[LINK] "How to do cephalopod philosophy"

[rfmcdonald]

Understanding Society's Daniel Little had a neat post last week on the problems of understanding the minds of others. Very Other others.

How should researchers attempt to investigate non-human intelligence? The image above raises difficult questions. The octopus is manipulating (tenticlating?) the Rubik's cube. But there are a raft of questions that are difficult to resolve on the basis of simple inductive observation. And some of those questions are as much conceptual as they are empirical. Is the octopus "attempting to solve the cube"? Does it understand the goal of the puzzle? Does it have a mental representation of a problem which it is undertaking to solve? Does it have temporally extended intentionality? How does octopus consciousness compare to human consciousness? (Here is a nice website by several biologists at Reed College on the subject of octopus cognition; link.)

An octopus-consciousness theorist might offer a few hypotheses:
1.The organism possesses a cognitive representation of its environment (including the object we refer to as "Rubik's cube").
2.The organism possesses curiosity -- a behavioral disposition to manipulate the environment and observe the effects of manipulation.
3.The organism has a cognitive framework encompassing the idea of cause and effect.
4.The organism has desires and intentions.
5.The organism has beliefs about the environment.
6.The organism is conscious of itself within the environment.
How would any of these hypotheses be evaluated?

One resource that the cephalopod behavior theorist has is the ability to observe octopi in their ordinary life environments and in laboratory conditions. These observations constitute a rich body of data about behavioral capacities and dispositions.

More, including the aforementioned photo and some video, at the blog.