People who work with octopuses or who spend a lot of time in their company describe the sense that when you look at an octopus, there is something looking back.
“When you’re dealing with an octopus who’s being attentively curious about something, it is very hard to imagine that there’s nothing experienced by it,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. “It seems kind of irresistible. That itself is not evidence, that’s just an impression.”
Likewise, imagining an octopus’s inner life is a hard thing to do from our human standpoint. Try it for a moment – imagine what it’s like to be suspended in the cool blueish twilight down at the seabed, perhaps a slight drag of current pulling you this way and that, your eight arms waving gently around you. When you picture the tips of your suckered limbs moving, what do you imagine it feels like? Is it, perhaps, something like wiggling your human fingers and toes?
“The octopus’s arms are, in some ways, more like lips or tongues than hands,” says Godfrey-Smith. “There’s a whole great cascade of sensory information of that taste-based form that’s coming in every time the animal does anything. That’s very different from our situation.”
Take a closer look at the octopus’s nervous system, and things get even stranger. The octopus’s arms have more autonomy than our human arms and legs do. Each has its own miniature brain, giving it a degree of independence from the animal’s central brain. Our own nervous system, however, is highly centralised, with the brain the seat of sensory integration, emotion, initiating movement, behaviour and other actions.