Oceanic alien minds
Inspired by Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds
What if I told you there’s not just one, but at least 2 non-mammalian cephalopod intelligences in the ocean, as distant and differentiated as birds and humans are.
That they have amazing abilities, complex behaviors, and materially different ways of organizing their brains and bodies?
Such as:
That they have the ability to change colors and shapes and patterns at will, and seem to be maximally metamorphic?
That octopuses can squeeze through pretty much any hole that’s greater than or equal to the size of their eyeball(!)
That they routinely mimick the colors, morphology, and swimming speed and movement patterns of other aquatic animals such as flounders, sea snakes, and parrotfish.
That cephalopods are the fastest marine invertebrates, and they can out-accelerate most fish.
That Japanese squids can glide for up to 50m in the air above the ocean(!) by shooting a jet of water while in the air and deploying their airfoil-like bodies appropriately:
Where do cephelopods hail from?
Our deep evolutionary past. Waaaaayyyy back.
So basically it’s unicellular life for a billion years, then animals start coming out in the Ediacaran (ee-dee-ack-aran) period 700Mya. Some think this was a fairly Edenic age with no predation - only soft, plant-like animals like Dickinsonia gently grazing on mats of algae and other single-celled life. One mark against this cheerful thought - jellyfish had stings before the Cambrian explosion, and stings are either offensive or defensive, so this is likely a mistaken impression overall. But it was certainly more Edenic and less red-in-tooth-and-claw than pretty much all animal-life since that time. 550Mya, the Cambrian explosion happened - life diversified in a baffling profusion of strange creatures. Animals went from feeding on microbial mats to feeding on the dead, and then began hunting the living. Predation and competition are seen even in the earliest Cambrian fossils, with eyes, claws, shells, and arms race dynamics.
One particular thing to note - eyes coming into being argues for a “Cambrian information explosion” too. An influx of sensory information creates a need for complex internal processing and calculation - “is the anomalocarid more likely to intercept me if I flee to that hole, or that other one?”
Birth of the cephalopod
Here we see the birth of the cephalopods. Originally limpet-like mollusks, they began filling shells with gas bubbles to create a buoyancy device, allowing them to turn into a fearsome airborne predator relative to all the other seafloor-dwelling animals.
“Many forms appeared, with straight shells and coiled, and the largest reached sizes of eighteen feet or more. Beginning as diminutive limpets, cephalopods had become the most fearsome predators in the sea.”
Probably around 300-350Mya, some of those cephalopods gave up their shells. The shells were abandoned, reduced, or internalized, allowing greater freedom of movement, at the cost of greatly increased vulnerability. The nautilus is the only known present-day survivor of the older “shelled” cephalopod period.
“To completely forgo both skeleton and shell is an unusual evolutionary move for a creature of this size and complexity. An octopus has almost no hard parts at all—its eyes and beak are the largest—and as a result it can squeeze through a hole about the size of its eyeball and transform its body shape almost indefinitely. The evolution of cephalopods yielded, in the octopus, a body of pure possibility.”
Remember eyes representing an information explosion? The cephalopods were not idle on this front - they represent an entirely parallel-to-vertebrates example of larger brains and intelligence evolving.
And those brains are truly different
In fact, their brains are SO different from ours, we can’t even map them neurologically. More than 2/3 of an octopus’ neurons are in their body and arms, not in their brain!
“When comparing cephalopods with mammals, the difficulties are acute. Octopuses and other cephalopods have exceptionally good eyes, and these are eyes built on the same general design as ours. Two experiments in the evolution of large nervous systems landed on similar ways of seeing. But the nervous systems beneath those eyes are organized very differently. When biologists look at a bird, a mammal, even a fish, they are able to map many parts of one animal’s brain onto another’s. Vertebrate brains all have a common architecture. When vertebrate brains are compared to octopus brains, all bets—or rather, all mappings—are off. There is no part-by-part correspondence between the parts of their brains and ours. Indeed, octopuses have not even collected the majority of their neurons inside their brains; most of the neurons are found in their arms. Given all this, the way to work out how smart octopuses are is to look at what they can do.”
