I was originally inspired to read this book thanks to an excellent recommendation by a friend – given the awareness of the intelligence and cognitive faculties of the animals that share this world with us, how exactly do they comprehend the world, what is this notion of “comprehension” of the world and what, if anything, does it tell us about the humanity and our own comprehension of the universe?
Perhaps one way to begin to understand the intellectual capabilities of something that is very capable of solving the many hurdles and challenges that we see as intelligent – and octopi are indeed incredibly capable of solving puzzles and finding innovative solutions to the daily challenges of feeding, fighting and breeding in their environment and yet they are absurdly alien to us in the way that they comprehend and process knowledge, with as if they had brains in their boneless arms and with evanescent lifespans that seem quite ill-matched for the cognitive faculties that they have.
They are indeed, truly alien and yet Godfrey-Smith describes them in such entrancing and endearing terms that one comes to truly relate to them, to love them, and in doing so, conveys a very full novel sense of understanding of well, understanding.
He does all of this while avoiding any inclination to anthropomorphize them, indeed, warning us off from the beginning to realize that these are a kind of truly different being.
Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.
Their distance from humans is vast – we’ve last shared a common ancestor with octopi 600 million years ago. And yet in a way, it fits into myth, following the Hawaiian story described in the tale.
The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages … At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive…
As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.
And so it does seem to be such a rare and intelligent creature, but perhaps, it is first worthwhile to query and explore the notion of intelligence itself. And prior to that investigation, perhaps it is worth to ask what the notion of behavior, of directed action, and all of that which is presumed to original from this intangible thing that we call “thought.”
We give credence to the notion of “thought” in our own actions(at least, when we do not think of the actions as thoughtless, or involuntary), but what of the actions of a moose or a mice? Or, to draw an even more extreme leap for us to bound to, what of the actions of bacteria? What of the simple nature of observation, action, and reaction?
Much of what they[bacteria] do counts as behavior only in a very broad sense, but they can control how they move and what chemicals they make, in response to what they detect going on around them. In order for any organism to do this, one part of it must be receptive, able to see or smell or hear, and another part must be active, able to make something useful happen.
This is an interesting and worthwhile detail to elaborate from what is “the mind.” Let’s peel it back and simplify it: what is a “sense?” In the most basic form, something has to receptive enough to sense, and then something has to be active enough to do something with the sense.
Sense something, do something. Engagement/interaction with the world now happens.
The bacterium solves this problem in an ingenious manner: as it senses its world, one mechanism registers what conditions are like right now, and another records how things were a few moments ago. The bacterium will swim in a straight line as long as the chemicals it senses seem better now than those it sensed a moment ago. If not, it’s preferable to change course.
Bacteria either “run” or “tumble.” That’s really their only engagement with movement; they go forward, or start tumbling. This also is an example of an aggregate decision that works in a positive, adaptive way even if it doesn’t seem that optimal: while it might not always be a good idea to stop moving forward because food has lessened temporarily, as a whole, its a generally good idea. The simple “run toward food. tumble when food isn’t as plentiful” turns into an adaptive, functional algorithm.
Perhaps there is an opportunity for consideration as we, as human beings, seek to develop our own pet minds – the minds of artificial intelligence, as it might be.
Those cells, eukaryotes, are larger and have an elaborate internal structure. Arising perhaps 1.5 billion years ago, they are the descendants of a process in which one small bacterium-like cell swallowed another.
Though Godfrey-Smith does not go into this, the development of the eukaryotes is funny and is either an example of deep mutualism(or perhaps a kind of parasitism, as it might be). We are eukaryotes: all life besides bacteria is. Eukaryotes have an unique feature: the existence of an “organelle” known as mitochondria that produces energy very efficiently for them(and us).
It so happens that upon research, we’ve found the mitochondria actually has its own DNA. They were their own being. At some point, they were integrated into eukaryotes on such a deep and total level that they are considered an organelle. Their process of aerobic respiration is highly efficient, and they populate our cells in large numbers(in heart cells, almost 40% of all space), basically converting oxygen into ATP which can be used for other cell processes.
At our very basis of existence, our very ability to respire and exist as beings requires that kind of cooperation within our cells. That’s a merciful way of seeing. Another way of seeing it, of course, is that this is a form of what could be called a macroparasitism, or a kind of enslavement. I suppose this is where the lens of interpretation provide us with a great deal of flexibility.
We return to the notion of observation in simple animals.
Single-celled eukaryotes, in many cases, have more complicated capacities to taste and swim, and they also edge close to a particularly important sense: vision…The eukaryotes have “eyespots,” patches that are sensitive to light, connected to something that shades or focuses the incoming light, making it more informative. Some eukaryotes seek light, some avoid it, and some switch between the two; they follow light when they want to take in energy, and avoid it when their energy supplies are full.
An aside on this was my thoughts on societal specialization/development by simply measuring the base energy it is able to utilize. All these wonderful senses that eukaryotes have are based on having additional energy from having the mitochondria. A lot can be simplified to a base common characteristic, and its one of the joys of analysis. I thought about that with Dark Eden(a fiction novel that I will write on later) as well, and I think toward the end it implies that: increasing specialists, presumably from more food sources.
more energy => more complexity; less energy => less complexity
We also this literally happen with the fall of Rome as well. Less available energy directly means fewer(or no) shipments of high quality ore from India, which means that there is no purpose for great bloomeries, which means no one buys steel, which means no one makes sense, and soon you have no minting. People go back to barter, 80% of the population goes to subsistence agriculture. Seems very Pareto, anyway.
Makes me realize that you don’t need a gigantic cataclysm to lead one to a post-apocalyptic a world as it is often portrayed. A few disasters, destruction of centralization and cooperation, and you’ll get there soon enough.
And the converse to this, the successful resolution of the coordination problem is one that has to be solved daily, and is indeed:
But doing something, if you are made of many cells, is not a trivial matter, not something that can simply be assumed. It takes a great deal of coordination between your parts. This is not a big deal if you are a bacterium, but if you’re a larger organism, things are different. Then you face the task of generating a coherent whole-organism action from the many tiny outputs— the tiny contractions, contortions, and twitches— of your parts. A multitude of micro-actions must be shaped into a macro-action.
As child, perhaps one of my earliest conscious philosophical thoughts(if I am to presume to call it as such), I remember I lifting my hand and moved a finger. But how did my “finger” “know” that I “wanted” to “move” it? Its a kind of peculiar miracle of order that a conscious desire effects an action.
And it certainly is – a complicated sequence of firing of neurons that ultimately coordinates with the specific activation or relaxation of muscle fiber such that it creates an successful effect. There’s something magically amazing in even the most basic of such explorations. Where did this cooperation evolve from?
As it would seem, it is a form of communication. And as a form of communication, it finds it origin from the very beginnings of the nature of that of life – and an excellent point to begin, in Part Two.