[pcthrowaway]

Interesting... I would have thought Octopi have more total neurons than dogs, given their problem-solving capabilities.

Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving

[jrrv]

Fun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.

[bdamm]

That's fun. Octopii rolls off the tongue though, doesn't it? Since we have survived both the Greek and Roman cultures, and have absorbed aspects of both into languages now widely distributed, I'd like to propose that we seed the path of a true lingua franca and declare the plural of octopus to be octopii.

It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.

[psychoslave]

They are all already in use https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus

[6510]

octopurs

[gnubison]

Pronounced octópodes, /ɒkˈtɒpədiːz/, with the -es rhyming with Heracles etc.

[PurpleRamen]

Neurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard.

And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?

[ordu]

> reacting faster in general than an Octopus

It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope.

Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential

[Nevermark]

Something interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny.

It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.

This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.

No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.

--

Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.

We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.

--

For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.

To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.

It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.

The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.

(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)

--

There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.

[DiffTheEnder]

The zero parenting thing is what gets me. Pretty much every other animal we'd call intelligent leans hard on social learning -- crows, primates, parrots all spend ages learning from adults. Octopuses hatch alone, figure everything out solo in 1-2 years, and then die. That's the wild part. If they had even a 5 year lifespan with overlapping generations, honestly no idea where the ceiling would be. Maybe the octopi in captivity could be taught to parent and produce genius octopi?

[Nevermark]

Yes, a five year lifespan octopus would be something.

Unfortunately they can't parent, as both parents die directly after reproduction. But octopus can learn from observing, so some kind of mentoring or modeling between individuals could be encouraged or arranged.

And perhaps animatronic or video animations could contribute? If it turned out octopus could learn from video, the potential experiments would be unlimited. Most of an octopus eye's field of vision, maybe all, is monocular.

One of my dreams is to have an octopus reserve and a parrot reserve. And breed and create situational and living contexts for both species, where both individual and social intelligences are brought to the surface and encouraged to flourish.

I view those two animals as the most and 2nd-most (peak, for their separating phylums/classes) alien intelligences on Earth. The octopus intelligence is a true alien from a functional perspective, in that our common ancestor only had a rudimentary nervous system. A bilateral marine worm, 600 mya.

Our common ancestor with parrots would be something like the Hylonomus, 320 mya. something like a primitive gecko.

The differences in managing the two species would be extreme. Water, air. Hermit vs. tight knit social bents. Extremely short generations vs. very long ones.

But both are highly curious and actively engage and bond with people, other creatures and artifacts they find interesting.

Short octopus lives would ironically, be an exceptional boon for breeding longevity. Not only would changes be very apparent quickly, but the short lifecycle makes breeding vast numbers, to implement a broad gene/morph search, relatively inexpensive.

We have 94 parrot genomes [0], and at least one octopus genome. [1] Octopus genes are as trippy as everything else about them.

My guess is with both creatures, a significant intelligence uptick could happen very quickly simply by mining their current very high diversity of genes, across large populations and numbers of sub-species. They are both ideal creatures in that respect.

The west side of Hawaii's Big Island had both an octopus lab and a parrot reserve. The reserve is still there. I was able to visit the lab twice before it was shut down.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36405343/

[1] https://scienceandculture.com/2023/02/geneticists-puzzled-by...

[sva_]

Yeah their nerve cells are much larger. The axons of a giant squid are up to a millimeter in width.

[psychoslave]

This code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product!

"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.

[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...

[yieldcrv]

The prevailing research is “more neurons = intelligence”

And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary

octopi bucking that trend is an example we need

[tokai]

No its pretty well understood that brain size in it self doesn't signify intelligence, even if correcting for body size. Density, connectedness, and complexity are important. Modeling the information processing capacity of animal brains it is shown that smaller brain like those of octopi and corvides are highly capable despite a relative low neuron count compared to humans.

[yieldcrv]

I’d be interested in crafting a more neural optimal, less resource intensive human