And what are those behaviors that indicate intelligence?
Octopuses in many labs have been known to deliberately shatter or short out lights, by directing siphons of water directly at lightbulbs, electrical enclosures, or wiring. There’s several examples of labs foregoing studying octopuses altogether, because the costs of maintenance and repair were too high!
Octopuses have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to recognize individuals, with behaviors such as squirting water at anybody new to the lab, and with particular affections and grudges for individual people, even in cases where everyone wears identical uniforms.
Often, octopuses are less than cooperative or quick on the uptake when being studied, and this has made it seem as though they aren’t very intelligent on some tasks. The author’s hypothesis is that they have distinct personalities and abilities, and some are just bored - a notable example was a study trying to get octopuses to pull a lever to receive a sardine. 2/3 of the octopuses in the study happily and repeatedly pulled the lever to get sardines. The third octopus, the most disruptive one, rarely pulled it, and instead preferred exploring, trying to pull external fixtures like lights and external tank apparatus into its enclosure, and when redirected to the lever, pulled it with maximum strength, breaking the apparatus entirely.
Octopuses mimick the colors, morphology, and swimming speed and movement patterns of other aquatic animals such as flounders, sea snakes, and parrotfish. An example video is here.
“One of these incidents has stayed in her mind for over a decade. Octopuses love to eat crabs, but in the lab they are often fed on thawed-out frozen shrimp or squid. It takes octopuses a while to get used to these second-rate foods, but eventually they do. One day Boal was walking down a row of tanks, feeding each octopus a piece of thawed squid as she passed. On reaching the end of the row, she walked back the way she’d come. The octopus in the first tank, though, seemed to be waiting for her. It had not eaten its squid, but instead was holding it conspicuously. As Boal stood there, the octopus made its way slowly across the tank toward the outflow pipe, watching her all the way. When it reached the outflow pipe, still watching her, it dumped the scrap of squid down the drain.”
Not just this, octopuses *use tools.* There are multiple instances of octopuses using found objects like halved coconut shells, large sealife shells, and tires to create a traveling “safehouse:”
One last mind-bender, seemingly alone among intelligent creatures, cephalopods are essentially non-social. In nearly every other intelligent creature, social dynamics have both driven-and-benefited-from enhanced cognition. Not cephalopods.
“The octopus, most of all, would follow a path of lone idiosyncratic complexity.”
Octopuses don’t hang out and interact with other octopuses, largely. Mating isn’t complex or very social. Males try to mate with every female. Female octopodes take sperm packets from multiple males, then select which they want to fertilize their eggs after the fact, with many broods having multiple paternity. All in all, it seems strictly superior to human mating logistics, save for the fact that some female octopuses eat their mates if they’re substantially bigger. And even that might be forgiven - it’s for the children, after all! Won’t anyone think of the children?? And in actual fact, most female octopuses die soon after giving birth, and are the first meal for those children.
So whence all the complexity?
It’s likely from hunting, being hunted, and a diverse diet. Octopuses that have never seen a clam “will try all sorts of methods, drilling the shell and chipping the edges with its beak, manipulating it in every way possible … and then eventually it learns that its sheer strength is sufficient: if it tries hard enough, it can simply pull the shell apart.”
They begin hunting soon after they are paralarvae, and learn by doing. Their literal lives depend on figuring out hunting successfully, de novo, in the ruthlessly competitive oceanic environment, from the time they’re barely bigger than a coffee bean:
And their minds are strange and complex. Not only non-mappable to vertebrate brains, they have a “ladder” neurology with ganglia located throughout the body linked by long nerves. Arms can taste, explore, bend, and grasp independently, but it’s a dual control model - with 2/3 of their neurons in their and arms rather than brain, the arms literally have independent lives, heuristics, and behaviors of their own, although they accept overall guidance from the brain.
“It took a long while for the octopuses to learn to do this, but in the end, nearly all of the octopuses that were tested succeeded. The eyes can guide the arms. At the same time, the paper also noted that when octopuses are doing well with this task, the arm that’s finding the food appears to do its own local exploration as it goes, crawling and feeling around. So it seems that two forms of control are working in tandem: there is central control of the arm’s overall path, via the eyes, combined with a fine-tuning of the search by the arm itself.”
