Mid-afternoon. Carol and Kim left for Westerville
and the baby shower for Ashley, granddaughter of Aunt Patsy and Uncle Ernie
after lunch with Paul, Owen, Brennan and you at Jason's Deli on Gemini (north
side of Polaris Shopping) . On the couch Paul is working on his laptop while
the boys are watching "Lion Guard" on Netflix via Apple TV. You
are sitting in your favorite chair looking their way. As 'octopus
consciousness' has been on your mind you found the following abstract which
provides good focus.- Amorella
** **
The octopus and
the unity of consciousness
Carls-Diamante, Sidney (2017) The octopus and the unity of
consciousness. [Preprint]
Abstract
If the octopus were conscious, what would its consciousness be
like? This paper investigates the structure octopus consciousness, if existent,
is likely to exhibit. Presupposing that the configuration of an organism’s
consciousness is correlated with that of its nervous system, it is unlikely
that the structure of the sort of conscious experience that would arise from
the highly decentralized octopus nervous system would bear much resemblance to
those of vertebrates. In particular, octopus consciousness may not exhibit
unity, which has long been assumed to be the normal or default structure of
consciousness. The octopus nervous system is characterized by the following
features: its three anatomically distinct components have extensive functional
autonomy and little intercommunication; much of the sensory processing and
motor control routines—that in vertebrates are localized in the brain—take
place within the peripheral arm nervous system; and proprioception and
somatotopic representation (point-for-point mapping of the body) are
significantly downplayed. In this paper, I present the octopus as a highly
successful biological organism in which it is plausible that the unified model
of consciousness does not hold.
Selected from -- http://philsci-archive dot pitt dot edu/14107/
** **
The second article carries through with more
detail on 'invertebrate intelligence of consciousness'. You find both articles
interesting and think on the recent excellent sci fi film, "Arrival". - Amorella
** **
What the Octopus Knows
By Olivia Judson
(January/February 2017 Atlantic issue
A scuba-diving philosopher explores invertebrate
intelligence and consciousness.
My love affair with
octopuses began when I was 9. On a summer holiday by the sea, I found Octopus
and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973) in my great-aunt’s bookcase.
Written by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the great pioneer of scuba diving, and his
colleague Philippe Diolé, the book told of encounters between humans and
cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and their
more distant cousins, the nautiluses. A few days after I’d finished reading, I
was out snorkeling and saw my first wild octopus. It was clambering over rocks
in the shallows, changing color as it went. I was so excited that, after it
vanished into a crevice, I leaped out of the water and began telling two
strangers on the shore everything I’d learned from the book.
Cousteau and his team
were the first to spend a lot of time—many hours at a stretch—in the water
observing and filming wild octopuses and getting to know different individuals
by visiting them regularly. Before long, some of the animals would come out to
greet the divers, even climbing onto them and going for a ride. Others were
shy, and would stay in their holes. Some appeared to develop preferences for
particular humans. The divers wanted to know whether octopuses—as
suspected—steal fish from fishermen’s nets, so they set up a net complete with
several fish, and settled back to watch. Sure enough, an octopus came and
helped itself to the lot. Another octopus opened a jar containing food, while a
third seemed disturbed by its reflection when shown a mirror.
Cousteau’s accounts are
anecdotes, not scientific experiments. Yet, taken together, they capture three
aspects of octopuses—some species of them, at least—that strike anyone who
spends time in the water with them.
First, different
individuals have different temperaments. Some are shy, some are bold; some are
inquisitive, some aggressive. Because of this individuality, people who hang
out with them, whether in the sea, at a public aquarium, or in the laboratory,
tend to give them names—an honor normally reserved for mammals such as dolphins
and chimpanzees. Cousteau spoke of an octopus called Octopissimus; one
scientific paper I read referred to Albert, Bertram, and Charles.
Second, some octopuses
will engage with you. They might reach out an arm and touch your hand. They will
investigate an object you present to them, giving every impression of thinking
about it as they do so. All the while, they will appear to watch you with their
large, mobile eyes. Again, these are behaviors we associate with dolphins and
dogs—but not with, say, fish, let alone animals such as sea urchins or clams.
The octopus mind has
evolved along a route entirely different from the one that led to our own.
Third, octopuses often
behave in surprising ways. Although Albert and Bertram were prepared to pull levers
to receive pieces of fish, Charles destroyed the experimental equipment—he
pulled it apart with his arms—and repeatedly squirted the experimenter with
water. On a recent diving trip, my partner and I came across a little octopus
sitting in the sand, two of its arms holding a large half clamshell over its
head like a roof. For a while, we looked at it, and it looked at us. Then it
shifted. It must have been reaching down with its other arms, because suddenly,
like a small animated bulldozer, it tossed up a heap of sand. It did this
several times, watching us closely and giving us the sense that, though it was
interested in checking us out, it was also ready, if necessary, to pull the
shell down like a lid and disappear into the seafloor.
