Smart Skin
I recently finished Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith, a book about the emergence of intelligence in cephalopods. Smith describes a branch in the history of evolution in which higher intelligence emerged. On one side, it emerged on the land (that’s us) and on the other, it emerged in the water (that’s cephalopods). It exhibits itself very differently in each, and this seems to be very closely related to both the nature of the environment and the nature of the animal itself and how it physically and socially evolved.
I cannot recommend this book enough, but one of the things I found most striking was the difference between our intelligence and theirs. Cephalopods, like cuttlefish, squids, and octopus, are about as intelligent as house pets, or lower primates, but theirs is distributed across their skin, so that most of the animal’s perception is both sensed and displayed in its tentacles.
The octopus can change the color and texture of its skin so that it blends in with its environment. As a creature that has evolved without a shell, this is an essential part of staying alive for its very short lifespan, which for the common octopus is only about one year. The octopus also mimics surrounding sea features with its posture, such as by hanging off rocky outcroppings to simulate corals or by arranging itself into a lump to mimic rocks. It uses tools like seashells and ocean floor debris as shields and exploratory devices, and it drills into unopened shellfish to eat.
In the 2020 documentary film My Octopus Teacher, photographer Craig Foster meets and befriends a female octopus off the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. His videography is gorgeous, and he captures life in the kelp forest where the octopus lives both though excellent storytelling and very beautiful cinematography. His friendship with the octopus he meets down there is both playful and loving.
These sources will get you to think hard about what intelligence means, and how much of it is dependent on the environment in which it evolved. I think cephalopods are the closest thing to alien intelligence that we can fathom on this planet, and they seem to be both remarkably similar and wildly different from us. Their minds are put to use camouflaging themselves, sneakily exploring and hiding from predators. They are solitary creatures, so they figure everything out as they go. They live for only one year, and the females final act in her short life is to give birth, sacrificing her own body to protect her offspring.
By contrast, we are social creatures, we have offspring in the first third of our lives, requiring many years of rearing before we are independent beings, our life span can be up to 100x longer than that of a common octopus, and much of our collective species intelligence is spent on anything but camouflaging and hiding. Perhaps most notably, our intelligence is far more concentrated on the inside of our bodies, specifically in our brains, (and in our hearts, depending on who you ask).
This is a source of wonder for me. What does that mean about intelligence itself, and what are the factors that might lead to its development, evolutionarily? In what other forms might it manifest? If intelligence were to develop on other planets, what would that mean in terms of what it looks like? If our intelligence is used to create tools and systems for generating and sharing resources, and an octopuses intelligence is used to hide and sneak, in another ecosystem, if intelligence were to develop, to what end might it be put to use? What about artificial intelligence? AI is developed outside of the physical environment entirely, and outside of a fleshy body. What does this mean about the way it thinks, and what social or structural parameters it responds to? It seems natural that the structure of the being itself and the environment it lives in relates to the flavor of its intelligence, and might tell us something about 'who it is’ or who it will become, right?