Another difference - much reduced cross-hemispheric “talk.” Pigeons and many other species don’t cross hemispheres in learning, and octopuses only do so with difficulty. This is related to why pigeons and other birds bob and weave their heads when perceiving something.1
Godfrey-Smith spends a good amount of time in the book trying to poke at the connections between perceptual mechanisms and consciousness, I think largely due to innate curiosity about the topic, but also to try to make a best guess at whether octopuses have self-reflective consciousness.
In many animals, including in humans, there are two “streams” of visual information, and it’s likely that only one is conscious:
“[Scientists Milner and Goodale] argue that there are two “streams” by which visual information moves through the brain. The ventral stream, which takes a lower path through the brain, is concerned with categorization, recognition, and description of objects. The dorsal stream, which runs above it, closer to the top of the head, is concerned with real-time navigation through space (avoiding obstacles as you walk, getting the letter through the slot). Milner and Goodale argue that our subjective experience of vision, the feel of the visual world, comes only from the ventral stream. The dorsal stream does its work unconsciously, both in DF and in ourselves.”
DF mentioned here is a woman with carbon-monoxide induced brain damage, who “feels” blind but can nevertheless navigate obstacles, post letters through mailbox slots, and so on, by using the dorsal stream of vision information.
The upshot here is that subjective experience and conscious apprehension of visual information is driven by an internal model built from both streams of vision.
In the 1960’s, David Ingle surgically rewired frog nervous systems, producing frogs that snap at prey to the left when it’s on the right, and vice versa. “But this rewiring of part of the visual system did not affect all of the frog’s visual behavior. The frogs behaved normally when they were using vision to get around a barrier.”
What did these frogs “see?” What did they experience, subjectively, as qualia? There’s no sensible answer to this.
“The question only makes sense if you believe that the brain has a single visual representation of the outside world that governs all of an animal’s behavior. Ingle’s experiments reveal that this cannot possibly be true.”
“The senses can do their basic work, and actions can be produced, with all this happening “in silence” as far as the organism’s experience is concerned. Then, at some stage in evolution, extra capacities appear that do give rise to subjective experience: the sensory streams are brought together, an “internal model” of the world arises, and there’s a recognition of time and self.”
Do cephalopods have subjective experience? Is there an integrated model driven by their sensorium?
We should hope so, because they’re one of the most “resplendently visual” species on earth. You think peacocks are impressive? They’ve got nothing!
From bioluminescence, to mentally controlled chromataphores changing color, to mentally controlled papillae changing texture and appearance at will, cephalopods are the visual showboats nonpareil of the animal world.
Let’s consider cuttlefish, who are the most visually stunning.
“Some cuttlefish have very large brains—perhaps even larger, as a fraction of the body, than octopuses. That is quite a mysterious fact at the moment, and less is known about what cuttlefish can do.”
Cuttlefish skin is basically a 10 megapixel screen
Cuttlefish (and some octopuses and squids) are walking around with the equivalent of a 10 megapixel screen on their bodies.
I’m going to quote at length here, because “mentally controlled chromataphores” has been at the top of my “multiple gene” gengineering wish list for decades, so I want a linkable record of the details:
“The skin of a cephalopod is a layered screen controlled directly by the brain. Neurons reach from the brain through the body into the skin, where they control muscles. The muscles, in turn, control millions of pixel-like sacs of color. A cuttlefish senses or decides something, and its color changes in an instant.
Here is how it works. The skin has an outer layer, a dermis, that acts as a covering. The next layer down contains the chromatophores, the most important of the color-control devices. A single chromatophore unit contains several different kinds of cells. One cell holds a sac of a colored chemical. Around it are muscle cells, one or two dozen of them, which pull the sac into different shapes. ”
“Those muscles are controlled by the brain. They stretch the sac to make its color visible, or relax it for the opposite effect.
