The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.

At times, when a cephalopod is resting, its skin will flow through color and textural displays that appear unconscious—as if the electrochemical flux of its thoughts were projected onto its surface. In this state it is truly like a mind floating, unsheathed by flesh, in the open ocean.

Her ripped fins were weak. She swam like a ghost ship tiding into dock under torn sails.

But the ink had been thicker, hadn’t it? Ink like a curtain that had battered her back. She had been to that place of solitude, seen the three senescent cuttlefish drifting, monklike, under the shattered eaves of their castle.

We understand the encoding of genetic sequences, the folding of proteins to construct the cells of the body, and even a good deal about how epigenetic switches control these processes. And yet we still do not understand what happens when we read a sentence. Meaning is not neuronal calculus in the brain, or the careful smudges of ink on a page, or the areas of light and dark on a screen. Meaning has no mass or charge. It occupies no space—and yet meaning makes a difference in the world.

She had heard, in that interview on the ceiling above her hotel bed, that Evrim did not eat, though they could taste and smell. That they did not sleep. That they never forgot anything. But how can you be human and never forget? Never sleep? Never eat?

Not only do we not agree on how to measure or recognize consciousness in others, but we are also unable to even “prove” it exists in ourselves. Science often dismisses our individual experiences—what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love—as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness: A stream of experience. A self-referential loop. Something out of nothing. None of these are satisfactory. Definition eludes us.

And then Ha saw it. Yes. This was why the world would never build another humanoid AI. The smile was perfect. Sincere, unaffected. Fully human. And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death.

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

There is more to us than the physical linkages that make up our minds—but there is no denying this physical substrate. You have seen it if you have eaten chicken: those whitish strings you encounter on your plate are nerves—bundles of axons, evidence of the fleshy connectivity without which no sophisticated living mind on earth can function. You can argue all you want about the soul. But without the connectome formed by the billions of synapses firing in the nervous system, there is no possibility of even the simplest memory. Every memory of lemonade you have is an electrochemical lightning bolt through flesh, on a microscopic scale. This is why I say I “build” minds: minds are as physical as a brick wall.

No intelligent animal is as antisocial as the octopus. It wanders the ocean alone, more inclined to cannibalize its own kind than band together with them, doomed to a senescent death after a haphazard sexual encounter. The octopus is the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” denounced by Homer. This solitude, along with her tragically short life span, presents an insurmountable barrier to the octopus’s emergence into culture. But this book asks the question: What if? What if a species of octopus emerged that attained longevity, intergenerational exchange, sociality? What if, unknown to us, a species already has? Then what?

“We’ve seen tons of signs of octopus intelligence. Creativity, multi-step problem solving, compound tool use, evidence of theory of mind, long-term learning, and a high degree of individuation. There are so many stories—all

Why? People name octopuses because, no matter how different they are from us, we recognize something in them. Something we have in common. Even people who don’t study them are aware of this, on some level. There’s something special about them—we’ve known that for a long time now.”

“Imagine we all lived alone most of our lives, and our lives were only two years long. No developed language. No culture, no buildings or cities or states.”

“Surrender macaroon, robot.” Evrim turned their calm face toward the door. “Excuse me?” “Surrender macaroon cookie thing. Cookie is useless to you.” “You are interrupting, Altantsetseg.” “Give up macaroon, and I depart,” the neutral translator voice said over the baffling consonantal barrier of Altantsetseg’s own language.

“This is one of the reasons why the communications of cephalopods are so difficult to crack: They don’t have a grammar or vocabulary. Everything is either local—learned on the fly over a short life span—or instinctive. Plus, they mix communications between colors, patterns, texture, and gesture. That would be a bit like communicating using speech, Morse code, and sign language at the same time, and having to understand all of them simultaneously in order to make sense of any of them.

We are shaped and limited by our skeletons. Jointed, defined, structured. We create a world of relationships that mirrors that shape: a world of rigid boundaries and binaries. A world of control and response, master and servant. In our world, as in our nervous systems, hierarchy rules.

Communication is not what sets humans apart. All life communicates, and at a level sufficient to its survival. Animal and even plant communications are, in fact, highly sophisticated. But what makes humans different is symbols—letters and words that can be arranged in the self-referential sets we call language. Using symbols, we can detach communication from its direct relation to things present around us. We can speak with one another about things not here and now. We can tell stories. Tradition, myth, history, culture—these are storage systems for knowledge, and they are all products of the symbol. And the use of symbols is something we have not seen outside our own species.

“What is going on?” Something on the horizon was burning—a pumpkin-colored flickering smear between dark sky and darker water, reflected in Evrim’s pupils.

Symbols do not come from nowhere. Not at first. Early hieroglyphic systems have connections to the world. Even in the highly sophisticated and abstracted hanzi characters of the modern Chinese logographic system, we see the traces of those relations—like the character for person, 人, which depicts a figure, however simplified, recognizably related to a standing human. Language is abstract, yes—but it emerges from real relations with real things in the world and bears the traces of that ancient relationship. These traces will be the keys to deciphering the symbols of another species—if only we can recognize them.

The symbol, clearly a warning or a threat, nagged at her. She felt as if at some level she already understood it. Had seen it before.

“Because he said he saw an octopus come down the beach, walking like a man. It’s ridiculous.

It was better to ask questions than to struggle for answers.

“That’s the question a philosopher named Thomas Nagel asked, so many decades ago. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ He was trying to make a point about how impossible it is to imagine oneself having a sensory apparatus as different from ours as a bat’s. That even to conceive of what it’s like to navigate the world with sonar, you would have to take up the bat’s point of view. But you can’t—you might be able to take up a different point of view a little, but the more distant you are from it—let’s say the more alien it is to you—the harder it is to answer the question.”

Every octopus we encounter has survived adventures and trials unimaginable to us. The octopus who has lived to adulthood in the dangers of the sea will be an Odysseus, a “man of twists and turns,” a heroically clever artist of battle and escape. How many arms will it have lost and regrown? How many forms will it have taken on to hide and stalk its prey? How many deaths will it have escaped? And what will it know of us, this hero of the sea? Has it hidden in a nineteenth-century diving helmet lost by our early explorers of the deep? Slipped from a fisherman’s net? Peered at us from the edge of its home as we walk upon our beaches? Handled the skulls drowned in our submarines? What will we be to it? Gods? Monsters? Or nothing that can signify to it at all? —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

Evrim sat alone, face lit by the glow of a terminal, surrounded by all the gear and tech Altantsetseg was constantly tinkering with. And Ha had a clear image of Pinocchio on the shelf, ranged among the inanimate dolls that were its ancestors, suspended between the worlds of the living and the inanimate, subject and object, struggling to become real.

The headlamps they all wore turned the fake jungle, now becoming real jungle as the island reclaimed it, into a web of shadows.

In the octopus we see opportunism, exploration, creativity—the qualities we associate with consciousness in our own mental life. We think we recognize a mind like our own. But this creature is nothing like us. The majority of an octopus’s neurons are in its arms, connected via a neural ring to a brain that can override, but does not always control, its maverick appendages. As I watch this quicksilver being moving through its environment, I ask myself: How does this animal, who has more neurons in its limbs than in its brain, who tastes with its grasp, whose skin can sense light, see the world? And could we ever hope to understand such a point of view?