[bmitc]

> We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a healthy or productive relationship.

In my opinion, this is a stretch. By comprehend and recognize, what do you mean? For an octopus, ant, or orca, we have little to no comprehension of their intelligence, philosophy, or consciousness. All of those things are a black box to us. We can observe behavior and take notes, but I think it's a huge leap to say we comprehend their intelligence.

It's an even bigger leap to say we could establish communications and relationships with an alien species. What is our relationship with orcas? We starve them, kill them with boats and pollutants, and we imprison them for entertainment. We try to rid the world of ants and attack and poison them on sight. We eat octopuses and also pollute their environment. I wouldn't call those things a relationship.

As for communication, how do we do there? We have almost no capability of talking to orcas or octopuses. And it's not a fault of theirs. It's because we are indeed different. There is even less hope for ants.

The existence of orcas, ants, and octopuses on Earth is the exact evidence I need to form the opinion that it is probable that there are alien species that we simply can't comprehend and vice versa.

Is it really that hard to believe there's a species out there such that we humans are their ant?

[Enginerrrd]

I agree with all of this and also want to add, we only recognize octopi as intelligent because they are operating on our timescales. What would happen if we encountered nearly crystalline life. They might have a rich culture, art, and scientific understanding.. but it might be only for phenomenon that they have any hope of interacting with.

I often wonder about plants. Suppose a forest and/or its network of fungi was "intelligent" in some sense. It may well be that the intelligence only manifests on extreme scales and contexts well beyond human's ability to see. Perhaps forests engage in millenia long chess games to reshape their environment more favorably in battle with other species or something. Perhaps its in a way that relies on very old memories passed down from their ancestors stored via genetics or some other means, and involves very complex decisions we can't even hope to compute on our best computers. We'd barely even be able to recognize that, and certainly wouldn't have much hope of seeing the intelligence in action. We don't know the first thing about "how to tree".

[simonh]

There's a fantasy world where fossils are actually stone-based forms of life that just move so slowly you can only even detect it over periods of thousands of years. To them stone is a liquid, and folded strata are actually waves.

[bmitc]

Yea, we simply don't know about the intelligence of other things, and so I don't get the perspective that other things are the thing less intelligent when we're in the same boat as them as not being able to communicate with them. There are symbiotic relationships like cats and dogs, and mammals generally share a certain something, but we still have little to no knowledge of what's going on, even in mammals, much less more exotic things. For the octopus, we recognize intelligent of things we notice, but what about intelligence they have that isn't noticed by us.

Your description reminded me of a book called The Dragon's Egg. I haven't read it but need to. The gist is that there's a species that somehow thrives on or in a neutron star. However, their time scales are not slow but extremely fast. That's all I know about it other than it apparently being a tutorial on neutron stars masquerading as a novel.

[red75prime]

> We have almost no capability of talking to orcas or octopuses. And it's not a fault of theirs.

How do you know that? Specifically, that they are capable of two way communication, which is suitable for establishing, for lack of a better word, diplomatic relations.

For ethical reasons we need to presume that they indeed are capable of that. But it's different from knowing that they are capable.

[ccozan]

So.... are we commiting xenocide then?