 So Peter Godfrey Smith is a philosophy professor, but instead of spending all his time in an ivory tower, he's actually off the coast of Australia, underneath a sea, watching Octopus. He's written a book about the experience, other minds. Matt, why does he find them so fascinating? Yeah, Octopus are very fascinating because they're so smart. If you think about other intelligent species on Earth, like dolphins or great apes, those are actually pretty close to humans in the evolutionary line. However, Octopus is in humans separated 600 million years ago, right as the nervous system was starting to develop. And because of this, they have a very different intelligence than our own. And in some ways, you could think of them as being the only alien intelligence we might ever encounter. Yes, Octopus and cephalopods in general certainly remind me of aliens and not just from watching the movie Arrival. But despite our very different evolutionary paths, it's kind of amazing how many human-type traits Octopuses have. So they understand when they're in captivity, and they're capable of recognizing people. If they don't like you, they'll often send a jet of water your way. They're also capable of playing with toys, and they're very friendly. Godfrey Smith talks about when he's underwater, and Octopus will often reach his arm out just to kind of say hi. Yeah, despite all this stuff, we know very little about these creatures. In fact, we really don't even know how intelligent they are. For example, one way we normally measure intelligence in animals is through a leader experiment. We ask the animal to push the leader a certain number of times and receive some food. And this works great on rats. However, Octopus don't seem to really care. They don't like pushing the leader. They think the food is second rate, so they don't participate. Yes, this really reinforces to me how hard it would be to talk to an alien civilization. You might need more than just Amy Adams and Jeremy Rendham a couple of whiteboards. And it also exposes some of the tropes of traditional sci-fi. You look at shows like Star Trek, we meet the aliens, and they're basically like us. They look like humans except a little bit weird, but they have the same grammar, they have the same motivations, and they have the same general intelligence level. But it probably wouldn't be like that if we actually run into an alien civilization. And octopus intelligence is very different from us in other ways. For example, we have our neurons in our brains, but octopuses actually have a ton of neurons in their arms. Yeah, an octopus is fascinating for this reason. You can imagine an octopus that wants to pick something up, sends a signal to its arm, hey, I want to pick that up, but then the arm takes over and actually grasps the object. So this is very different than how humans work. You can think of humans as being an orchestra, whereas, you know, we have a brain and directs each of our parts to do what they should be doing, but an octopus is more like a jazz band. Each of the parts is independent, and they work together in concert to get things done. Yes. So this distributed system jazz band of an octopus reminded me of one of our favorite books, Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom. Now, when I think about a super intelligent AI, it seems like it might take the form of an octopus more so than a human, in that it could be semi-autonomous systems doing their own thing, rather than the centralized brain dictating everything. Absolutely. Really interesting points, Adam. Unfortunately, the book doesn't get into any of these. We mostly focus on anecdotes about the author's favorite octopus, and it's really just a love letter to cephalopods. I would love to hear more about consciousness in the ways that octopus might think. Yes, this book's really a complete hodgepodge. You have a lot of diving anecdotes from Godfrey Smith. You have a few pages on consciousness, some really interesting stuff on evolutionary aging theory, but it doesn't really have a distinct theme that sort of pulls it all together. But if you're someone that's interested in aliens, octopuses, cephalopods, philosophy, really any area of human knowledge, you'll probably find a couple pages and they have it appeal to you, so I'd absolutely encourage you to check it out. This has been Radham Tulkis. Thank you very much for watching.