{"id":187612,"date":"2021-07-26T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T11:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=187612"},"modified":"2021-06-24T06:18:09","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T05:18:09","slug":"the-soul-of-an-octopus-how-one-of-earths-most-alien-creatures-illuminates-the-wonders-of-consciousness-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/the-soul-of-an-octopus-how-one-of-earths-most-alien-creatures-illuminates-the-wonders-of-consciousness-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Soul of an Octopus: How One of Earth\u2019s Most Alien Creatures Illuminates the Wonders of Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWhile stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege\u2026 an uplink to universal consciousness.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cDespite centuries of investigation by everyone from natural historians, psychologists, and psychiatrists, to ethicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers, there is still no universal definition of emotion or consciousness,\u201d Laurel Braitman wrote in her terrific exploration of the mental lives of animals<\/a>. Virginia Woolf defined consciousness as \u201ca wave in the mind,\u201d<\/a> but even if we\u2019re able to ride the wave, we hardly know the ocean out of which it arises.<\/p>\n

During my annual visit to NPR\u2019s Science Friday<\/em> to discuss<\/a> my choices for the year\u2019s best science books<\/a>, my co-guest \u2014 science writer extraordinaire Deborah Blum<\/a> \u2014 mentioned a fascinating book that had slipped my readerly tentacles, one that addresses this abiding question of consciousness with unparalleled rigor and grace: The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) by naturalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker Sy Montgomery<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Montgomery begins with a seemingly simple premise. The octopus is a creature magnificently dissimilar to us \u2014 it can change shape and color, tastes with its skin, has its mouth in its armpit, and is capable of squeezing its entire body through a hole the size of an apple. And since we humans experience reality in profoundly different ways from one another<\/a>, based on our individual consciousnesses, then the octopus must be inhabiting an altogether different version of what we call reality.<\/p>\n

The constellation of complexities comprising this difference, Montgomery reveals over the course of this miraculously insightful and enchanting book, expands our understanding of consciousness and sheds light on the very notion of what we call a \u201csoul.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from Cephalopod Atlas<\/em><\/a>, 1909.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

More than half a billion years ago, the lineage that would lead to octopuses and the one leading to humans separated. Was it possible, I wondered, to reach another mind on the other side of that divide? Octopuses represent the great mystery of the Other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Among the pitfalls of the human condition is our tendency to see otherness as a source of dread rather than an invitation to friendly curiosity. The octopus, as the ultimate Other, has a long history of epitomizing this inclination and sparking our primal fear of the unknown. Montgomery cites one particularly emblematic depiction from Victor Hugo\u2019s novel Toilers of the Sea<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The spectre lies upon you; the tiger can only devour you; the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away\u2026 The muscles swell, the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the lymph of the monster, which clings to the victim with innumerable hideous mouths\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Setting out to \u201cdefend the octopus against centuries of character assassination,\u201d Montgomery notes that octopuses have highly individual personalities and can exhibit marked curiosity \u2014 faculties we tend to think of as singularly human. Even their motives for friendliness and unfriendliness, far from the baseless brutality of depictions like Hugo\u2019s, parallel our own:<\/p>\n

In one study, Seattle Aquarium biologist Roland Anderson exposed eight giant Pacific octopuses to two unfamiliar humans, dressed identically in blue aquarium uniforms. One person consistently fed a particular octopus, and another always touched it with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first sight of the people \u2014 looking up at them through the water, without even touching or tasting them \u2014 most of the octopuses moved toward the feeder and away from the irritator. Sometimes the octopus would aim its water-shooting funnel, the siphon near the side of the head with which an octopus jets through the sea, at the person who had touched it with the bristly stick.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Surely, a skeptic might argue that this is more instinct than \u201cconsciousness.\u201d But Montgomery goes on to outline a number of strikingly specific and context-considered behaviors indicating that octopuses are animated by complex conscious experiences \u2014 things we tend to term \u201cthoughts\u201d and \u201cfeelings\u201d in the human realm \u2014 that upend our delusions of exceptionalism. Lest we forget, we have a long history<\/a> of bolstering those delusions by putting other species down, much like petty egotists try to make themselves feel big by making other people feel small \u2014 even Jane Goodall contended with dismissal and ridicule<\/a> when she first suggested that chimpanzees have consciousness.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from Cephalopod Atlas<\/em><\/a>, 1909.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But beyond intellectual considerations of this weird and wonderful creature\u2019s inner life, Montgomery points to the physical, bodily presence with an octopus as a transcendent experience in its own right \u2014 one that pulls into question our most basic assumptions about consciousness:<\/p>\n

While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege. It\u2019s a shared sweetness, a gentle miracle, an uplink to universal consciousness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, the book\u2019s greatest reward isn\u2019t the fascinating science \u2014 although that is riveting and ablaze with rigor \u2014 but Montgomery\u2019s bewitching prose, pouring from the soul of a literary naturalist who paints the marvels of the ocean\u2019s depths like Thoreau did the marvels of the New England woods. Finding herself \u201cdrunk with strange splendors\u201d as she beholds the marine world\u2019s \u201cparade of wonders,\u201d Montgomery writes:<\/p>\n

A splendid toadfish hides beneath a rock. Once thought to live only in Cozumel, it\u2019s pancake flat, with thin, wavy, horizontal blue and white stripes, Day-Glo yellow fins, and whiskery barbels. A four-foot nurse shark sleeps beneath a coral shelf, peaceful as a prayer. A trumpet fish, yellow with dark stripes, floats with its long, tubular snout down, trying to blend in with some branching coral\u2026 A school of iridescent pink and yellow fish slide by inches from our masks, then wheel in unison like birds in the sky.<\/p>\n

I have known no natural state more like a dream than this. I feel elation cresting into ecstasy and experience bizarre sensations: my own breath resonates in my skull, faraway sounds thump in my chest, objects appear closer and larger than they really are. Like in a dream, the impossible unfolds before me, and yet I accept it unquestioningly. Beneath the water, I find myself in an altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically changed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
North Pacific Giant Octopus by photographer Mark Laita from his project Sea<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Suddenly acutely aware that the octopuses she has met and come to love on her expeditions experience this dizzying otherworldliness as their basic backdrop of existence, she considers the limited array of sensations and perceptions that we\u2019ve come to accept as the whole or reality:<\/p>\n

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

In my scuba-induced altered state, I\u2019m not in the grip of a drug: I am lucid in my immersion, voluntarily becoming part of what feels like the ocean\u2019s own dream.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Out of this perspective-shifting consideration arises Montgomery\u2019s most profound inquiry. Sitting in a Tahitian temple dedicated to the spirit of the octopus, where one of her expeditions has taken her, she wonders:<\/p>\n

What is the soul? Some say it is the self, the \u201cI\u201d that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.<\/p>\n

Others say that soul is our innermost being, the thing that gives us our senses, our intelligence, our emotions, our desires, our will, our personality, and identity. One calls soul \u201cthe indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go, that watches the world pass.\u201d Perhaps none of these definitions is true. Perhaps all of them are. But I am certain of one thing as I sit in my pew: If I have a soul \u2014 and I think I do \u2014 an octopus has a soul, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, no doubt, is what Alan Watts meant when he asserted that \u201cLife and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired UK and<\/em> The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhile stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege\u2026 an uplink to universal consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":187613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[801,1177,2575],"class_list":["post-187612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-consciousness","tag-inspirational","tag-octopus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}