The psychology of consciousness and cognition, I have found, tends to deal very little with the problems that occur when we infer things about the properties of the consciousness of others. I suppose that if it had to deal with these problems before proceeding, it would probably not get anywhere very fast. My personal view is that these experiments don’t actually say anything about consciousness – that can only be speculated about based on an always somewhat flawed analogy to people (to one’s self, more specifically.)

The experiments I’ve talked about here are valid in that they measure the effects of certain manipulations on a system, and can do it reliably. The conclusions we can draw from them are concrete, and have nothing to do with the animal’s subjectivity directly: “given a variety of bivalves to eat, an octopus will match its bivalve-opening strategy to the force required to separate the shells of the bivalve” and “shown an image of itself, a cuttlefish will show agonistic behavior”. What might appear to be the inference of conscious processes is actually a speculation as to the possibility of some sort of conscious processes, which may never become more developed because of the inaccessibility of others’ subjectivities.

That said, if we don’t assume away problems like the one you brought up, or for example, the classical problem of other minds, we have no chance of studying consciousness as a mechanism of behavior (by which I mean something like “understand the neural events which coincide with conscious states as a mechanism of behavior”.) These assumptions are less problematic if we treat science as an inquiry into function rather than an inquiry into truth, so that probabilistic predictive ability (which can be shown and discussed rather unambiguously) is our goal rather than “knowing” the Other (the Other being whatever behaving organism we’re studying.)

I hope that makes sense.

Typically, the seeker of this type of knowledge seeks to compare the objects, mechanisms and functions of other beings’ being to that of their own, usually in order to attain some sort of instrumental power over that object: to predict, to understand, to control.

Levinas would have pointed out that this approach precludes learning because it precludes discourse with the “object of investigation”, and locks the investigator into a paradoxical DIALOG with their own projections, effects and affects. It is the difference, he would say, between encountering Other (which is merely a shadow of our psycholinguistically constructed Self) and encountering actual alterity…

Interestingly, this problem pertains even in the ontological investigation of our own phenomena: as mentioned before, we tend to anthropocentrically instrumentalise and objectify everything we encounter, and this projective quality is all but invisible to us: we cannot see the colour of our own eyes, cannot see the ripples we cause, cannot see beyond the horizon that our existential “location” entails.

It is astounding to me, that we should believe we may have ANY epistemological access the subjective phenomena of other beings, when we are so mawkishly inept in dealing with our own!

I just heard about this site today, and it made my summer. I have been a lifelong lover of sea life — Jacques Cousteau was my god when I was a kid — especially the beautiful and graceful cephalopods, so this is right up my alley. Please keep it coming.

Thanks!

-Bunche

I’ve tried to steer clear of actually claiming anything outright about whether or not cephalopods have consciousness (and it would probably be only primary consciousness, if anything,) because the arguments for that position (as you point out) require a lot of (blind) inference. However, I’m convinced that cephalopods are a good candidate for further study on the possibility of consciousness.

The hippocampus/vertical lobe analogy is one that I myself don’t quite buy, except in the most general sense – ie. in the sense that a tic-tac-toe-playing computer made out of tinker toys ( http://www.retrothing.com/2006/12/the_tinkertoy_c.html ) and a my PC both use the same sort of mathematics to accomplish tasks. They may have similar computational properties (based on very preliminary anatomical evidence), but we’ve yet to solve what that means in terms of large-scale brain function.

Nevertheless, I love your blog