I had a joyful experience at the octopus farm near Kona Hawaii (now sadly closed because they were even more sadly apparently not treating the animals well).
With hands in the tank, I was able to play catch with a small plastic ball and a roughly 2 month old octopus. It was definitely catch — I could scoot the ball anywhere and the octopus would grab it and throw it back.
Possibly a trained behavior, who knows? It was really charming and delightful.
One of the struggles with researching octopus intelligence is that they’re basically untrainable. They’ll do what you want them to if they’re interested but it’s quite difficult to get them to be consistently interested.
In other words, it was probably fun for the octopus too.
> One of the struggles with researching octopus intelligence is that they’re basically untrainable. They’ll do what you want them to if they’re interested but it’s quite difficult to get them to be consistently interested.
One of my dogs is the same. She knows exactly what you want her to do, but if there is no rewards involved, it's impossible. But as soon as you hold a snack in your hand, anything and more is possible.
Maybe the scientists haven't found a good enough snack to give them?
There are lots of farms where animals are treated well and with dignity. At least over here in Switzerland. Source: worked at one, and saw a lot of them (my father worked as a vet).
> There are lots of farms where animals are treated well and with dignity.
What practices are used that constitute good treatment with dignity? And what animals are you talking about, and producing what goods?
I ask because I find that most people who say stuff like this think that a dairy cow with access to open pastures is treated well, and with dignity, but then overlook the fact that the animal is routinely artificially impregnated, separated from their calf over and over and over again, and then killed at a quarter of her natural lifespan because her milk production is no longer economically beneficial to the company that "owns" her.
I'm not trying to say that that's the case here, just trying to get specific because I talk with a lot of people who say similar things as you, and I want to know if you're saying something substantially different or not.
Yes, I've also visited and lived on such farms. They are for small specialist production, I wouldn't say commercial. Great that you know more of them: it proves we can treat animals very well and still have (albeit at low quantity) meat production.
Who are you fooling here? Yourself? Imagine your children being born into one of these farms. There is no self determination. Only because we are not overtly cruel doesn't mean we don't treat them like slaves. "Look at my slave, now that I impregnated her she gets to have a couple more square meter to walk around in until her children are taken away from her." Not all farms are equally bad, but there is no farm where if you applied the same treatment to humans it would not constitute human rights violations. You might argue non human animals are different, but why does that matter? Black and white people are different, why would that difference justify enslaving one group?
Are there bad actors in farming even in Switzerland? Sure. But the majority of the farms I've been to have treated their animals with respect and kindness. The cows actually spend most of their time out on the pastures grazing freely. They are only taken indoors when the weather gets too cold for them in winter. It's very far from what people picture when talking about industrial farming in the US. It is true that there's an ultimate cruelty to keeping farm animals: we do it so eventually we can kill and eat them.
So if you argue against all meat consumption by humans, then it is true: no keeper of animals can be considered "fit for keeping humans". Even a small farm purely for the owner's own consumption places restrictions on the livestock's freedom and ultimately keeps them so they can be eaten. Even animals that we keep as pets could be considered to live in inhuman conditions, because we restrict their freedoms.
Treating an animal well sometimes does not mean that the animal was treated well. It's nice that the cows you're talking about are given lots of access to pastures, but that doesn't mean that anything else can be done to the animal without it qualifying as disrespectful or unkind.
I can't think of another situation in which one could choose to kill an animal for pleasure at 10% it's lifespan, and think that this was kind or respectful. Can you?
Respectfully, every comparison you made seems like a false equivalence to me. I'd argue extrapolating from the human perspective to a cow is much closer than to a cockroach. Personally I draw the line at "complex" emotions, somewhere between insects and fish. Yes, that line is arbitrary and I can't prove it. But so is drawing the line at, humans and nothing else that isn't cute. You can't prove the validity of that line either. So what are we left with? Is it so unreasonable to extrapolate from one mammal to another?
There’s a part of me that kind of wonders whether the Jewish Kashrut laws are meant to protect the most intelligent animals: the best-known laws (cloven feet, does not chew the cud, that which swims in the sea but does not have scales) end up protecting pigs, cetaceans and cephalapods (plus other stuff that’s not so bright, but put that aside).
There’s no rational reason to believe this, of course, but it’s still fun to imagine in a sort of Erik von Däniken way.
I’ve often wondered similarly about Islamic codes which prohibit the eating of sentient pigs and dogs; perhaps the ancients knew that calling them “dirty” was the only practical way to protect them from the mouths of the masses.
That man may not have the respect of any academic community but damn it if he isn't entertaining to watch.
On a more on-topic note, our growing understanding of animal intelligence has definitely made it harder for me to justify eating certain kinds of meat. My day-to-day is a bit too stressful to make the switch entirely to vegetarianism, but once my financial and personal situations have settled I'm looking forward to a less guilty lived experience. (This is of course not to say that you should feel guilty for eating meat - just my personal take)
As a person who made the switch after realizing how intelligent these animals are, I can honestly say that it's worth it if you do decide to. However, I also understand why you would continue to eat meat. It was probably one of the harder things I've done in my life.
