the wily octopus

Part of the problem is that most our associations with the octopus have to do either with food or, more commonly, with the fearful seaman's perception of the octopus (and from there the culture's metaphor of the octopus) as all-reaching, all-grabbing, all-lifting-you-screaming-off-the-boat-and-popping-you-carelessly-into-some-kind-of-horrible-beak-all-wet-and-dark-and-barnacled-with-wisps-of-seaweed-hanging-off-of-its-hard-chipped-flashing-in-the-lightning-beaky-edge-(although-to-be-fair-really-less-the-beak-than-the-reachy-arms)-and-then-descending-into-the-blackness.  In other words, the extremes of our understanding tend to run from squishy–chewy to nightmare–symbolic...

...but I am here to tell you that the octopus is smarter than a monkey Einstein.

Well, I don't really know about that, but apparently they're smarter than your dog.  There's some debate about this but it centers around the octopus's ability to learn.  A dog I gather learns by trial-and-error, punishment-and-reward, whereas an octopus can observe and analyze, can even understand what abstractly is necessary (e.g., the knob to that door must turn for the door to open) and to apply its own, nonanalogous organs to the task (e.g., you used your hand, I can use my arm).  Also, I heard that they'll play with baby toys, which is kind of cute–sad.  I forget what else.  Anyway, they're supposed to be smart.

But so examining the octopus not from the fearful-seaman's perspective (or the adventurous diner's) but rather more empathetically, from the octopus's perspective,* you wind up with something rather different—and maybe part of the reason I heart octopodes** is that empathizing or identifying with them as intelligent beings is rather a lot like identifying with a space alien as an intelligent being: most of the smart creatures we know are mammals—all, really, no?—and here's something that isn't even a vertebrate, doesn't have a skeleton, a creature whose name means headfoot and who is a mollusk, and it is smarter than your dog.  Who knows?  Maybe, just maybe—following Douglas Adams, who suggested that our reasons for assuming we're smarter than dolphins (we invented civilization and technology, dolphins just swam around) might instead be evidence of the opposite—maybe octopuses are smarter than we are.  They can certainly fit through smaller holes:

So just look at that fucking thing—which, I'm sorry, it is a space alien—then assert to yourself, even experimentally, that it is smart, that it is self-aware, that it is a conscious being...  And then, I don't know about you, but when I think about that I just get a rush of some kind of crazy emotion, man—I should probably see a psychiatrist or something.

Bye!

* Impossible.

** Or octopuses—usually octopuses, since octopodes is basically pretentious and best used for a laff—but never, never octopi.