Each chromatophore contains just one color. Different cephalopod species use different colors, and usually the animal has three kinds. In a giant cuttlefish, the chromatophores are red, yellow, and black/brown. Each is much less than a millimeter in diameter.
This device explains how cephalopods produce some of their colors, but not all. A giant cuttlefish can make red or yellow by activating chromatophores of one color alone, and it might make orange with a combination of the two.”
“But this mechanism has no means to produce many other colors a cuttlefish might display. There’s no way to produce blue, green, violet, or silver-white. Those colors are produced by mechanisms in the next layers of skin. Here we find several kinds of reflecting cells. These cells do not display fixed pigments, as chromatophores do, but reflect back incoming light. This reflecting need not be a simple mirroring. In iridophores, light is bounced and filtered through tiny stacks of plates. These plates separate and direct the light’s different wavelengths, shining back colors that can be different from those that came in.”
“The results include the greens and blues that chromatophores cannot produce. These cells are not attached directly to the brain, but it seems that some of them are controlled, more slowly, by other chemical signals. Just below the iridophores, the leucophores are another kind of reflecting cell; they do not manipulate the light but reflect it straight back. As a result, they often appear white, though they can reflect whatever color is around. As the chromatophores sit in a higher layer than the reflecting cells, all the reflecting cells have their effects modulated by what the chromatophores are doing.”
“When chromatophores expand, this affects the light that makes it down to the reflecting cells, and hence what is shone back.
Imagine looking at a cuttlefish’s skin from its side, in a cross-section. We would see a top layer, then a layer with millions of tiny colored sacs, each being pulled constantly into shapes that expose or hide the pigments inside. This will be happening at a great rate, through the activity of many muscles. Some light would pass through this layer and reach another layer, where it would be reflected and filtered between stacks of mirrors.”
“Those cells might be changing their shape, more slowly, as chemicals reach them from elsewhere. Further down, a layer of simpler reflecting cells mirror back whatever light reaches them.
“Suppose a giant cuttlefish has about ten million chromatophores. Then, very roughly, we can think of that layer of the animal’s skin as a ten-megapixel screen. ”
The author relates a lot of fun stories about particularly unique cuttlefish he’s known, who would show more intense colors (one he called Matisse would do a sudden “maximal intensity yellow” sunburst that would slowly fade), more interesting patterns (he relates one putting on the equivalent of a visual symphony, with repeating chords, patterns and motifs, counterpoint, and more), or even one trying to create nightmarish patterns and colors in a dominance display designed to drive him away:
“On these chases he produced the most murderous-looking displays I have ever seen: burning orange colors, arms like horns and sickles, and skin-folds resembling bent iron armor. Sometimes his inner arms were held high, contorted. At one point he held nearly all his arms aloft and twisted together, with just one set of arms below and his face between. I thought: he looks like the jaws of hell. It was as if he in his molluscan way had a real sense of what is frightening for a human, and was trying to produce a vision of damnation, something intended to strike at our hearts.”
Given all these unique and resplendently visual capabilities, perhaps the single most mind blowing fact about cephalopods is that they’re technically colorblind.
Cephalopods have only a single color receptor, and so are technically color blind.
So you look at that, and you see the impossible displays they put on, and you see that they can fully camouflage themselves in both colors and textures, including color differences they would have to perceive to be able to match, and you genuinely ask - “HUH?”
Oh, but it gets weirder and more fun than that.
Obviously they couldn’t *really* be color blind - they match a very wide array of colors flawlessly when camouflaging. And indeed, it’s thought that they literally see via their skin.
“[Ramirez and Oakley] showed first that photoreceptor genes are active in the skin of a particular octopus species (Octopus bimaculoides). Crucially, it also showed that the skin of this octopus is sensitive to light and can change the shape of the chromatophores, even when the skin is detached from the body. Octopus skin itself can both sense light and also produce a response that affects the skin’s color. Back in chapter 3 I discussed the way that an octopus’s nervous system is spread throughout much of its body. The image I tried to develop in that chapter was one of a body that is its own controller, to some extent, rather than a body steered around by the brain. Now we learn that an octopus can see with its skin.”
