Hesiod in his Works and Days (c. 700 BC) talks about the behaviour of octopuses, saying that when octopuses get hungry they will eat their own tentacles. Amazingly, Hesiod was right about this behaviour (octopuses do sometimes eat their own tentacles) but it's not because they're hungry, but because they're stressed.
Why is eating your tentacle useful when "stressed"?
Eating your tentacle is a net negative in "calories" long term, and there is probably the opportunity cost of not having said tentacle (for some time?)
I guess maybe they want a quick snack for the high energy jet propulsion predator escape that they are preparing for when stressed.
But then Hesoid is kid of right, they do eat it because they need more energy.
It's a misunderstanding that evolution leads to only positive behaviours remaining. Eating your own tentacles might be similar to humans cutting themselves, or the stress response behaviours spillover by zoo animals: a spillover réaction that turns adaptive behavioural patterns (eating) into maladaptive (eating yourself)
Very few humans cut themselves and it has very limited health consequences for those who do.
Evolution predicts that self-harming behaviour will be observed less frequently compared to self benefitting behaviours.
So whenever an apparently self-harming behaviour is observed it is quite useful to ask: "is it really self-harm or secretly useful somehow?". And also: "how often does that really happen?"
You also need to ask yourself "is there a way to do a useful thing without this". Like, evolution can't jump, if the same gene expression gives you better pattern matching and improved chances of hallucinations, depending on the selection drift, you might go for this, and then you are stuck with hallucinations long after the benefit of pattern matching might be lost.
A simple answer might be that octopuses get stressed when there are to many other octopuses around which limits resources. Some octopuses eating their own tentacles and dying might give them an evolutionary advantage.
I mean, I do it. (Less now than I used to.) The amount of flesh I take off is unnoticeable visually or as a percentage of my hand.
But more to the point, if somebody from a coastal, extensively seafaring culture 2700 years ago says octopi sometimes eat their own tentacles, there is every reason to believe he's saying it because it's true. The options are (I) octopi sometimes eat their own tentacles, as advertised; (II) octopi sometimes engage in a behavior that looks very similar to eating their own tentacles, but is subtly different; or (III) someone made it up and nobody in a culture with extensive exposure to octopi ever noticed that it never happened.
Incidents of type III are far from unheard of -- I have a dictionary with the Tongue Map printed in it -- but they're not the way to bet.
The notion of sentience is something that's unsurprisingly well-trodden in both philosophy and neuroscience. Your statements presumes that such is flippant.
While there's not a single well-agreed on definition, there are different things like ability to see and project oneself into the future and to assign value to those projections, the ability to empathize, the ability to miss things that are no longer there, etc. are often metrics used for higher levels of sentience.
We know that humans and some other mammals do these things. I believe I remember that there's some debate about crows and some other birds. While octopuses are the only invertebrate that has passed the "mirror-test", part of what this article is getting at is that we don't know much about their emotions and extended sense of self, and assigning them to a high category of sentience may be premature. (Or not; asking that question is what this article is about.) But human sentience isn't trivial.
Your argument is basically, "We're all chemical systems, eh?" And sure, at some level that's true, but it's not really enlightening to the discussion.
Well trodden yet nowhere close to being understood.
I'll say it again - whether or not we are deterministic is not a settled question.
I didn't take a position on that either way. My point was that because of our present (poor) understanding there's no reason to assume a human and an octopus have different degrees of agency, so questioning whether or not an octopus is deterministic is inconsequential to whether we can relate emotionally with one:
- If we both are then friendship, bonding, emotions etc. are just an illusion that our wiring compels us to entertain, and so we will proceed to do so.
- If we both aren't then friendship may be just as real for both of us and we'll proceed the same way.
An answer to this would have consequences for moral choice, and as long as it's open we should act ethically, even if only as a precaution. But the outcome here is the same. This isn't about ethical ramifications.
You're right that whether we're deterministic or not isn't settled, but that argument is mostly a physics question, not a biological one. (It reduces to: is the universe deterministic? And it is a very much a debate at the center of different interpretations of quantum physics.)
But we still find it useful to talk about different strata of intelligence and to make predictions based on that. Like I said, your argument is basically, "It's all just chemicals." And that's true, but just doesn't move the conversation in any interesting direction. There is utility in reasoning about these things at the macro level, and that's what this article is about.
