You Probably Know That Humans Can Experience Phantom Limbs, But Did You Know That The Limbs Of An Octopus

You probably know that humans can experience “phantom limbs,” but did you know that the limbs of an octopus can have a “phantom body”? If you cut off an octopus’ tentacle, it will try to feed a mouth that is no longer there. A severed octopus tentacle also curls up when it’s exposed to negative stimuli like acid. Essentially, if an octopus dies and its tentacle is cut off, the tentacle can outlive the original animal by a whole hour. 

Octopi have as many as 130 million neurons, but the vast majority are located in their limbs, not their brains. Their mind is “distributed.” That is fundamentally unlike the human mind. We have muscle memory, but our arms can’t move completely independently of our brains.

What does this mean for octopus consciousness? Well… we don’t know. There’s no way to observe or deduce via experiment what it’s like to be a particular animal. We can see how they behave, but we won’t ever see the world through their eyes. Science can study what is outside, but not what’s inside. So, animal consciousness isn’t really the domain of science. 

As is always the case, philosophers have attempted to do what scientists cannot. The philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has a really great way of explaining what’s at stake: “Octopuses let us ask which features of our minds can we expect to be universal whenever intelligence arises in the universe, and which are unique to us.”  There’s a decent chance you’ve seen a popular Tumblr post about Umwelt Theory—the idea that animals have access to senses that we do not. Smells too refined for our noses, pitches too high for our ears, colors outside the range of our eyes. But the inner worlds of animals might be even stranger than that. The postmortem movement of octopus limbs suggests that some animal minds might be fundamentally different from ours. Simply put, it’s not just that some animals have access to sensations that we will never feel. They might have access to types of thoughts that we will never be able to think.

HUNGER! is now a big physical woven tapestry you can buy here. smiling normally at you

oh emily wilson translation of the iliad we’re really in it now

stories about dungeons and hunger~