A fascinating deep dive (!) into other consciousnesses.
Anyone who has seen the excellent Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher will be in no doubt that there is an extremely complex realm of thought at play among the cephalopods. The ocean is the source of all life with its single celled organisms and on a different branch to us mammals, they have still chanced to have a large cache of neurons in a decentralised brain.
While the writing can be a little muddled and opaque at times, the evolutionary history and philosophy more than make up for this. Godfrey-Smith scuba dives among the residents at “Octopolis” and recalls their behaviour in rich detail.
Nagel asked us what it means to be a bat and here we ponder what could it be like to see colour through your arms/legs and camouflage yourself accordingly? Arms/Legs that are replete with neurons and have their own individual level of action and autonomy.
An imprisoned octopus recognises the staff members in a laboratory and squirts water at their least favourite individual. A state of captivity of course isn’t suitable for making any overarching judgments. Also listed are flawed, unethical tests in which the individuals are given negative punishment (electrocutions etc) and poor, unsuitable rewards.
It was telling that the author described the pre-Cambrian times of peaceful, non-competitive life as a “Garden Of Eden.” Who could ever claim it was a boon for sentient life to need weapons, antenna and eyes-as defences-and become “red in tooth and claw”? Unimaginable levels of suffering have followed.
On which topic, Cartesian arrogance that plants us at the centre of creation is being eroded one finding at a time as other species show themselves to be more advanced than previously thought. Often in ways that needn’t involve anthropocentric criteria.
As Yuval Noah Harari asserts, our industrial scale exploitation and killing of other sentient beings will surely come to be understood as a huge moral wrong. Many members of the public recently bristled at the proposition of a new octopus farm but it is long overdue that we equally oppose the farming of cows, pigs and chickens.
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