I blame this on watching Babylon 5 when I was younger (spoiler: same souls), but when they started using animal organs and heart valves in human surgery, it made (religious) sense to me that it was going to be pig.
As you say, not a really rational belief, but I always like it when disperate ideologies point in similar directions.
I think rationally, it's far more likely that Kashrut laws were designed to protect humans from eating certain more risky animals, especially 3-4,000 years ago in a place with high heat and little refridgeration, but I'll never actually know.
I am just reading The Swarm by Frank Schätzing that kind of combines the First Contact and Earth's Oceans. I enjoyed Blindsight so maybe you'd like it too
> "Since the octopus was not reacting to any existing threat, but rather in anticipation of one, it had demonstrated foresight and planning."
The journalist is hopefully misunderstanding a more correct explanation by the scientists. That most certainly isn't demonstration of foresight and planning. Nature is perfectly capable of encoding that sort of information as an instinctual response. Something like [trying to sleep] -> [get distressed by exposure to open ocean].
It is like how humans feel cold and put on a jumper. It isn't a demonstration that we all understand heat flow equations and have modelled out that we need to consume less food if we put another layer between us and the outside world, increasing the long term economics of our survival, demonstrating an advanced knowledge of thermodynamics and economics. Our body has encoded "heat leaking through skin" -> "feel uncomfortable" into our senses and that is all we need to respond to without considering the consequences of the response.
Agreed. This is like building a little den out of nearby objects, which seems to be at sub-mammal levels? Even birds that didn’t get the best grades do this.
They picked an extremely mediocre example by octopus standards. Play is more interesting but this happens with primitive mammals as well, like squirrels and such. And fish, btw.
It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of magnitude less sophisticated[1] than what is obvious from having pets, watching a basic nature doc, or just observing wildlife for a tiny bit.
[1]: I tend to avoid words like intelligence etc both because they’re ambiguous as hell, and because people jump to anthropomorphization, backwards-rationalizing etc, in exactly the fashion you mention.
> It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of magnitude less sophisticated[1] than what is obvious from having pets, watching a basic nature doc, or just observing wildlife for a tiny bit.
I would go further and claim that basically everybody holds the assumption that animal cognition lives on a scale of not sophisticated to very sophisticated, and also that human cognition holds the top spot on this scale, and that therefor anything else is below us in sophistication.
The idea that conscious thoughts are what makes our cognitive abilities so good is merely an assumption. It's very possible that in million year of evolution humans evolve a way to do everything we do today on instinct without the need for energy hungry consciousness. That would probably allow the brain to become much smaller and efficient over time.
With our assumptions we would conclude that the smaller brain and instinctual behaviors would signify a less sophisticated brain.
There's a video about an octopus solving a maze: https://youtu.be/7__r4FVj-EI?si=FH2QsL7BxlJ4h7KF. You could call that reactionary too, but at some point we have to admit octopuses do have a higher level of intelligence than we'd assume from an animal their size.
It sounds like you would prefer evidence of something like Kahneman’s System II as evidence of high intelligence? That is, an abstract general purpose thinking system, even if it is slower and in many ways weaker than the instinctive/trained/evolved systems for solving specific problems?
I preferred the bottle-bouncing behaviour. It seems unlikely that nature encoded that one as an instinct - or if it did, it is an adaptive enough instinct to be intelligence for me.
It just happens that the leading example was not correct. That sort of thing turns up all the time in creatures that are effectively thoughtless automatons.
It’s a bit off topic I’m not sure behaviour being “instinctive” means it’s thoughtless (whatever that means).
For example, being uncomfortable might be an instinctive response to being cold, but it’s hardly thoughtless. Some people choose to swim in icy water as a form of recreation. Some sit outside on a cool night and enjoy the crisp air. We write songs and poetry about the deep frost. It means something to us.
I know our nervous systems are far more complex than eg: a bivalve mollusc, who are probably not composing poetry about the sensation they get that makes them close their shell.
I don’t really disagree with you about the observed behaviours in TFA, but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton.
> but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton.
I feel very weird about this too.
This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system, an article of faith, as the many alternatives are.
Saying this doesn't imply that every belief system is equally valuable or scientifically verifiable. But I think it's important to recognize one's axioms and/or biases.
The mechanistic view is certainly compelling and has the appearance of being all-encompassing.
Its all-encompassing appearance may actually be an artifact of how used to the story we've grown. A clockwork universe. We know that one by heart, whether we're scientists or not. We can apply that template to anything, and set about exploring (or reading about) the mechanisms. The fact that there are mechanisms everywhere doesn't prove that mechanism is all there is. That last part is an implicit belief system, a hidden article of faith, and that's how you get Descartes vivisecting dogs, and conscious experience necessarily (as though no other possibility could exist) having to be an "emergent" property.
Yes. Also, one of the most popular alternative views (that a non-“mechanical” soul is the origin of higher-order experiences) is probably even more deeply engrained in many of our cultures and patterns of thought. And operates very similarly, albeit with a different story about how these properties “emerge”.