It's kind of like saying, "Is this apple red or blue?" And you object, "Red and blue are just labels on an infinite spectrum and don't exist as specific wavelengths!" That's true. But you can still, with high utility and reasonableness, talk about things being red and blue, despite those terms not being perfectly well defined.
Yes reality exists in layers etc. and this is all fine and frankly almost obvious, but it's not a response.
Again, I am not taking an existential position - whether it's all just chemicals or otherwise is NOT relevant or useful. It's that it's also useless for analysing animal behaviour and it's similarity and compatibility to our own, since the case for humans is not settled either. I don't know how else to say it.
Something to remember about the MSR test. The high level conclusion that we draw from it is a large leap from what the experiment is able to show and we haven’t been able to distinguish it from any number of plausible theories.
For example, I caught my dog looking at me through the mirror in the room when she didn’t have direct line of sight and we were the only two in the room and I was talking in ways that would get her attention. That indicates some level of recognition of the role a mirror plays and that the image in the mirror is a reflection and not a mystery animal. That animals utilize their senses differently and find different things interesting to them says more about the limitations of our ability to evaluate other animals than it does about their actual sentience and intelligence I think. Eg maybe the MSR test is simply a test that works well on animals that have a similar working sensory model to us (or at least vision is important enough and interest in mirrors is aligned).
> there are different things like ability to see and project oneself into the future and to assign value to those projections, the ability to empathize, the ability to miss things that are no longer there, etc. are often metrics used for higher levels of sentience.
That’s a bold claim. I’d say at most we have a sample size of one species because we’re able to communicate and compare notes with each other + within a species animals work fairly similarly enough for the most part. We have absolutely no knowledge of whether the things you said are important for sentience/intelligence. Not if candidates we think are likely closest in intelligence (elephants, dolphins, crows) demonstrate these traits as it requires a degree of insight and communication we don’t have. - we have to do convoluted experiments to try to tease out effects but we don’t actually know what the experiments are telling us.
Maybe if our brain imaging technology gets better some of these questions will become more answerable.
Additionally, couldn't MSR results simply be produced by mirror neurons firing? I.e., touching a marked part of the body does not mean "Animal in the mirror is me", it can simply mean "Marked part of that animal is 'itching' me"?
Are there MSR tests that used windows to other animals instead mirrors as a control?
Philosophy says none of those assertions are provable. You could very well be an automaton in a simulation and all your presumptions about the world are false.
Those are very different corners of philosophy. Things can be epistomogically unprovable, but at the same time ethically relevant.
Put another way, your counterargument applies equally to genocide as it does to octopus intelligence. That doesn't mean we should proceed as if genocide is ethically neutral.
sadly, a spanish multinational is planning to open up an octopus farm this summer -- the world's first commercial octopus farm -- which is to breed and kill something like 300,000 - 600,000 octopuses per year.
Here is a critique of My Octopus Teacher as a movie of a self-centered man who projects his issues onto an unsuspecting wild animal: "MY OCTOPUS TEACHER & Environmental Horror, An Analysis" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whb4unrhy44
Self-centered? I'm assuming you're basing that off of an edited film designed to entertain people and not because you actually know the man.
> who projects his issues onto an unsuspecting wild animal
Humans tend to project their issues onto unsuspecting things all the time in my experience: partners, co-workers, strangers, pets, etc. And inanimate objects too, if you've ever seen someone slam a door, pound a table or seek guidance from nature. We seem to be driven to share our experience with others.
In the film the octopus has no trouble hiding, running away or disappearing when it wants. And likewise, no trouble approaching after it became comfortable with him. And he refuses to intervene when its life is in danger.
After these quips, I usually hear the criticism that he was a rich white guy of privilege telling a "woe is me" storyline. If you don't like what the guy represents, fine, but his actions are not that different from many other naturalists who loves to observe animals in the wild.
In the general sense of media and art consumption, I'm not sure where I stand. Some people refuse to listen to R. Kelly's music. Do his actions as a human change the quality of his output? It's not as if anything can be judged separate from the context within which it arose and the subsequent context within which it was consumed.
Another example, is it bad to watch Birth of a Nation? Does it depend on the creator's intent or the broadcaster's intent or the consumer's intent?
