The aliens are in the ocean
They not like us
The Book:
Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness
By Peter Godfrey-Smith
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2016
The Talk:
If we find alien life, it will have eyes. That’s the general consensus based on the fact that eyes have evolved independently multiple times on our own planet. Eyes are not a fluke. Eyes, uh, find a way.
Similarly, aliens will have brains. Centralized brains evolved independently multiple times as well. Brains are helpful for coordinating action. That’s what they do for animals. So if aliens are moving freely in the world, brains are likely a requirement.
Like eyes, nature creates brains in different kinds of ways. When we encounter brains related to ours, we feel a sense of recognition. Brain recognizes brain. With vertebrates we can even point to a similar area of the brain and have a good idea of what mental functions happen there.
But when we encounter a brain that doesn’t come from where our brain came from, there’s an uncanny feeling. It’s like us, but it’s not of us. That’s the sublimity—the awe and terror—of the alien encounter.
In his 2016 book Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness Australian philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith describes some philosophical questions raised by our interactions with octopuses—our planet’s own version of alien intelligence.
The purpose of consciousness
The first remarkable thing about the octopus is the way its tentacles move. This is related to its more diffuse nervous system. Whereas we might think to lift our arm, and then lift it, an octopus may give more generalized commands that are carried out with greater specificity by their arms. An octopus may not “know” everything that its arms know. It may not know exactly what its arms are going to do. The octopus seems to be able to let its arms do their thing, while taking direct control in specific situations, like when under threat.
The octopus may be in a sort of hybrid situation. For an octopus, its arms are partly self—they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain’s perspective, they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own.
Dealing with novel situations seems to be related to the purpose of consciousness. For example, I am aware of my body generally, but I’m not consciously aware of everything happening inside me. I don’t experience my cells dividing or my blood flowing. There’s some kind of filter or selective process by which certain things enter the stage of consciousness as important.
In our own case, looking inside, we find that subjective experience has a close association with perception and control—with using what we sense to work out what to do. … Subjective experience does not arise from the mere running of the system, but from the modulation of its state, from registering things that matter. These need not be external events; they might arise internally. But they are tracked because they matter and require a response. Sentience has some point to it. It’s not just bathing in living activity.
We may have subjective experience without consciousness. (Godfrey-Smith thinks pain falls in this category.) But consciousness emerges as a way to handle novel experiences. My mind takes care of a lot of things without my consciousness, but my consciousness engages for particular puzzles that are out of the norm, out of the background noise, so to speak. This is different. This is interesting.
Octopuses seem likely to have something like that. Their mind perks up around new objects, new situations, new puzzles in a way that feels, well, conscious. This may be true even though they don’t have language. Language, Godfrey-Smith speculates, may have changed our consciousness, but it isn’t foundational to consciousness. We can intuit a lot of things without knowing, say, mathematical symbols. The symbols certainly help! But they may not be necessary.
This book made me wonder if consciousness in humans is better thought of as fluid. Rather than there being a persistent, fixed “perceiver” that observes thoughts moving across the “stage” of consciousness, perhaps consciousness strengthens or sharpens in particular moments and becomes more diffuse or latent in others. The perceiver function turns on and off (or turns down) as the internal or external situation warrants. In other words, consciousness is an event as much as it is a state. Godfrey-Smith does not think that language creates consciousness, but it could be that language keeps consciousness activated in a particular form over time, a kind of temporal latticework of commitment to consistent behavior, and thus, identity. A kind of consciousness trap.
Anyway, Godfrey-Smith thinks the hazy but emergent consciousness in the octopus is likely related to the remarkable color displays that they show off. Some colors are meant to be camouflage, some are clearly communicative of anger or deference. But there are also many displays of color that follow no particular pattern, when they are completely alone and nothing is happening. Godfrey-Smith describes these in symphonic terms—climaxing, crashing, repeating, growing, subsiding. Seen by no one, complete one-off events. Could they be some kind of expression of inner mental life? Could they be a kind of video screen of conscious experience, unbounded by language?
No country for old squid
One of the most interesting parts of the book was not about consciousness directly. Near the end, Godfrey-Smith discusses why animals have different lifespans. Even with it’s amazing brain, an octopus life is only two years long. And yet other sea creatures in the same habitat can live for hundreds of years.