Occam's razor does support the mechanistic view. It is certainly necessary to explain the entire world, and it is sufficient to explain intelligence. So by Occam's razor we should accept it is the best explanation of intelligence.
That doesn't mean we have to give up on understanding the mechanism. Nor does it mean we shouldn't try to find out if it isn't a sufficient explanation. But calling it an unsupported belief system goes a bit far. It certainly isn't proven scientific theory. And there is room for it to be wrong. But there are good scientific principles behind this belief.
This is actually a bad example. Although cold being uncomfortable is instinctual, the way how people deal with feeling cold is not instinctual at all. People use different methods of dealing with the cold depending on situation, culture, experience.
In this way your example actually speaks for the claimed forethought, because in this analogy the octopus knows (from experience or speculation) that he will be uncomfortable when trying to sleep if he's exposed and he decides to 'put on a jumper' by putting rocks in front of the entrance.
Also instinctual behavior is in general much less sophisticated. Like an infant animal starting sucking when encountering a nipple shaped object or a moth circling a light bulb because it always tries to keep the brightest source above it. It could be that pulling debris around him before sleeping could be instinctual, but it would be very unlikely for that to include the process of looking for suitable rocks beforehand.
The jumper explanation is interesting, but it has a hidden catch.
While the Stone Age people who first came up with clothing certainly didn't understand heat flow equations, they still had to think in advance about the coming cold snap and make preparations: hunting down some game for its coat, skinning it etc. Quite a sophisticated set of actions, not a mere instinctive response to changing temperature.
While I agree with your distinctions I think it is important to note that the boundary of this is not explicitly clear and it can be difficult to differentiate.
Certainly instinctual responses are a form of planning, but more automated. For example, people often forego reaching for a jacket (that is well within reach or even in their literal hands) if they are quickly going from one warm place to another. And idk about you, but I've done this without a moment's thought about how the other end will be warm. The action feels fairly automatic in the same way walking outside in winter has an automatic response of grabbing a jacket.
Of course, this could be because (and likely is) a more complex equation is formulated in my mind but just operated outside the conscious part. But I think that just illustrates how the lines blur. Especially since many conscious actions turn into unconscious ones. Think about when you first learned to drive a car and how involved you were compared to now many years later. In fact, you WANT to have automated responses as these are quicker, but they come through experience. Do we call this foresight and planning? I think you can argue either side. You can easily argue that some algorithm with explicit foresight and planning was encoded into the subconscious.
I guess I'm just trying to say that it is quite complicated and we should be ensuring this complexity is known (the existence of complexity, not necessarily all the details), or it will be difficult to interpret.
For what it’s worth, this is an excerpt from a book, not a piece by a journalist say, summarizing someone’s study.
The author (Toomey) is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches courses in writing and in the history of science.
I wish there was a video of this in that article. The reading was very descriptive, but would have loved to see the video of the octopus playing with the bottle.
What aspect of it is anthropomorphizing? Do you mean the phrase "bouncing the ball" because it is not literally bouncing a ball? Nothing else in the article jumped out at me as ascribing human-specific behavior to octopuses.
Also, I don't follow what lifespan has to do with anything. Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most other animals, including animals with very long lifespans, such as turtles.
Not to mention that the article was specifically regarding an octopus species that lives longer than that; I take it you did not actually read it?
It’s interesting how the same phrase can mean very different things to us depending on whether there is a human or not. It’s completely automatic and is not obvious.
A human bounces the ball: the connotation of play. Something or an animal bounces the ball: mechanical movement. Somehow, it feels like a different action.
In a more drastic version: a human is learning = self-fulfillment, becoming a better person and better member of society, advancement and progress, basic right; machine learning = consuming a dataset to create a black box that can “predict” the next token if you give it one.
If you see “bounces the ball” accompanied by “play” when talking about an animal, it can feel like the intent is to use one version of bouncing in place of another to anthropomorphize an animal (although it’s not clear what would be the alternative for the same mechanical action). I think it can be true that animals play, but someone who doesn’t think so can see it as sensationalizing and misleading public into being taken literally.
In a similar vein, a statement “LLM learns” could seem normal to some, but rub someone else wrong if they think attributing humanness to LLMs is sensationalizing and misappropriating industry term into being taken literally (probably to benefit the big tech).
> Not to mention that the article was specifically regarding an octopus species that lives longer than that
Nope, it's about the common octopus. That is what Octopus vulgaris is. Yes, I did read it.
> Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most other animals
Rats are not popularly deemed "highly intelligent" animals, unlike octopi. If we thought them to be on their level we wouldn't be sharing these articles all the time.
There isn't. There's periodic pop-sci headlines shared on HN that suggest they are, but no evidence that they are "crazy smart". You might as well say the honeybee is "crazy smart", it makes as much sense.
There is a difference between anthropomorphizing it and demonstrating that humans are a subset of Animalia and some characteristics of Animalia are not human-specific, even if they're very different from humans.
With hands in the tank, I was able to play catch with a small plastic ball and a roughly 2 month old octopus. It was definitely catch — I could scoot the ball anywhere and the octopus would grab it and throw it back.
Possibly a trained behavior, who knows? It was really charming and delightful.