The animals also
frequently change their skin color and texture—which, to creatures such as
ourselves, fine-tuned to watch faces for frowns and smiles, blushes and
blanches, gives the appearance of emotional expressiveness. In other words, an
encounter with an octopus can sometimes leave you with the strong feeling that
you’ve encountered another mind.
FSG
But that mind—if mind
it is—has evolved along a route entirely different from the one that led to our
own. The most-recent common ancestors of humans and octopuses lived about 600
million years ago, early in the evolution of animal life. Although much about
our joint ancestors is obscure, they were probably small wormlike creatures
that lived in the sea. This makes octopuses very different from other animals
we suspect of sentience, such as dolphins and dogs, parrots and crows, which
are much more closely related to us. In the words of Peter Godfrey-Smith,
“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. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an
intelligent alien.”
Godfrey-Smith is a
scuba-diving philosopher; his specialties are philosophy of biology and
philosophy of mind. While out diving some years ago, he began encountering
octopuses and cuttlefish, became intrigued, and started studying them. The
result is Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of
Consciousness, a terrific mix of Cousteau-esque encounters with the animals
in the wild (including a giant cuttlefish he calls Kandinsky), wide-ranging
scientific discussion, and philosophical analysis. Beautifully written,
thought-provoking, and bold, this book is the latest, and most closely argued,
salvo in the debate over whether octopuses and other cephalopods are
intelligent, sentient beings.
Mind,
intelligence, sentience, consciousness—these are difficult,
slippery terms, especially when applied to nonhuman animals. Cousteau remarked
drily, “Scientists, although they concede that the octopus has a memory and
that it learns quickly, do not use the word ‘intelligence’ in describing it.”
He was writing in 1973, but it could have been yesterday. Several octopus
researchers have told me that intelligence is a word they shy away from,
either because of the SAT-like connotations, or because they feel that evidence
for it is lacking, or because they think focusing on intelligence is
narcissistic and fails to capture other important aspects of the wonder of
these animals. Consciousness is even more contentious.
Arguably, though, it’s
also narcissistic to assume up front that other animals are not, in some
measure, intelligent or sentient, and that the human experience is unique in
all respects. In any case, evolution doesn’t usually conjure complex traits
from nothing; instead, they typically emerge from simpler antecedents.
Light-sensing mechanisms run the gamut from molecules to eyespots to a huge variety
of more complicated eyes. Nervous systems, too, show different levels of
complexity; some are small and simple, while others are larger and more
intricate. So why can’t the same be true of minds or consciousness? Indeed,
as Godfrey-Smith reminds us, William James, the great 19th-century philosopher
and one of the founders of psychology, argued that we should avoid assuming
that human consciousness irrupted, fully formed, into the universe, and should
seek simpler precursors. Taking this to its logical conclusion,
Godfrey-Smith starts his quest for the origin of minds around the dawn of
animal life, when nervous systems were first evolving into being.
Despite their “alien”
credentials, octopuses do resemble us in some unexpected ways.
But let’s get back to
octopuses. In many ways, they are indeed profoundly alien. The animals are
mollusks, and thus more closely related to other mollusks, such as clams and
snails, than they are to any mammal. Most famously, they have eight arms, each
lined with scores of suckers capable of grasping and tasting. Octopuses lack
bones or an external shell (though they have a piece of cartilage that protects
the brain). As a result, their bodies are soft, flexible, and
stretchy—properties that allow them to vanish through tiny gaps. A small
octopus can easily get inside an empty beer bottle. And in some species at
least, the animals have an astonishing capacity for camouflage, instantly
changing color, texture, and posture so as to blend in with lumps of coral on a
reef or the blankness of the sand. This helps them hide from the many animals
that fancy having octopus for lunch.
Then there’s the fact
that they live in the sea, which means they operate in an entirely different
sensory world—gravity doesn’t press, sound travels differently, and as the
water gets deeper, the light becomes more and more blue before fading out
altogether. This
makes them, like many marine animals, hard to study in the wild. Just to find
out what octopuses do all day takes tag teams of observers spending hours
snorkeling or diving. Only a handful of groups have ever attempted such work.
And octopuses have a reputation for being difficult to keep in the
laboratory—they are sensitive to water quality, tricky to look after, and
well-known escape artists.
Despite their “alien”
credentials, however, octopuses do resemble us in some unexpected ways. Their
eyes are remarkably like human eyes, an example of evolution converging on
roughly the same solution from two wildly different starting points. (Octopuses
don’t see in color, but because of the way their eyes are wired, they also
don’t have a blind spot.) Like us, octopuses are dexterous, and can reach out
and manipulate objects in the world. They display all those inquisitive,
friendly behaviors reminiscent of dolphins and dogs.
