“Fiorito’s lab was arranged with two rows of tanks lining a central walkway, one octopus in each tank. (Octopuses are generally not social creatures and can even be cannibalistic.) On this particular day, David had chosen a tank in the left-hand row, about halfway along. When I walked in to see what was going on, I was astonished to see all the octopuses on the other side of the walkway pressed up against the glass of their tanks, every one of them staring intently at David while he repeatedly lowered his objects into his chosen tank. The observing octopuses seemed to be trying to figure out what was going on for no other reason than the sheer interest of it.
Being among octopuses, even for a short time, left me with an impression of an intelligence, and a conscious presence, very different from any other – and certainly very different from our own human incarnation. This of course was a subjective impression, necessarily tainted by the biases of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, and open to the charge of taking intelligence as a sign of sentience. But the octopus is objectively remarkable too, and spending some time with them can push our intuitions about how different a non-human consciousness might be.
The most recent common ancestor of humans and octopuses lived about 600 million years ago. Little is known about this ancient creature. Perhaps it was some kind of flattened worm. Whatever it looked like, it must have been a very simple animal. Octopus minds are not aquatic spinoffs from our own, or indeed from any other species with a backbone, past or present. The mind of an octopus is an independently created evolutionary experiment, as close to the mind of an alien as we are likely to encounter on this planet. As scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith put it, ‘If we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.”