“What could it be like to see with your skin? There could be no focusing of an image. Only general changes and washes of light could be detected. We don’t yet know whether the skin’s sensing is communicated to the brain, or whether the information remains local. Both possibilities stretch the imagination.”
And this could solve the “only a single photoreceptor” problem, because they can modulate light sensing via their chromatophores and iridophores and leucophores, essentially by expanding and contracting different colors and perceiving matches.
“Suppose some light-sensitive cells sit below a layer of many chromatophores. As chromatophores of different colors expanded and contracted, the light passing through them would be affected in different ways. If the animal kept track of which chromatophores were expanded, as well as how much light was reaching its sensors, it could know something about the color of incoming light.”
“As long as some light-sensitive structures lie below the colored chromatophores, when the animal performs its chromatophore changes there will inevitably be effects on the light-sensitive structures below, and these effects will correlate with the color of incoming light. The information is available. It would not seem to be a difficult evolutionary transition for the animal to put this information to use.”
One last fun fact - cuttlefish and octopus (and maybe squid, although the book is largely silent about them) are both likely intelligent. But they split ~270Mya, and this is nearly the same degree of separation as separates us and birds (another intelligent species, pace parrots and corvids).
There’s a good chance there’s nobody on the other end of those riots of color
Is there any realistic sign that all this color and fury and signaling means anything or is processed as actual information? NO!
When male cuttlefish display and compete for mates, it’s essentially decided by size - the males stretch out as long as they can and put on a furious display to each other, but being bigger will predict the “winner” ~90% of the time.
Similarly, female cuttlefish ARE selective in choosing who to mate with - but it corresponds neither to size nor visual or arm signaling displays,2 as near as we can tell. The best guess is that they choose based on olfactory cues.
There is some sign of communication - when female squids are approached sexually, many will display a simple white line - a simple “no thanks” or “buzz off,” essentially a single bit of information and communication.
All these chromatophores! Bioluminescence! Papillae that let you morph your body shape and texture into unimaginable shapes! Ten megapixel screens!! All pointless??
That is the best guess, yes.
All those furious displays are pure “output,” and aren’t really used for input, as near as we can tell. Maybe they’re all actually way smarter than us, and it’s being used and acted upon in some four dimensional chess way…but I sure wouldn’t bet on it.
Because the other mind blower is that most cephalopods only live 1-2 years.
They’re butterflies, brief flashes of light and color in the dark and depths of the ocean, and then gone. They’re haikus, not sonnets. They aren’t long-lived enough to be using a lot of information and doing complex things secretly.
When you first start learning about cephalopods, you run into all these strange contradictions. They’re intelligent, but basically solitary, unlike every other intelligent species. They’re the visual sumptuaries of the world, with impossible color and texture matching abilities, as well as routinely incredible displays, but are supposedly colorblind. Finally - seemingly alone among intelligent and tool using species, they’re extremely short-lived rather than long-lived.
Why would they have these evolutionarily expensive traits and abilities at all? Do you know how hard it is to evolve a 10 megapixel skin that you can control like a full color video screen?? And it’s barely even used for mating!
Truly, an alien mind and experience and way of interacting with the world.
True oceanic minds
So I sort of teased a bit with the title, because the alien minds here are merely literally (and almost “littorally!”) oceanic, rather than the more exciting and interesting metaphorical sense.
But I think the true takeaway here is: cephalopods - what a platform!
A truly different sensorium, neural architecture, and physical being, with a built-in high bandwidth communication platform.
If you do the math, a 10 megapixel screen is basically gigabit communication capacity - roughly 1 gb / s.3
They’re no slouches on the receiving end either - look back up at those camouflage videos. To camouflage like that requires around 3-20 mb / s of input and processing.4
Do you know how much human conscious experience processes? Under 10 b/s.5
Unconscious information processing is difficult to measure and quantify, but we’re probably between 10-100mb/s.
