The mind of the octopus

Yes, you have the right, mind, of an octopus. Why not?

Amia Srinivasan review two recent books in "The Sucker, the Sucker!", London Review of Books, 17 September 2017.

Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Collins, 255 pp, £20.00, March 2017, ISBN 978 0 00 822627 5

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery, Simon & Schuster, 272 pp, £8.99, April 2016, ISBN 978 1 4711 4675 6

From the review:

The octopus threatens boundaries. Its body, a boneless mass of soft tissue, has no fixed shape. Even large octopuses – the largest species, the Giant Pacific, has an arm span of more than six metres and weighs a hundred pounds – can fit through an opening an inch wide, or about the size of its eye. This, combined with their considerable strength – a mature male Giant Pacific can lift thirty pounds with each of its 1600 suckers – means that octopuses are difficult to keep in captivity. [...]

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and diver who has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods in the wild, mostly off the coast of his native Sydney, for years. The alienness of octopuses, in his view, provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of cognition and consciousness without simply projecting from the human example. Because of their evolutionary distance from us, octopuses are an ‘independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour’. Insofar as we are able to make intelligent contact with them – to understand octopuses and have them understand us – it is ‘not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over’. The potential worry is that the evolutionary chasm between us and the octopus is too great to make mutual intelligibility possible. In that case the octopus will have something to teach us about the limits of our own understanding. [...]

Octopuses are indeed glutinous; according to Sy Montgomery, author of the splendid Soul of an Octopus, the slime on an octopus’s skin feels like a cross between drool and snot. But the octopus’s will is far from malignant, at least when it comes to humans. Octopuses do occasionally attack people, giving a venomous nip or stealing an underwater camera when threatened or annoyed, but in general they are gentle, inquisitive creatures. (Fishermen, by contrast, often kill octopuses by biting out their brains, and in many countries they are eaten alive.) Octopuses encountering divers in the wild will frequently meet them with a probing arm or two, and sometimes lead them by the hand on a tour of the neighbourhood. Aristotle, mistaking curiosity for a lack of intelligence, called the octopus a ‘stupid creature’ because of its willingness to approach an extended human hand. Octopuses can recognise individual humans, and will respond differently to different people, greeting some with a caress of the arms, spraying others with their siphons. This is striking behaviour in an animal whose natural life cycle is deeply antisocial. Octopuses live solitary lives in single dens and die soon after their young hatch. Many male octopuses, to avoid being eaten during mating, will keep their bodies as far removed from the female as possible, extending a single arm with a sperm packet towards her siphon, a manoeuvre known as ‘the reach’. [...]

What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it feel like anything at all? Or are octopuses, as Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘just biochemical machines for which all is dark inside’? This form of question – ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ Thomas Nagel asked in a hugely influential paper in 1974 – is philosophical shorthand for asking whether a creature is conscious. [...]

Godfrey-Smith starts with the conviction that consciousness is an evolved thing, and accepts the conclusion that it has more primitive precursors: that it comes in degrees after all. Consciousness – the possession of an ‘inner’ model of the ‘outer’ world, or the sense of having an integrated, subjective perspective on the world – is, on his view, just a highly evolved form of what he calls ‘subjective experience’. Many animals, Godfrey-Smith thinks, have some degree of subjective experience, even if it falls short of full-blown consciousness. He points to what the physiologist Derek Denton called the ‘primordial emotions’: thirst, lack of air, physical pain. These sensations intrude on our more complex mental processes, refusing to be dismissed. They hark back to a more rudimentary form of experiencing the world – a form, Godfrey-Smith thinks, that does not require a sophisticated inner model of the world. ‘Do you think,’ he asks, that pain, thirst or shortness of breath ‘only feel like something because of sophisticated cognitive processing in mammals that has arisen late in evolution? I doubt it.

FWIW, I was quite taken with cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish, and octopi) when I was young and wrote a term paper about them for 10th grade biology.