With Heraclitus we say of life: “The World Bubbles Forth”
Dance Of The Octopus - Red Norvo, xylophone
Artie Shaw, bass clarinet (1933)
Cephalopods were the smartest creatures on earth for millions of years....On the other tentacle...https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/03/26/on-the-other-tentacle/
“The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the mode of understanding in physics since Newton, namely differential equations, initial and boundary conditions, then integration which constitutes deduction, which in turn constitutes “entailment”, fails fundamentally for the evolution of life. No law in the physical sense, we will argue, entails the evolution of life. If we are correct, this spells the end of “strong reductionism”, the long held belief that a set of laws “down there” entails all that happens in the universe. More, if no law entails the evolution of life, yet the biosphere is the most complex system we know of in the universe, it has managed to come into existence without an entailing law. Then such law is not necessary for extraordinary complexity to arise and thrive. We need new ways to think about how current life organization can have come into being and persists. Those ways include coming to understand how what we will call organisms as “Kantian wholes” co-create their worlds with one another...
...Finally, and stunningly, evolution creates, without selection acting to do so, new “adjacent possible empty niches” which enable new possible directions of evolution. This is radical emergence from life to life. Further, the evolution of a new organism to live in a new “adjacent possible empty niche”, often arises due to one or a sequence of quantum events, at the molecular level, which are acausal. Thus the niche does not cause, but “enables” the radical emergence. Not only is life caught in a web of causes, it is part of a co-constituting web of enablement and radical emergence.
If correct, reductionism reaches a terminus at the watershed of life...
Two thousand five hundred years ago Heraclitus said, “The world bubbles forth”. He may not be correct for physics. But at the watershed of life, we agree: Life bubbles forth.
Stuart Kaufman
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2069.pdf
Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?
“The brainiest of the bunch {invertebrates} is the octopus, which is a soft-bodied cephalopod, or “head-footed” animal. This is an apt name, since their squishy bodies consist of a head that directly joins eight limbs, while the body (the mantle) is positioned behind the head. The cephalopods are an ancient class that arose well before there were land vertebrates around, but the group to which the octopus belongs is a fairly modern offshoot. We seem to have almost nothing in common with them, both anatomically and mentally. Yet they have been reported to open a pill bottle protected by a childproof cap. Since this requires the cap to be pushed down and twisted at the same time, it takes skill, intelligence, and persistence. Some public aquariums show off octopus intelligence by locking the animal in a glass jar that they close with a screw top. Like a true Houdini, the octopus takes less than a minute to grab the cover from within with its suckers and unscrew it so as to escape.
The octopus brain is the largest and most complex of all invertebrates, but the explanation of its extraordinary skills may lie elsewhere. These animals literally think outside the box. Each octopus has nearly two thousand suckers, every single one equipped with its own ganglion with half a million neurons. That amounts to a lot of neurons on top of a 65-million-neuron brain. In addition, it has a chain of ganglia along its arms. The brain connects with all these “mini brains,” which are also joined among themselves. Instead of a single central command, as in our species, the cephalopod nervous system is more like the Internet: there is extensive local control. A severed arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food. Similarly, a shrimp or small crab can be handed from one sucker to the next, as if on a conveyer belt, in the direction of the octopus’s mouth. When these animals change skin color in self-defense, the decision may come from central command, but perhaps the skin is involved as well, since cephalopod skin may detect light. It sounds rather unbelievable: an organism with seeing skin and eight independently thinking arms!
This realization has led to a bit of hype: that the octopus is the most intelligent organism in the ocean, a sentient being that we should stop eating. We shouldn’t overlook dolphins and orcas, though, which have vastly larger brains. Even if the octopus stands out among invertebrates, its tool use is rather limited, and its reaction to a mirror is as perplexed as that of a small songbird. It remains unclear whether an octopus is smarter than most fish, but let me hasten to add that such comparisons barely make any sense. Instead of turning the study of cognition into a contest, we should avoid putting apples next to oranges. The octopus’s senses and anatomy, including its decentralized nervous system, make it unparalleled. If superlatives of uniqueness were allowed, the octopus might be the most unique species of them all. They defy comparison with any other group, unlike our own species, which derives from a long line of land vertebrates with structurally similar body plans and brains. Octopuses have an odd life cycle. Most live only one or two years, which is unusual for an animal with their brainpower. They grow fast while trying to stay away from predators until they have a chance to mate and reproduce, after which they die. They stop eating, lose weight, and go into senescence. This is the stage about which Aristotle observed: “after giving birth … [they] become stupid, and are not aware of being tossed about in the water, but it is easy to dive and catch them by hand.”These short-lived loners have no social organization to speak of. Given their biology, they have no reason to pay attention to one another, except as rivals, mates, predators, and prey. They are certainly not friends or partners. There is no evidence that they learn from others or spread behavioral traditions, the way many vertebrates, including fish, do. The absence of social bonds and cooperation, and their cannibalistic ways, make cephalopods quite alien to us. Their main worry is predation, because apart from their own kind, they are eaten by almost everything around, from marine mammals, diving birds, sharks, and other fish to humans. When they get larger, they become formidable predators themselves, as the Seattle Aquarium accidentally found out. Worried about their giant Pacific octopus in a tank full of sharks, staff were hoping that the animal would know how to hide. But then they noticed one dogfish (a small shark) after another disappearing from the tank—and found to their astonishment that the octopus had turned the tables.
