Astro Hacker News - Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation

doodlebugging |next [-]

>If we “use nature as a guide to understand how that happens naturally,” she says, “then we can probably find ways to put it into human cells.”

Oh boy! Please hurry up with this. I want brains in all my appendages so I can adapt in real time to all the environmental conditions that I am encountering moment to moment.

Test it first though, maybe on a rat or a planarian. Your choice.

BatFastard |next |previous [-]

I found the article very interesting. Not click bait at all.

I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.

ortusdux |root |parent |next [-]

Not only that, they have the highest ratio of brain-to-body-mass of any invertebrate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence

hermitcrab |root |parent [-]

Yes, so maybe think twice before eating one.

bayganyo |root |parent |next [-]

I find it interesting how people justify (or not) whether to eat another animal.

GMoromisato |root |parent |next [-]

First time talking to humans? We distinguish murder from killing because the latter is sometimes justified (e.g., in war or self-defense).

We justify everything we do.

sinsterizme |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Can you explain?

micromacrofoot |root |parent |previous [-]

I like to see where they are farmed before I decide... and having seen much of that in the US I've landed on "maybe some bugs are ok to eat."

GMoromisato |root |parent |next |previous [-]

[dead]

PowerElectronix |root |parent |previous [-]

They're too delicious to consider how smart they are.

unethical_ban |root |parent |next [-]

I cannot judge too harshly, since I still eat many kinds of animal. However, I never ate octopus growing up, and I learned of their intelligence before I tried it more than a few times. It was easier to "never start" than to quit. And besides, octopus is not that great and if you insist on eating seafood I find pretty much any other item to have more enjoyable texture.

testaccount28 |root |parent |previous [-]

[flagged]

adolph |root |parent |next |previous [-]

You might find the recent Theories of Everything podcast interview [0] with Peter Godfrey-Smith interesting. Godfrey-Smith is the author of "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness," which is a great read to delve further.

Two other interesting aspects of cephalopods:

  * Make many more changes to RNA than other invertebrates [2]
  * Have only one type of light sensing cell in eyes, so may detect color by chromatic aberration

0. https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/peter-godfrey-smith-thi...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...

2. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/octopus-squid-rna-editin...

3. https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopu...

goatlover |root |parent |previous [-]

It's like 9 brains, one central one in the head and 8 semi-autonomous ones in the arms. Makes one wonder what an octopus consciousness is like. Is it distributed among the nine brains, or focused on the central one? If the latter then the arm-brains would be zombie minds. It's also possible the 8 arms have their own separate experiences.

We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine. We experience ourselves as a unified hole, allowing exceptions for certain conditions.

VorpalWay |root |parent |next [-]

> We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine.

Mostly yes. But we do have some processing that bypasses the brain: reflexes for example. The classic example is the kick reflex that doctors test with a small mallet on your knee. Or when you blink as something flies towards your eyes. It happens and your brain gets informed afterwards.

But there are degrees of non-conscious processing, from the heart beating by itself and your guts doing their things, to the breath which will be on autopilot until you take control over it, to entirely voluntary things like moving about your limbs (for healthy individuals).

Maybe the octopuses experience their disconnected brains somewhere on that spectra, where the limbs are semi-autonomous unless it focuses on them? (All we can do is speculate, there is no known way to learn the qualia of being an octupus.)

cgriswald |root |parent |next |previous [-]

If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. It's fiction which explores different intelligences, with the second novel[0] dealing specifically with octopuses.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Ruin

bookofjoe |root |parent |previous [-]

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [excellent]

https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...

fmjrey |next |previous [-]

I would imagine their intelligence is directly proportional to the so many degrees of freedom the arms have for grasping, but don't ask which one came first, chicken or egg?

pryce |root |parent [-]

the history of how people have conceived of causality between human intelligence and human hands (and in which direction dependency may lie) is quite interesting. "It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals." —Anaxagoras, circa 450 BCE.

throw310822 |next |previous [-]

Pure, shameless clickbait as usual from Smithsonian magazine.

> Although there is no direct evidence that the adaptation is linked to expanded octopus brainpower,

I.e. the entire connection between this mutation and octopus intelligence is made up. Not even a shred of justification.

yieldcrv |next |previous [-]

lets splice in a gene fix for cephalopod senescence and get the invasion over with

Razengan |root |parent [-]

I have this headcanon that an ancient ape civilization was at war with cephalopods and they created a weapon of mass destruction that artificially gimped octopus lifespans :'(

culi |root |parent |next [-]

There is only one species of octopus that lives socially (LPSO are rare and incredibly intelligent but their lifespans are like 3 years)

Maybe your headcannon should be that apes did a "tower of babel" type thing to make all the octopus individualistic and unable to organize into a civilization

ux266478 |root |parent [-]

It's more complex than that. The famed octopus city[1] was populated by the gloomy octopus, a species which prior to the discover was believed to have been exclusively solitary.

[1] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...

yieldcrv |root |parent |previous [-]

mutations that occur after reproduction are never weeded out since the genes are passed on already, so natural selection on its own can result in this, just like cancer or lower safeguards against cancer such as short telomeres in humans

a_t48 |root |parent [-]

This isn’t quite true, is it? A mutation that killed 5 years after childbirth would result in higher mortality rates for the child.

yieldcrv |root |parent [-]

Octopus have extremely high mortality rates and extremely large litters, so there’s that

They don’t raise their offspring

jjk166 |previous [-]

Correlation does not imply causation and it's not even clear this qualifies as correlation.