The mind of an octopus has baffled many for centuries, but one man has incorporated the study of them into his philosophical views.

It all began when Peter Godfrey-Smith, an Australian academic philosopher, had a life-changing encounter when he came across a giant cuttlefish while snorkelling in Sydney.

The experience, which occurred in 2007, resulted in Godfrey-Smith “establishing an unlikely framework for his own study of philosophy, first at Harvard and then the City University of New York,” reports The Guardian.

Writer Elle Hunt set the scene from her own experience:

Inches above the seafloor of Sydney’s Cabbage Tree Bay, with the proximity made possible by several millimetres of neoprene and a scuba diving tank, I’m just about eyeball to eyeball with this creature: an Australian giant cuttlefish.

Even allowing for the magnifying effects of the mask snug across my nose, it must be about 60cm (two feet) long, and the peculiarities that abound in the cephalopod family, that includes octopuses and squid, are the more striking writ so large.

Its body – shaped around an internal surfboard-like shell, tailing off into a fistful of tentacles – has the shifting colour of velvet in light, and its W-shaped pupils lend it a stern expression. I don’t think I’m imagining some recognition on its part. The question is, of what?

The cuttlefish wasn’t afraid, but rather as curious about Hunt and Godfrey-Smith as they were about it.

Ten years later and Godfrey-Smith has released a book full of charming anecdotes of his interactions with cephalopods, particularly about “captive octopuses frustrating scientists’ attempts at observation”:

[I]n one case quite literally, when he recounts an octopus taking his collaborator by hand on a 10-minute tour to its den, “as if he were being led across the sea floor by a very small eight-legged child”…

A 1959 paper detailed an attempt at the Naples Zoological Station to teach three octopuses to pull and release a lever in exchange for food. Albert and Bertram performed in a “reasonably consistent” manner, but one named Charles tried to drag a light suspended above the water into the tank; squirted water at anyone who approached; and prematurely ended the experiment when he broke the lever.

Most aquariums that have attempted to keep octopuses have tales to tell of their great escapes – even their overnight raids of neighbouring tanks for food. Godfrey-Smith writes of animals learning to turn off lights by directing jets of water at them, short-circuiting the power supply. Elsewhere octopuses have plugged their tanks’ outflow valves, causing them to overflow…

In captivity, they have learned to navigate simple mazes, solve puzzles and open screw-top jars, while wild animals have been observed stacking rocks to protect the entrances to their dens, and hiding themselves inside coconut shell halves.

Although it is clear that octopus are highly intelligent, Godfrey-Smith has found them mighty difficult to deal with, often being unruly.

Not only do they each have personalities, but “the inconsistencies of their behaviour, combined with their apparent intelligence, presents an obvious trap of anthropomorphism.”

During his study, it was one common link and one devastating face that kept Godfrey-Smith captivated:

When philosophers ponder the mind-body problem, none poses quite such a challenge as that of the octopus’s, and the study of cephalopods gives some clues to questions about the origins of our own consciousness.

Our last common ancestor existed 600m years ago and was thought to resemble a flattened worm, perhaps only millimetres long. Yet somewhere along the line, cephalopods developed high-resolution, camera eyes – as did we, entirely independently…

One possibility is that an octopus’s brain needs to be powerful just to preside over such an unwieldy form, in the same way that a computer would need a state-of-the-art processor to perform a large volume of complex tasks.

“I mean, the body is so hard to control, with eight arms and every possible inch an elbow.” But that explanation doesn’t account for the flair, even playfulness with which they apply it.

“They behave smartly, they do all these novel, inventive things – that line of reasoning doesn’t resolve things, by any stretch,” says Godfrey-Smith. “There’s still a somewhat mysterious element there.”

And Godfrey-Smith isn’t the only one puzzled by the lives of cephalopods:

Good luck eating calamari this weekend.

[source:theguardian]