As one example, we can lower and upper bound my “that was the Sherwood team before their uniform change, so this must have been in March last year” in 16ms example as demonstrating between 1 - 6 mb/s unconscious processing.6 As another example, top Starcraft players can perform 500-600 APM or “actions per minute.” That shakes out to the standard conscious 10 b /s if each one represents a binary bit-wise decision - but they don’t! Each action was selected from a range of actions. And the overall set of potential actions are much larger, and deciding which to take in which order is itself a formidable optimization problem that involves considerable unconscious number crunching (and effortfully built unconscious schemas around that optimization). Just specifying the map location for an action is in the thousands, and it’s a combinatorial explosion from there, with millions of potential actions available at any given time. Charting an optimal course through that combinatorial forest is what MAKES a top player elite. But if you have millions of actions you’re evaluating overall, we’re back to megabytes per second of evaluation, and it’s pretty easy for that to turn into the 10 - 100 mb /s range given they’re not all binary decisions. I’m going to handwave the ceiling here because we’re getting kind of long for this tangent, but I think we can agree with a little more argument that it probably caps out in the hundreds.7
This is a long way of saying, we know cephalopods are roughly within 0 - 1 OOMs of our own maximum information input and processing capabilities, when they have ~200x fewer neurons overall!
And as for output capabilities? Ha! “Dominating” doesn’t begin to describe it! By voice, humans average 10-20 b/s and top out at 30-50 b/s, in special circumstances. If you look at specifically crafted information-dense things like Morse code, typing, or sign language, you might hit 100-300 b/s with peak effort for short periods of time. Compare that to the effortless cuttlefish thousandfold 0.4 -1.6 gb / s!
Imagine cuttlefish and octopus were as long lived as whales, dolphins, or humans. Imagine they became social…or *eusocial*.
With those two simple changes, you would probably set off an arms race in intelligence and brain size. The similar arms race in hominids 3x-d brain volumes from less social macaques to more social chimps, then 10x-d from chimps to early hominins, and finally 1.5x-d to “most social” modern H sap. Lifespans were going up at each step there too. That is a total 30-50x change moving from less social and long lived to fully social and long lived.
If we 50x-d giant cuttlefish and octopus, they’d be roughly H Habilis level, within 3-4x of us, with a profoundly different neural architecture and massively higher information output, input, and processing capabilities.
The strange clusters and hives of constantly color and texture changing, inscrutable yet highly coordinated minds truly would be oceanic alien minds.
Imagine the equivalent of an ant colony, but made of 50x uplifted cuttlefish or octopus! Honestly, it would probably be an ecological catastrophe unless whales and dolphins were similarly uplifted and served as a predation source / control - you think WE overfish now, imagine hives of 50x intelligent cephalopods with “average American” consumption and lifestyles, right down to the 7-9 hours of total screentime per day!
Or we could skip the crawlingly slow “evolution” timeline altogether and upload artificial or human minds into that platform, which I would personally love to experience for a few months, along with being a mantis shrimp, as famously argued better than I can by The Oatmeal.
What else would you get from Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds itself?
A lot of fun deep dives into information processing studies and speculations on human consciousness
A bunch of amazing pictures and stories about his own diving experiences, studying and interacting with cuttlefish and octopuses over many years
A number of fun “lab octopus” hijinks and anecdotes
A very careful and nuanced take on the verifiable demonstrations and limits of octopus intelligence and capabilities
The story of the Hawaiian creation myth, which maintains the octopus is a lone alien mind left over from the pre-creation era
“In birds like pigeons, each retina has two different “fields,” the yellow field and the red field. The red field sees a small area in front of the bird where there is binocular vision, and the yellow field sees a larger area that the other eye cannot access. Pigeons not only failed to transfer information between eyes; they also did quite badly at transfer between different regions of the same eye. This might explain some distinctive bird behaviors. Marian Dawkins did a simple experiment showing a novel object (a red toy hammer) to hens, who were allowed to approach and inspect it. She found that hens approached such an object in a weaving way that seemed designed to give the different parts of each eye access to it. That, apparently, is the way the whole brain gets access to the object. The weaving gaze of a bird is a technique designed to slosh the incoming information around.”