The octopus may be the only playful invertebrate. I say may since play behavior is almost impossible to define, but the octopus appears to go beyond mere manipulation and checking out of novel objects. The Canadian biologist Jennifer Mather found that given a new toy, the animal will move from exploration (“What is this?”) to repeated lively movements and tossing around (“What can I do with it?”). With their funnel, they blow jets of water at a floating plastic bottle, for example, to move it from one side of their tank to another, or to have it tossed back at them by the water flow of the filter, which makes them look as if they were bouncing a ball. Such manipulations, which serve no obvious purpose and are repeated over and over, have been taken as indications of play. Tied to the immense predation pressure under which these animals live is their ability for camouflage. Perhaps their most astonishing specialization, it provides an inexhaustible “magic well” for those who study them. The octopus changes color so rapidly that it out-chameleons the chameleon. Roger Hanlon, a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, has collected rare underwater footage of octopuses in action. All we see at first is a clump of algae on a rock, but hidden among it is a large octopus indistinguishable from its surroundings. When the approaching human diver scares the animal, it turns almost white, revealing that it represented almost half the clump of algae. It speeds away while shooting a dark cloud of ink, which is its secondary defense. The animal then lands on the sea floor and makes itself look huge by spreading all its arms and stretching the skin between them into a tent. This frightening expansion is its tertiary defense.
When this video clip is slowed down and played backward, it is easy to see how superb the original camouflage was. Both structurally and color-wise, the large octopus had made itself look exactly like an algae-covered rock. It did so by making its chromatophores (millions of neurally controlled pigment sacs in its skin) match their surroundings. But instead of exactly mimicking its background, which is impossible, it did so just well enough to fool our visual system. And it probably did more than that, since the octopus also takes other visual systems into account. Humans see no polarized or ultraviolet light and don’t have great night vision, whereas the octopus’s camouflage needs to trick all these visual capacities. In doing so, it draws on a limited set of patterns that it has in stand-by mode. Turning on one of these “blueprint” patterns allows it to blend in in a fraction of a second. The result is an optical illusion, but one realistic enough to save its life hundreds of times. Sometimes an octopus mimics an inanimate object, such as a rock or plant, while moving so slowly that one would swear it is not moving at all. It does so when it needs to cross an open space, an activity that exposes it to detection. Imitating a plant, the octopus waves some of its arms above itself, making them look like branches, while tiptoeing on three or four of its remaining arms. It takes tiny little steps in line with the water movements. If the ocean is wild, plants sway back and forth, which helps the octopus disguise its steps by swaying in the same rhythm. On a waveless day, on the other hand, nothing else moves, so the octopus needs to be extremely careful. It may take twenty minutes to cross a stretch of sea floor that it otherwise might have crossed in twenty seconds. The animal acts as if rooted to the spot, counting on the fact that no predator will take the time to notice that it is actually inching forward.
The champion of camouflage, finally, is the mimic octopus, a species found off the coast of Indonesia that impersonates other species. It acts like a flounder by adopting this fish’s body shape and color as well as its typical undulating swimming pattern close to the sea floor. The repertoire of this octopus includes adopting the likeness of a dozen local marine organisms, such as lionfish, sea snakes, and jellyfish. We don’t know exactly how octopuses achieve this astonishing range of mimicry. Some of it may be automated, but there is probably also learning involved based on observations of other creatures and adoption of their habits. As primates, we find it impossible to relate to these remarkable capacities, and we may hesitate to call them cognitive. We tend to view invertebrates as instinct machines, arriving at solutions through inborn behavior. But this position has become untenable. There are too many remarkable observations—including the deceptive tactics of cuttlefish, close relatives of the octopus.
Frans De Waal - Are Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Isaac Newton
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