With their morphing bodies, colour-changing skin, many suckered arms, and their curious, intelligent behaviour, octopuses are among the strangest and most fascinating of sea-dwellers. A paper published this year caused a recent media frenzy when it announced, among other things, that octopuses might be extraterrestrial in origin. Scientists were quick to respond in the negative – we have plenty of evidence about the evolutionary history and relatives of octopuses, all of which points to an aquatic rather than a cosmic origin. However, although octopuses are not aliens, interacting with them is, as philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it in his recent book Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” 

This strange, aquatic intelligence is what leads philosopher Dr Marta Halina in a recent paper to describe octopuses as a kind of “conscious exotica.” She is particularly interested in octopuses as useful case studies for thinking about how we can assess and understand consciousness and intelligence in systems that are very different from ourselves – from other organisms through to artificial systems. Dr Halina is a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Cambridge, and is a program director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. In this episode of BioViews, she talks about octopus intelligence and the challenges of consciousness research.

Read more about Dr Marta Halina and her research, have a read of her paper Octopuses as conscious exotica, and check out the projects at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. You can also follow her on Twitter @MartaHalina.

If you are interested in reading more about the philosophy of consciousness, head over to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article for a good overview. Check out Roger Hanlon’s site at the University of Chicago for some awesome footage of octopus camouflage and threat displays, and read more about chromatophores, the complex skin structures that octopuses use to achieve these incredible feats.

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Other Minds: The Octopus And The Evolution of Intelligent Life is well worth a read, or head over to his blog at metazoan.net. Peter Godfrey-Smith and others will be presenting at the upcoming workshop Animal Sentience: Pushing the Boundaries, which is being held at the ANU in Canberra on 17th August 2018.

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