A week ago I wrote here about cephalopods -- the octopus and similar creatures. I was then, and am now, motivated by some comments in Peter Godfrey-Smith's book about them, OTHER MINDS. I want to add to those thoughts today. The reason Godfrey-Smith (a professor of philosophy at CUNY) is so interested in them is that they are arguably a case where mind, consciousness, and the use of language have emerged with an evolutionary path very different from our own. Most writing on other, non-human, minds focuses on creatures with whom we share a lot of adaptive history: the other primates, for example, or even the marine mammals. But on the tree of life, the branching off that separates octopuses, squids, etc. from humans and other mammals of land or sea took place a long, long time ago. This, Godfrey-Smith says, presents is with a situation similar to that which would occur were we to encounter a form of life that had evolved on another planet. So: what do we learn by way of com...
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The cephalopods are: the squid, the cuttlefish, and the Octopus. Do they have intelligence? We normally think of our companions in intelligence as other mammals. This is a very different branch of the tree of life. Still, as a start, we might ask ourselves: do they have a language? Nothing so auditory as the human voice, or the wonderful whale songs either. The best candidate for a cephalopod language is the constant change of the color of their skin. As Peter Godfrey-Smith writes, these colors change "second by second," Blues and greens, for example, can seep back and forth, unveiling "gray and silver veins." There are at least three evolutionary purposes for the display of colors. They are used for camouflage. If camouflage fails and it is necessary to flee a predator, the colors can also be used for "deimatic displays," i.e. for patterns that may surprise or confuse the predator giving chase. A predator that pauses or loses its own bearings can...