In a similar way, we can't help but view other beings from within our own subjective frame. The levels of abstractive difference from that octopus to my comment are dizzying. Each individual applies another coat of paint to the canvas.
I find research papers bland sometimes, but that is the point. Researchers try to hide their perspective and take on some sort of apreferential objective God view. In that attempt, we get a nutritious, unseasoned chunk of raw tofu. I can eat that sometimes. A lot of the times I want a flavorful, multi-modal umami dish. The person who concocts that sort of meal will inevitably "season to taste". I would be remiss to spit out my first bite, "This is not raw tofu!"
They are also notorious for finding increasingly cleverer ways of escaping aquariums. Which again adds to the case that an aquarium is not a suitable environment.
For my purposes, because their short lifespan and particular needs make them pretty bad pets IMO. Never mind the moral arguments for keeping such intelligent animals in captivity.
I don't know if that is true. For example dogs have acclimated extremely well to captivity, but on the other hand we know that orcas do extremely poorly.
I was watching Clint's Reptiles on Youtube where he's reviewing an octopus staying at an aquarium. It gets all the food it needs, entertainment via puzzles, interaction with the keepers etc. For an octopus it seemed like a very safe and easy life as compared to the wild.
Now the real questions would be if whether they prefer to migrate around or stay in one place. If they prefer one safe place, then perhaps given this safe aquarium space they'd choose to stay in it?
Dogs have been highly domesticated, but only some smaller breeds are "ok" with not getting regular walks outside.
I think it would fall on being able to empirically test whether the animal is content or perhaps even happy. It seems possible to satiate most needs and basic desires but you bring up a good point as to whether we can truly replicate the audiovisual and tactile richness of their usual habitat.
(waiting for the recurring comments, that 2 x octopus -> octopodes or octopuses but not octopi since it's not latin 2nd declension, but rather misspelled greek)
Doesn't it actually come into English from Latin (in its later academic/international use, rather than the classical language)?
But in any case, it's English, not Latin or misspelled Greek, and octopi seems to at least be the oldest evident English plural of octopus, AFAIK, though octopuses seems to be experiencing current popularity, and octopodes is just...no, though the suggestion once made that English ought to adopt octopods, wasn't bad, but never caught on.
I think 'octopodes' should be considered incorrect on the basis that the vast majority of even the people using it are probably not pronouncing it correctly.
I changed the title from "Can We Really Be Friends with an Octopus?" to "When octopuses are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" (the subtitle, more or less) in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this. (A comment reacting purely to information, or lack of information, in a title is pretty much shallow by definition.)
Since that didn't work, I guess it's time to look for some more representative phrase from the article text.
Edit: ok, I've combined two phrases from the article to try to that. Commenters: please discuss the actual material now.
A shallow comment can contain a profound question. "What is the meaning of life?" would be an even shallower comment.
Were a comment to contain new and interesting information about a profound, i.e. generic, question, that would be fine. But this is precisely what internet comments bringing up generic questions don't usually do. It's not a good fit for the genre. Someone who really has something original to say about a profound question would be better off writing an essay, or a book. Certainly not a one-liner to an internet forum.
This is so much the case, in fact, that changing the subject from a concrete topic to a more generic one is a frequent form of trolling.
In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction.
Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree. The topic is the social behavior of octopuses. It's not always bad for HN threads to go off topic—for example if there's an unpredictable direction which is more interesting than the original topic—but it's pretty much always bad for them to go in generic, pseudo-profound directions like this. It makes discussions more predictable, and therefore more (yes) shallow.
p.s. Please don't use multiple accounts to comment in the same thread. That's abusive, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.
It's not pseudo-profound. It goes to the heart of what social behaviour is and provides another angle for interpreting the personal experiences shared by the researchers. There's nothing shallow about it.
The reason it's shallow is this is directly addressed by the content of the article. The author starts out the essay by giving all of the reasons we have to believe that our relationships with pets and other humans are mutual, i.e. closeness in evolutionary distance, the fact that we're all social creatures that form bonds within our own species that are clearly advantageous to us and friendship makes sense from that standpoint. It then contrasts that with a traditional naive view of octopuses as loners that either mate or kill each other when they meet in the wild, giving reason to doubt that they would form friendships with humans.
