between sprinting away and making planned, sapient decisions to escape.
What's the difference? They're both instinctual responses to a perceived threat.
Now, I'm not saying we should be killing animals indiscriminately. I'm saying that decision has nothing to do with whether the animal knows which direction to flee or how to hide. That's like trying to decide whether to buy a house based on the number in the ones place of its price.
> Here we have a highly intelligent and inventive creature repeatedly trying its best to escape - it's hard not to identify with it! - and the scientists just recapture it by force.
> They actively oppose the animal's attempts to liberate itself, again and again.
That makes me think about the Rat Park experiments. Treatment of the animal's may play a bigger role in the results of experiments than anyone suspects. Especially as the intelligence of the animal increases.
Do you feel the same way when you have chicken or beef at dinner knowing all these animals were butchered "against their will". Maybe you feel less empathy for animals that aren't intelligent.
This is all a part of being human. Its the way we are and most of us don't even think its something wrong. I doubt this will change so you need to deal with it.
The idea of breeding cephalopods for increased intelligence is touched on in the (great) novel, "Manifold: Time".
Not cephalopods specifically, but the idea of breeding smarter animals is touched on by David Brin in his "Uplift" novels.
I've often thought about how fascinating it would be if some organization took on the long-term task of breeding for intelligence. Perhaps it would require a well-funded non-profit to provide the resources. Could it be done more open-source styled, with standardized tests, individuals breeding animals and submitting gene sequences for analysis (is there a 23andme for animals)?
How interesting would it be to (ultimately) talk to a gorilla or octopus philosopher?
Being bred for human style intelligence, it would have similar capabilities to our own in terms of cognitive capacities. Yet its metaphors for interacting with the world would all be based on the body of an octopus. It would have a tenticle in both worlds.
Some things would overlap, like big meaning important, sharp meaning dangerous or cutting. Others might not, for instance any metaphor having to do with wetness would probably have a different meaning for the octopus whose home is the water than it does for those of us on land.
That novel completely ruined squids and asteroid mining for me, because I immediately think about it. Whenever I come across a group studying cephalopod intelligence, I am waiting for someone to say they developed a computer interface that they glom to and have one operating a motorized tank.
At what point do you have to stop the experiment because the species has become too smart? A human-level intelligence that can make arguments in its own defense has a good likelihood of being recognized as having rights by a court.
You could try ASCII - they should have no problem with octal.
It's hard to measure IQ without a social context.
Humans are unique in that most of our collective learning is shareable and externalised. If you took a human child and kept it completely isolated from all external teaching and human contact until after puberty, it's not obvious that it would appear that much more intelligent than an octopus.
Conversely, if you could give an octopus the genes for a much longer lifespan and less need to be solitary, I don't know what you'd get - but it might be scary smart.
> If you took a human child and kept it completely isolated from all external teaching and human contact until after puberty, it's not obvious that it would appear that much more intelligent than an octopus.
Obviously we cannot deliberately test this hypothesis, but there have been a few cases of children raised in isolation who failed to ever attain an adult level of language [0]. In fact, if you measure by number of acquired words alone (a dubious metric), their capacity for learning language was at the same order of magnitude as gorillas [1] (the validity of gorilla language studies remains controversial).
To be taken with a rock of salt, of course, but it shows that development is far from guaranteed. This makes determining the intelligence potential of a species very difficult: what is the optimal environment for baby octopi to learn to communicate?
> Sooo... can we breed octopi for intelligence? How far could that rise in say a hundred years?
Who has time to wait 100 years? Intelligence is not really correlated with brain size, but I'd start by breeding octopodes and then selecting the octopus eggs that seem to be inhabited by octopus with larger-than-average brains. Their eggs are transparent and you can just look, while tossing the ones that you don't want to hatch. Next I would iterate on this for a few generations, meanwhile selecting for octopus problem solving and communication.
I think that might quickly fail. I know you've already seen the guppy paper where they did just that with mixed results, and that was only a handful of generations. Brain size is not that great a proxy for intelligence.
> Brain size is not that great a proxy for intelligence.
Oh certainly, agreed. But larger brains can be easier to work with, such as for slicing studies where you examine the different areas of the brain to look for evidence of changes that you might want to keep for the next generation. Smaller brains have less matter to work with, and therefore have less of a chance of developing novel features that strike your fancy while you attempt to select the ones that might have a higher probability of developing impressive cognitive ability. Having said this, I am very interested in trying to take something already rather clever (like a dog) and seeing how small we can get the brain before it loses all of its interesting behavior. For whatever reason society has already developed a fascination with really small dogs with small heads anyway.....
But the article points out that not all of their neural structure is in their discrete brain case. Part of the machinery that drives their intelligence seems to be in their limbs.
I wonder if people prefer this style of writing ? I feel like I've read 2-3 paragraphs worth of data and a few quotes buerried in wordstream on authors feelings and impressions.
The rhetorical method we like to call "science writing" is a particularly useful way to help a non-expert reader understand a new topic. You tell a story around a scientific topic and the reader can both engage with an otherwise foreign topic and gain a greater appreciation / knowledge of it.
In this case... the author wants to help the reader understand that these animals are intelligent. He personifies them through a series of anecdotes and approaches encounters from an octopus-first perspective, to help the reader "get in the headspace" of the various octopuses.
This passage stuck out to me and I had to include it:
> Perhaps I had understood something basic about what it felt like to be Athena at that moment: she was hungry. I handed a fish to one of her larger suckers, and she began to move it toward her mouth. But soon she brought more arms to the task, and covered the fish with many suckers — as if she were licking her fingers, savoring the meal.
A lot of people are now in their own bodies as well as Athena the Octopus', thinking about food they love to eat.
In the end, many readers will come away feeling like, in a little way, they "were" the octopus, and appreciating them more.
Maybe you could try to see the author's feelings and impressions as a kind of data? Very subjective data, and less clear and rigorous, but not worthless.
A lot of what the author is trying to convey is not factual, but perspective. "I learned and experienced some things, and it changed how I see the world."
> Some would let themselves be captured, only to use the net as a trampoline. They’d leap off the mesh and onto the floor — and then run for it. Yes, run. “You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat,” Warburton said. “It’s so weird!”
> [..] “Catching her for the maze always took twenty minutes,” Warburton said. “She’d grip onto something and not let go. Once she got stuck in a filter and we couldn’t get her out. It was awful!”
What seems far more awful is using these apparently-highly-intelligent animals for laboratory experiments, against their will.
This isn't the usual argument of animal rights. Here we have a highly intelligent and inventive creature repeatedly trying its best to escape - it's hard not to identify with it! - and the scientists just recapture it by force. They actively oppose the animal's attempts to liberate itself, again and again.