Ask A Genius 103 – More on Octopi
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/02/28
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Rick Rosner: This book, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith, talks about sentience and consciousness, which, I guess, sentience is a not quite conscious level of ability to think and perceive — but not as high as other animals. You can divide things up like that. Then he talks about a researcher who thinks that at the very threshold of consciousness or sentience, you would perceive the world as almost nothing.
That would be perceive as white noise, which is a good, but not, great analogy because when somebody says, “White noise,” I think of looking at an old TV screen. An old TV from the 70s goes off and you only see snow, which implies a perceptual framework that is well-enough developed to perceive static or snow as static or snow, but that’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying that not only are you experiencing white noise.
Your perceptual framework is so non-existent that you can’t even perceive white noise as white noise. You perceive almost nothing. It is like a vague blur, except that it is not a vague blur within some framework that allows you to perceive something as vague. Your framework is not that big or that precise. Off tape, you talked about a system that is able to perceive a white pixel or a black pixel as a base level of perception.
That runs into the same problem as white noise. In that, when I picture a pixel, I picture a white square or a black square. And if your system is only able to perceive one of two state, those states are so blurry — it’s bootstrapped chaos. Not only are you perceiving almost nothing, but you can’t perceive anything beyond almost nothing because you don’t have the perceptual or cognitive equipment.
There’s only vagueness, but you don’t know it’s vagueness because that would imply more perception and cognition. So just lights are not even on — I mean, anyway, the book also talks about how — You mentioned how in a really low-level perceptual system, say one that has cognitive capacity of 100 bits. How 85 of those bits might be administrative and only 5 or 10 would be the picture of the world that you have, that reminded me of something that is talked about in this octopi book, which is that octopi neural layout, structure, is much less centralized than ours. Almost all of our cognition takes place in our brains.
It takes less to run our bodies. It takes less cognition to run our bodies than an octopus because we have bones, which limits the range of configurations our limbs can take because everything is locked into place — planes of motion. We’re solid and octopi almost entirely soft and mush. There’s very little that gives them a definite, Erector Set, Tinker Toy — [Laughing] I am mentioning all of these toys that nobody knows anymore — Legos kind of structure.
But you can’t evolve that because those things, as far as we know, aren’t physically possible. But eyes are physically possible, and are helpful. Every step from light sensitive spots on your skin all the way to fully developed eyes are helpful. There’s a nice path of helpfulness, and it’s physically possible to evolve those things, then it seems those things will evolve often in more than one organism.
Means of locomotion, various means of locomotion have evolved numerous times. The one thing that it is hard to know whether it evolved more than once is life itself, whether life originated on Earth more than once. It is hard to know because life originated billions of years ago, and it originated in forms that don’t leave evidence behind. Even if this junk did leave fossils, not much got left because that’s enough time for the Earth’s surface to be recycled a bunch of times.
You have to find a place that has been floating away from clefts in the tectonic plates for a long, long time. And life as we know it originated closed out opportunities for other life to arise once it took hold and started changing the Earth’s physical environment and spitting out oxygen, and proliferating all over the place. Other possible forms of life just kind of — that opportunity was lost, though we do kinda know life went from single cellular to multicellular more than once.
You have plants. You have animals. You have a few other kingdoms, which, I think, reflect a couple other times when life went from single to multicellular. If you want to go to the Drake Equation or a Drake type of thinking, the Drake Equation is this deal that combines all of the probabilities for all of the necessary ingredients for life originated someplace else and combines them into one equation.
One thing you need are planets in places where you can get enough chemical activity for life to evolve. You don’t get good chemistry in a Mercury-type orbit too close to the Sun. You don’t get it too, too far away from the Sun. But in the last 5, 10, years, we’ve seen that part of the Drake Equation. Whatever he originally calculated has been blown away because it looks like the number of planets in the universe might be equal to the number of stars.
There seems to be at least one planet per star, which means that there’s close to that number of planets, in terms of the exponent you hang on it, in temperate regions — in that zone that permits life. The Earth orbit, perhaps Mars orbit, that distance from a star. So you can have things are warm enough for chemical activity, but not too warm. So that part of the Drake Equation is richly satisfying. Looking at how often the various steps in life have originated on Earth, it makes a good argument that if life originates at all. It has a fair chance of getting fairly fancy because of the treasures of existence. That the advantages to be had by taking the next steps in evolution, even though those steps aren’t designed, are permitted because they have given an advantage. There’s advantage in perception, in mobility.
The main bottleneck to being fairly convinced of life elsewhere is that first step of life originating at all. Once you get life, and looking at the history of life on Earth, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that life will evolve to take advantage of increased complexity over, and over, again throughout the universe.
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