What Would an Octopus Be?

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I love aliens. Like we're always assuming that they've evolved in some sort of ape-like way to have our way of thinking about the world as complicated social species. But who's to say they're not like an octopus with this distributed intelligence or a colony of insects, like the Borg or something? Sifi writers are great at coming up with these ideas. And yeah, the thing that makes humans destructive is because we are this kind of ape, which has our biological needs,. We're very tribal, we're kind of violent sometimes. I mean, it's like you say, the law of the large numbers, like eventually there will be intelligence out there.

All our unique gifts like language, math, and science do not make humans happier or more “successful” (evolutionarily speaking) than other species. Our intelligence allowed us to split the atom, but we’ve harnessed that knowledge to make machines of war. We are uniquely susceptible to bullshit; our bizarre obsession with lawns has contributed to the growing threat of climate change; we are sexually diverse like many species yet stand apart as homophobic; and discriminate among our own as if its natural, which it certainly is not. Is our intelligence more of a curse than a gift?

Shermer and Gregg discuss: • intelligence • stupidity • dolphins • artificial intelligence • language • rationality • moral systems • comparative thanatology • “causal inference” vs. “learned associations” • humans as “why specialists” • death awareness • why narwhals do not commit genocide • “prognostic myopia” • our “shortsighted farsightedness" as "an extinction-level threat to humanity” • consciousness and sophisticated consciousness: animals and humans • free will • determinism • pleasure vs. happiness vs. purposefulness.

Justin Gregg is a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project and an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University where he lectures on animal behavior and cognition. Originally from Vermont, Justin studied the echolocation abilities of wild dolphins in Japan and The Bahamas. He currently lives in rural Nova Scotia where he writes about science and contemplates the inner lives of the crows that live near his home.