It then goes on to complicate that narrative, claiming that more recent discoveries indicate many species of octopus are, in fact, social creatures, and older understanding of them was likely due to insufficient observation and the fact they hide themselves so well.
It's quite an in-depth essay with a lot of information in it that addresses this exact question with nuance, research, anecdotes, from every side of every possible answer. It deserves better than a pithy response implying the author never thought to just ask the reverse question. He definitely already thought of this.
I found it shallow because it didn't meaningfully add or respond to the article's topic. Saying "humans also do similar things implies the animals do it for the same reason" would not make a reliable way of evaluating the motivations behind the actions.
I don't believe humans are nearly as "special" as historically seen in comparison to animals, but the rephrasing as performed in the comment here doesn't add anything to support that case.
It's not shallow at all, it's rather the human shallowness being exposed, of which the article has lots.
For example, the article correctly claims that we don't really know how an octopus perceives these interactions with humans, as they're of an entirely different non-mammalian intelligence and social behavior. Next, the article strongly affirms they're about as intelligent as a racoon.
These two things directly contradict each other and show shallowness on our behalf. The real answer is that we have no idea at all.
The article continues to state that things like deceit and learning ability are rarely found in invertebrates. Which is plain wrong. They are found in creatures a thousand times smaller than an octopus.
Weak scorpionfly males pretend to be a female so that they get a food gift from a strong male, which they can carry to the actual female. Deceit. Some butterflies strategically place their eggs near ants after which the ants take the pupa (which is evolved to look like an ant pupa) and nourish it to an adult. After which the young adult butterfly goes: thanks for everything, bye now. Deceit. Camouflage. Deceit. Traps. Deceit. Mimicry. Deceit.
Beewolfs (which are wasps) navigate by beacons. Move the beacons and they re-learn the path. Learning ability. The absolute "dumbest" creature showing learning ability: earth worms. We're talking a handful of neurons. They drag leaves into their dens to feed on. By giving them lots of different leafs, they learn which types they want. They also learn to drag them in the right direction, as the other way blocks the den. It actually remembers this and gets better at it over time.
We are incredibly shallow in misunderstanding but above all underestimating the capabilities of animals and overestimating the value of our own definitions.
So the challenge is warranted. Perhaps another species is studying us and concluding that we're not a social species, because we all seem to sit by ourselves looking at some weird bar of bright light all day. Even in mass gatherings (cities) of millions, this weird species does not show actual social behavior. Nobody knows each other and actively ignores others.
I think you guys are somewhat missing what makes a comment like that one shallow. It's the lack of specific relevant information.
I wouldn't call your comment here shallow, for example. It's still generic overall—not a good thing in an HN context—but it makes up for that with specific information about, e.g. wasps and worms.
> When humans are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?
Haha... I think it depends on the current situation of the human is in... Sometimes human just wants to have a meaningful conversation, sometimes just reacting aptly to prevent social awkwardness or being tagged rude...
Does "When octopuses are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" really have a meaning? Or is the distinction meaningful to make?
The octopus regarded the research as "safe" and "interesting". It didn't integrate the researcher into octopus society because such a thing doesn't exist. But octopuses had a society, would it have to be more than a mutual regarding of a group as safe and interesting? Especially, since many other complex behaviors can be created from this start (just as the octopus created all sort of interesting things in the world).
"Maybe octopuses don’t regard us so much as friends or associates as giant, elaborate levers they can manipulate for their own benefit"
Maybe the difference between these kinds of relationships is less than we think.
I read these articles about octopuses, and then lament the fact that we hunt them down and eat them. Given all of the other sources of nourishment available to us, why eat them?
That’s a good question. I have always liked pulpo, but when I learned about what an incredible species octopuses are, I swore to never even consider eating it again.
It’s a bit hypocritical to not feel the same about every animal, but then I’m as irrational as all humans
This is why I became a vegetarian. I watched cows take care of calves, and could not think of eating meat again.
We have the ability to thrive without meat (or at least, animal meat). It's time we took the next step in our evolution and eschewed killing other animals.
For the same reason people kill most animals: tradition and they're delicious.
I've heard of vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, etc., but it would be interesting if there was another eating style based on some (admittedly challenging) evaluation of the animal's cognition or social behavior.