Most telling of all,
octopuses, along with cuttlefish and squid, have far larger, more complex
nervous systems than any of their molluscan relations—or indeed, than any other
invertebrates—do. The California sea slug (also a mollusk) has about 18,000
neurons, and honeybees, the invertebrate runners-up for neuron count, have
roughly 1 million. The common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about 500
million neurons. This is more than five times the number in a hamster, and
approaches the number in the common marmoset, a kind of monkey. (Humans have
about 86 billion.) Going just on the basis of neuron count, you might think
octopuses were a kind of mammal. But whereas mammals keep most of their neurons
in their heads, an octopus’s nervous system is distributed throughout its body:
About two-thirds of its neurons are not in its head, but in its arms.
Which raises several
questions. What forces led octopuses to evolve such large nervous systems? Does
having a large nervous system necessarily mean octopuses are intelligent, even
conscious? And if they are, is their experience of consciousness something akin
to our own, or is it—reflecting, perhaps, their distributed nervous
system—entirely different?
Drawing on the work of
other researchers, from primatologists to fellow octopologists and
philosophers, Godfrey-Smith suggests two reasons for the large nervous system
of the octopus. One has to do with its body. For an animal like a cat or a
human, details of the skeleton dictate many of the motions the animal can make. You can’t roll your
arm into a neat spiral from wrist to shoulder— your bones and joints get in the
way. An octopus, having no skeleton, has no such constraint. It can, and
frequently does, roll up some of its arms; or it can choose to make one (or
several) of them stiff, creating an elbow. Surely the animal needs a huge
number of neurons merely to be well coordinated when roaming about the reef.
At the same time,
octopuses are versatile predators, eating a wide variety of food, from lobsters
and shrimps to clams and fish. Octopuses that live in tide pools will
occasionally leap out of the water to catch passing crabs; some even prey on
incautious birds, grabbing them by the legs, pulling them underwater, and
drowning them. Animals that evolve to tackle diverse kinds of food may tend to
evolve larger brains than animals that always handle food in the same way
(think of a frog catching insects).
But are they clever?
Measuring intelligence in other animals is a challenge even when they’re not as
remote from us as the octopus. And for octopuses, Godfrey-Smith observes, there
is “a mismatch between the results of laboratory experiments on learning and
intelligence, on one side, and a range of anecdotes and one-off reports on the
other.” Yet as he points out, the very wealth of anecdotes is important
information, showing as it does the flexible, unpredictable ways in which
different individuals behave. While pigeons will spend hours pecking keys to
get food rewards, octopuses are notoriously feisty. Charles is by no means
alone in electing to squirt the experimenter instead of following the protocol.
As for assessing animal
consciousness, that at first seems impossible. But one angle of attack is to
work from the situation in humans. Over the past 30 years, a growing body of
results has shown that conscious awareness represents just a fraction of what
the human brain is registering. At the same time, scientists are identifying
the type of tasks that do require consciousness. In particular: Consciousness
seems essential for learning new skills—such as finding an alternative way home
or opening a coconut. Taking up the work of the neuroscientist Stanislas
Dehaene, Godfrey-Smith suggests that “there’s a particular style of
processing—one that we use to deal especially with time, sequences,
and novelty—that brings with it conscious awareness, while a lot of
other quite complex activities do not.”
Like humans, octopuses
learn new skills. In some species, individuals inhabit a den for only a week or
so before moving on, so they are constantly learning routes through new
environments. Similarly, the first time an octopus tackles a clam, say, it has
to figure out how to open it—can it pull it apart, or would it be more
effective to drill a hole? If consciousness is necessary for such tasks, then
perhaps the octopus does have an awareness that in some ways resembles our own.
Perhaps, indeed, we should take the “mammalian”
behaviors of octopuses at face value. If evolution can produce similar eyes
through different routes, why not similar minds? Or perhaps, in wishing to find
these animals like ourselves, what we are really revealing is our deep desire
not to be alone.
Selected and edited from -- https://www dot the
atlantic dot com/magazine/archive/2017/01/what-the-octopus-knows/508745/
** **
1455 hours. It
is interesting that looking into such a creatures' eyes one reflects on her or
his own consciousness/intelligence and wonders on the consciousness of the
other species including alien.
You just popped up with the thought, 'what
would be the makeup of the angelic consciousness?' What is the makeup of your
consciousness, Amorella?
1511 hours. I
immediately pushed the thought down because it seems impolite to ask such a personal
question.
Which is the very reason I brought it back
up into consciousness. - Amorella
1512 hours.
Embarrassingly, I need a break. Besides I have to pick up Carol at four and we
need to head on home. Kim drove our car and Paul and I will stop and pick them
up. I'll drive home and Kim will drive back here with Paul and the boys.
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