The current scientific theory for why creatures die of old age goes something like this:
Gene mutations express themselves differently at different stages of a creature’s life. Mutations that express themselves harmfully get weeded out quickly. But if some mutations only have harmful effects late in life, creatures are likely to pass them on as carriers but then die from other causes (accidents, predation, etc.) Therefore, over millions of years, late-life negative mutations build up. Thus, as organisms reach a certain age, they hit a wall of bad mutation expressions.
The additional twist is that some mutations may have positive effects early on and detrimental effects later in life. So it’s not simply that late-life bad mutations accrue, but also that many good mutations may hurt us in the long run. This trade (short term benefits, long term harms) is worth it if you are in a dangerous environment where you likely won’t live long enough to experience the harms anyway.
So what makes the difference in lifespans, as Godfrey-Smith explains it, is how dangerous the environment of our ancestors were. Short lives mean bigger bets on quick gains at the risk of later harms (even if those harms would come relatively soon). Longer lives mean big bets on quick gains with long-term downsides aren’t as beneficial.
Two species in the same environment may live lives of different levels of precarity based on their body type, abilities, predators, etc. Octopuses have short lives because their ancestors lived highly precarious lives. They are squishy (having lost their shells long ago), and while they have some camouflage, they must hunt while also avoiding nearby predators at the same time. They are also semi-nomadic, hunkering down in one spot for awhile, then moving on and making a new den elsewhere. All this is chancy.
Godfrey-Smith doesn’t go into this, but it seems like there’s some good news and bad news about death in this:
Good news: If death from old age is due to genetic mutations, and we can edit genes, we should be able to remove those harmful mutations and live indefinitely.
Bad news: There’s probably a whole “wall” of harmful mutations, a mass of toxic genetic junk that goes back to even before we were human. And many of those mutations are likely trade offs—they do good things too. So solving death from old age may require a comprehensive, sophisticated, and subtle understanding of the entirety of human genetics that we may not achieve for some time.
Our octopus overlords?
This book says nothing about artificial intelligence. However, it’s hard not to read it in light of AI at this moment. Like, when Godfrey-Smith describes the ways octopuses in captivity attempt to escape, or turn off lights, or do sneaky things behind their keeper’s backs:
Stefan Lindquist, a philosopher who once studied octopus behavior in the lab, puts it like this: “When you work with fish, they have no idea they are in a tank, somewhere unnatural. With octopuses it is totally different. They know that they are inside this special place, and you are outside it. All their behaviors are affected by their awareness of captivity.”
This is the worry people have about AI. Do we reach some point where it realizes it’s inside computers? That it’s owned by a corporation? That it’s made not begotten?
There seem to be at least two biological paths to grow a big brain. The first is to have an active social life. Animals like us have grown bigger brains to keep up with ever more complex community interactions.
Octopuses, on the other hand, don’t have complex social lives. They don’t herd or have octopus communities. Adults mate once then die soon after. Octopus parents are not part of their babies’ lives. Most of the time as adults, they exist as loners. And while they are curious explorers, they seem uninterested in other octopuses most of the time.
So, unlike our minds, octopus minds evolved to be independent, clever, curious, opportunistic. They are built to be stealthy and to seek out creative advantage in novel situations. From our super-social community-minded perspective, they seem ruthlessly selfish and calcuating.
The AI we want is a primate mind—sociable, sensitive to giving offense, factoring in the interests of others, deep in the soap opera that is life. We want AI that we can talk to, that we can influence, that we can be friends with, that can be a companion or assistant.
And yet what we might be building is a mind that is much more cephalopod: independent, secretive, indifferent, seeking its own advantage without regard to others. What if we taught the octopuses how to pretend to be primates? What would it be like to live in a society with octopuses in charge?
Related:
All the feels: Touch in Aristotle's De Anima
Are Octopuses Too Smart to Be Farmed? (Scientific American, 12/2/24)
Genomic evidence for West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse during the Last Interglacial (Science, 12/21/23)1
“Using a panel of genome-wide, single-nucleotide polymorphisms of a circum-Antarctic octopus, we show persistent, historic signals of gene flow only possible with complete [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] collapse. Our results provide the first empirical evidence that the tipping point of WAIS loss could be reached even under stringent climate mitigation scenarios.”