There are some vegans and vegetarians who subscribe to a "no pain" version of this which allows eating creatures like oysters who verifiably can't feel pain.
this seems to be about the Netflix movie "My Octopus Teacher". It's a great watch and certainly interesting whether or not you think the octopus is bonding with the filmmaker.
I regret my shallow dismissal of this most thoughtful article.
All I can say is: I felt triggered by my recollection all of of the cruel and nonconsensual things our species has enacted upon theirs, since the dawn of time.
Seems like Kooistra asked in the obvious polite way -- sit down (i.e. render oneself less mobile) at a non-threatening range and let them choose to approach or not. Is that not consent?
You can't be [friends in the same way you are friends with humans] an octopus because they are not human. I'm friends with my cat. We have a mutual social relationship and he doesn't speak a lick of English.
You should read about experiments where they gave MDMA to octopus who are usually very unsocial… spoiler: it has an effect.
They are fascinating animals.
They are highly intelligent, but have one big problem: their max. life expectation is about 5 years.
Usually the mother dies at birth and they grow up alone from an early age, hence no social development (even to a degree where they are very hostile to other octopus).
So they have not a way of building culture like humans, like thr passing on knowledge to the younger generations. Though they kind of have 8 brains.
If they didn‘t have these problems, we might be talking
differently about them.
One day I will open a training area with octopus & invest millions in trying to extend life expectancy & social behaviour of octopuses and train them to take over the world.
It is pretty amazing the extent of understanding you can achieve with an animal. After a year or so raising my pup, it feels like we have both picked up certain signals to communicate. He paws at me and then sits by the front door when he needs to go to the bathroom, for instance (although sometimes he cleverly abuses this because he just wants to go outside and play with me during worktime, but I can't fault him for that). I'm sure this is mundane for most people who are dog owners, but being my first dog I couldn't help but be impressed at the level of communication the little guy seems to be capable of.
I can't imagine they're the only animals capable of that. It certainly feels like we're friends with a mutual understanding.
Dogs are the champions of human communication. They are the first domesticated specie, not only they were predisposed to it, being pack animals. But they also had 15000 years of evolution to perfect it.
Cats are not to the same level as dogs but they are still very competent domesticated animals.
Octopuses, by comparison, are aliens. In fact, someone said that if we want to have an idea of what alien intelligence could look like, look at octopuses. They are intelligent in a very non-human way.
Dogs have lived alongside humans for millennia. They're genetically engineered animals (in the oldschool way - by breeding and selection, not in a test tube). And we've bred them largely by rewarding their ability to interact with us. Dogs are obviously quite artificial species in that sense
Having grown up with a lot of domesticated animals, it's amazing how much dogs can communicate on our terms, compared to, say, a horse. Horses can communicate quite a bit, but you typically have to understand horses and meet them where they're at before you can effectivity communicate with them. Dogs do a much better job of trying different ways to get their point across to you until you get it.
I love this phrasing, as I think it sums up the difference between dogs and other animals with regards to human communication. It's possible to communicate with other animals if you put in the effort, but dogs on the other hand are often willing to put in the effort to communicate with you!
That's a good point. They've definitely been bred for their ability to communicate with us. I know it's a bit tangential, but I do like the fact we have a kind of sister species in that way. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if our ancestors had instead domesticated another animal to that extent (besides the cat, I suppose). In an alternate universe, maybe we'd have smallish bears as trusted companions :-)
If you lived near a farm or spent time at one, many animals are curious, intelligent and eerily sentient. They have things they want to do, they devise and follow up on plans to get to their goals which are not necessarily only based on eating.
"In an alternate universe, maybe we'd have smallish bears as trusted companions :-)"
Some people have even in this universe, but not so many, because they are not easy to handle. And back then having pets, was not so much a hobby - but the dogs were useful for survival. (guarding and hunting)
Not easy, but much more easy, because wolves are pack animals who accept a leader, which can be a human.
Bears not so much and therefore much harder to control. Same with cats, which is why they have been kept around to hunt the mice and rats - but only small cats.
Also I believe the first dogs did not came from wolves, but other wild dog breeds.
So you can’t be friends with mute people or people you do not share a language with? There are far more telling ways to determine friendship than someone saying ‘yes, let’s be friends’. Even between those who do speak the same language.
