Category Archives: Philosophy

General Science, Philosophy, Science And Society

How Smart Are Octopi?

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A very interesting article:

…octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind for? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn’t need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?

Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.

Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. “In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react,” points out Mather. But in the wild, “the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness.”

So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. “They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms,” he said. “It’s remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

We probably won’t find more fascinating creatures to study until/unless we find extraterrestrial life.

[Via Geek Press]

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Children Of Rousseau

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Return to a state of nature. And they’re not “noble” savages. It ain’t pretty. It’s more like Lord of the Flies.

[Monday morning update]

Everything the media accused the Tea Party of being, the Fleabaggers actually are, and yet they won’t report it.

[Update a few minutes later]

The double standard doesn’t just come from the media, but from the kleptocrats in power:

“Democratic commentator Bob Beckel recently compared the disparity between the Tea Party’s treatment by local governments and the Occupiers’ to one person getting a better deal on a car than another. Imagine an America where basic equalities and a God-given right to public self-expression are reduced to clearance-sale status, depending on the agenda and whims of the ‘bosses’ on duty at a given time.”

That example — government as used-car salesman — captures both the ethos and the performance of Beckel and his ilk. The truth is, these people get a pass because, as client groups of the Democratic Party, they’re exempt from the enforcement of the law. This may make people who aren’t so favored wonder why they should pay taxes to, or obey the commands of, a system that doesn’t follow the law itself. Well: Why should they? Where’s the legitimacy?

If they have any left, they’re rapidly losing it. Only the Constitution has legitimacy, and these creatures don’t give a damn about it.

Philosophy

The Pope’s Praise Of Agnostics

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I consider myself an agnostic, but not in this sense:

In addition to the two phenomena of religion and anti-religion, a further basic orientation is found in the growing world of agnosticism: people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God. Such people do not simply assert: “There is no God.” They suffer from his absence and yet are inwardly making their way towards him, inasmuch as they seek truth and goodness. They are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.” They ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false certainty by which these claim to know that there is no God and they invite them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it. But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others.

These people are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practised. Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible. Therefore I have consciously invited delegates of this third group to our meeting in Assisi, which does not simply bring together representatives of religious institutions. Rather it is a case of being together on a journey towards truth, a case of taking a decisive stand for human dignity and a case of common engagement for peace against every form of destructive force.

That doesn’t really describe me at all. I don’t think that I “suffer” from God’s absence, and I’m no seeking Him in any way (other than in my religious belief that it is humanity’s teleological duty to bring life and awareness to the universe). I’m functionally an atheist, in the sense that I live my life as though there is no God — I’m an agnostic only in the sense that I know that I can’t know whether or not there is a God, so I’m not an evangelist of the belief that He doesn’t exist, as people like Dawkins and Hitchens are.