“Another aggressive gesture is to hold the two “first” arms up like horns. Some cuttlefish make these horns elegantly wavy. Others shape their arms into fiddleheads, hooks, or clubs. In the most elaborate cases, cuttlefish will arrange layers of arms at three or four different levels. The first arms will be held high and straight; the second arms will be horn-like at a lower level, perhaps with curled ends, with the third pair below, and finally the fourth arms, flattened and made as massive as possible. There are some fish whom, despite their harmlessness, giant cuttlefish seem to positively despise, and their approach is generally greeted with arms raised into horns and hooks.”
10 megapixel screen Fermi math. Assume a 10 megapixel screen. Each pixel can transmit 4-8 bits of color (16-256 distinct colors). Each pixel can cycle or change color 10-20 times a second. 4-8 * 10M * 10-20 = 400mb - 1.6 gb / s. Let’s center it at 1 gb /s.
Camouflaging Fermi math. We’ll assume a 5-10 megapixel skin, and that they fully match color and texture in 2-3 seconds. They have pretty good color match to the resolution we can see in the gifs with our own eyes, but our eyes kinda suck and the gifs are low res, it’s almost certainly not full 8 bit color, they’re only doing it to a certain fidelity. Let’s call it 2-4 bits, ie 4-16 colors, for 10-40mb total.
The texture match is actually surprisingly low information - their papillae can assume a number of shapes and sizes, but this too is at a certain resolution, and even if you give them heights between 1-10mm per papillae, they only have something like 1-10k papillae for a medium octopus (about 10 per square inch, the absolutely biggest octopus might reach up to 30-50k papillae). Lets call it 10k given the giant ones. If you only have 10k and 10 height settings, you’re basically capped at 100k bits, it’s totally dominated by the colors. Even if you gave it a “breadth” or volume dimension, that can only take it to ~1mb, out of 10-40mb on the color side.
So if you process 10-40mb over a camouflaging transformation, and it takes 2-3 seconds, you’re at 3-20 mb/s. Call it 12mb/s average.
10 b/s average from Zheng and Meister, The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? (2024)
What I found most interesting - “even if a person soaks up information at the perceptual limit of a Speed Card champion (18 b/s), does this 24 hours a day without sleeping, and lives for 100 years, they will have acquired approximately <=4 GB of data.”
As an aside, the fact that the entirety of a human lifetime’s worth of “conscious perceptual moments” can fit into a handful of gb is yet another strong argument that we live in a simulation, IMO.
Sherwood team Fermi math. As a lower bound # 1 - the Shannon information theory sense tells us log2(1/prob) is the number of bits. The vast majority of everybody will not recognize or get any viable bits from a volleyball picture flashed for only 16ms. There’s 15-30k pro volleyball players in the world, let’s call it 30k, and let’s assume 2/3 of them could do that. That’s 20k / 8B people, or 1/400k, which plugged into the Shannon equation gives us ~18.6 bits.
That seems low, so let’s do lower bound #2: the amount of bits to specify whether the volleyball is in or out of the frame, to recognize the Sherwood team, to recognize their uniforms, to place the change of their uniforms in time, and to infer the timing of this particular picture from that and other cues, and then place them all in the appropriate relation to each other is probably on the order of (1b, 6b, 2b, 4b, 10b) ~23b. Man, still pretty close, and still pretty low.
As an upper bound, the sentence “that was the Sherwood team before their uniform change, so this must have been in March last year” is roughly 100 bits to encode in ASCII.
So we have 20 bits / 16ms and 100 bits / 16ms, and get our 1.2mb - 6.2mb figure.
For instance, processing 100mb in 1s with current state of the art hardware like NVIDIA A100’s would require 250-500 watts, and we know humans run at 100w, and have basically zero “spike” capability (chess grandmasters in the throes of a match only burn ~4 calories more per hour.)
N. Troubat et al, "The stress of chess players as a model to study the effects of psychological stimuli on physiological responses" (2009)
I may have a blind spot here, but do you actually name the book anywhere?
I suppose you're talking about Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith? Cool book, cool comments on it!