I’m currently reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. One thing I’ve learned from the book that surprised me a lot is that octopuses can differentiate between individual humans (for example, it’s mentioned that at one lab, one of the octopuses had a habit of squirting jets of water at one particular researcher). If you didn’t already know this, take a moment to let it sink in how surprising that is: octopuses, which 1.) are mostly nonsocial animals, 2.) have a completely different nervous-system structure that evolved on a completely different branch of the tree of life, and 3.) have no evolutionary history of interaction with humans, can recognize individual humans, and differentiate them from other humans. I’m not sure, but I bet humans have a pretty hard time differentiating between individual octopuses.
I feel as though a fact this surprising[1] ought to produce a pretty strong update to my world-model. I’m not exactly sure what parts of my model need to update, but here are one or two possibilities (I don’t necessarily think all of these are correct):
1. Perhaps the ability to recognize individuals isn’t as tied to being a social animal as I had thought
2. Perhaps humans are easier to tell apart than I thought (i.e. humans have more distinguishing features, or these distinguishing features are larger/more visually noticeable, etc., than I thought)
3. Perhaps the ability to distinguish individual humans doesn’t require a specific psychological module, as I had thought, but rather falls out of a more general ability to distinguish objects from each other
4. Perhaps I’m overimagining how fine-grained the octopus’s ability to distinguish humans is. I.e. maybe that person was the only one in the lab with a particular hair color, and they can’t distinguish the rest of the people (though note, another example given in the book was that one octopus liked to squirt **new people**, people it hadn’t seen regularly in the lab before. This wouldn’t mesh very well with the “octopuses can only make coarse-grained distinctions between people” hypothesis)
Those are the only ones I can come up with right now; I’d welcome more thoughts on this in the comments. At the moment, I’m leaning most strongly towards 2, plus the thought that 3 is partially right; namely, perhaps there’s a special module for this in **humans**, but for octopuses it **does** fall out of a general ability to distinguish objects from each other, and the reason that that ability is enough is because different humans have more/more obvious distinguishing characteristics than I had thought.
[1] This footnote serves to flag the Mind Projection Fallacy inherent in calling something “surprising,” rather than “surprising-to-my-model.”
This comment is great both for the neat facts about Octopuses, and for the awareness of “man, I should sure make an update here”, and then actually doing it. :)
I’m currently reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. One thing I’ve learned from the book that surprised me a lot is that octopuses can differentiate between individual humans (for example, it’s mentioned that at one lab, one of the octopuses had a habit of squirting jets of water at one particular researcher). If you didn’t already know this, take a moment to let it sink in how surprising that is: octopuses, which 1.) are mostly nonsocial animals, 2.) have a completely different nervous-system structure that evolved on a completely different branch of the tree of life, and 3.) have no evolutionary history of interaction with humans, can recognize individual humans, and differentiate them from other humans. I’m not sure, but I bet humans have a pretty hard time differentiating between individual octopuses.
I feel as though a fact this surprising[1] ought to produce a pretty strong update to my world-model. I’m not exactly sure what parts of my model need to update, but here are one or two possibilities (I don’t necessarily think all of these are correct):
1. Perhaps the ability to recognize individuals isn’t as tied to being a social animal as I had thought
2. Perhaps humans are easier to tell apart than I thought (i.e. humans have more distinguishing features, or these distinguishing features are larger/more visually noticeable, etc., than I thought)
3. Perhaps the ability to distinguish individual humans doesn’t require a specific psychological module, as I had thought, but rather falls out of a more general ability to distinguish objects from each other
4. Perhaps I’m overimagining how fine-grained the octopus’s ability to distinguish humans is. I.e. maybe that person was the only one in the lab with a particular hair color, and they can’t distinguish the rest of the people (though note, another example given in the book was that one octopus liked to squirt **new people**, people it hadn’t seen regularly in the lab before. This wouldn’t mesh very well with the “octopuses can only make coarse-grained distinctions between people” hypothesis)
Those are the only ones I can come up with right now; I’d welcome more thoughts on this in the comments. At the moment, I’m leaning most strongly towards 2, plus the thought that 3 is partially right; namely, perhaps there’s a special module for this in **humans**, but for octopuses it **does** fall out of a general ability to distinguish objects from each other, and the reason that that ability is enough is because different humans have more/more obvious distinguishing characteristics than I had thought.
[1] This footnote serves to flag the Mind Projection Fallacy inherent in calling something “surprising,” rather than “surprising-to-my-model.”
This comment is great both for the neat facts about Octopuses, and for the awareness of “man, I should sure make an update here”, and then actually doing it. :)