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Cephalopods are fucking cool and you can't tell me otherwise. But also this article got me thinking about something: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432610-400-octopuses-were-thought-to-be-solitary-until-a-social-species-turned-up/
A really popular idea in evolutionary and developmental biology is that social pressure is the driving force for increasing intelligence, since social animals are almost universally more intelligent than solitary ones. Octopi were generally considered to be an exception to this--
--but recent studies like the one in the article above started showing that, no, octopi could actually get pretty dang sociable in a lot of circumstances, and arguably the most clever species of octopus is the also the most sociable species of octopus.
But the main way that--
But the main way that--
--the "Social Brain Hypothesis" gets framed is usually through inter-group competition. Y'know, a sort of arms race between members of a group so that a person avoids domination (they like to call this the "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis"). Obviously maintaining social--
--bonds is super important too, since even under the Machiavellian idea forming alliances is a highly effective strategy, but generally the focus is on competition.
But I figure that's actually not the important part--in fact intra-group competition might *shape* intelligence--
But I figure that's actually not the important part--in fact intra-group competition might *shape* intelligence--
--but have a very limited role in actually producing it. I figure that the main thing is *distribution* of cognition, and octopi provide a really good example of why *that's* the most important element of the Social Brain Hypothesis.
My evidence? A lot of the sociality of--
My evidence? A lot of the sociality of--
--octopi involves cooperating and interacting with other species, like fish: . And let's not forget the main thing that distinguishes cephalopods from other types of animals: they essentially have as many brains as they have arms, plus a central overseer--
--that helps coordinate everything. So even the most solitary type of octopus has a higher distributed form of intelligence than, say, a solitary mammal, with the general functioning of information processing relying on cooperation between these different parts. Same goes for--
--animals with one brain but live in a society: a ton more information can be acquired through a diverse and large number of nodes, but that information can only be effectively processed if there are extensive communicative and cooperative mechanisms available. Otherwise--
--shit would just get horded, remain fragmentary, or just be plain manipulated in a way that destroys what needs to be transferred; incidentally, this sort of thing was how JS Mill united "freedom of speech" and "truth" together in a way that his value pluralism otherwise--
--wouldn't allow, and why democracy was so vitally important for JS Mill's political philosophy (in a way that gets ignored by so-called "classical liberals" quite frequently).
I think that if you accept this notion--that intelligence improves when it's distributed and--
I think that if you accept this notion--that intelligence improves when it's distributed and--
--it's various nodes have robust mechanisms for communicating and sharing the information they have--that this can help explain the intense, inseparable connection between language and thought and why the ability to communicate is such an essential element of determining animal--
--intelligence. There are some nice implications here (in a positive sense) for Habermas's "discourse ethics" too, some further explanations for why "play" is so vital for intelligence (and well-being) as well, and it links up nicely with Kropotkin's work on inter-species--
--cooperation as a vital survival strategy in that explains why more intelligent species also have similar social behaviours (like empathy and so on) to humans, and not just cutthroat competition and dominance (and funny enough, some biologists gave octopi MDMA to see if it would
have the same pro-social effect on them as humans, despite wildly different brain structures, and it turns out that octopi get just as affable and snuggly as human beings do when on an ecstacy, suggesting that the pro-social effect of neurotransmitters like serotonin is--
--preserved even over 500 million years of vastly divergent evolution: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982218309916)
Part of me also wonders if this means that the next step in intelligence is basically to become the Geth from Mass Effect, which I mean hey, the Geth were awesome, but I feel like this thread is long enough already.
