Cognition and Consciousness
Wait, wait, wait….!!!!
The title of this article seems like it’s going to give hundreds of references to research papers on the relationship or difference between Cognition and Consciousness. This is not going to be that way.
While watching Craig Foster’s ‘My Octopus Teacher’ on Netflix this weekend, I was amazed how Craig’s experience became so enriching after going into detail and becoming almost one with the ways of the forest.
An Octopus, while trying to hide from its predators, essentially small sharks, uses its suction cups on the tentacles to cover itself with shells, stones and pebbles to disengage or camouflage.
While you stare at the marvel of the intelligence this mollusk carries, you can also question the cognition and consciousness that operates in an octopus, for that matter any animal or human being.
“One of the big picture questions we have is just how a distributed nervous system would work, especially when it’s trying to do something complicated, like move through fluid and find food on a complex ocean floor,” said neuroscientist David Gire of the University of Washington.
Rather than a centralized nervous system such as vertebrates have, two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are spread throughout its body, distributed between its arms.[1]
The way we process information around us, and say, how a cat or a dog does, is very different from how a cephalopod like an octopus does. The octopus’ suckers gather information from its environment and the neurons in its arms process it. If the cognition, its processing of information isn’t the same as ours, does that mean its consciousness might be unexplained or even alien to us for the most part since we’re still struggling to understand ours?
While being hunted by a shark, Craig notices how the octopus hides by covering itself with shells, stones and rocks around it, using its suckers. While the shark uses its high functioning olfactory organs to figure out where she was hiding, uses its immense strength to dislodge the stones out of her suckers, it could not gain dominance. After a moment, she gets herself out of the sharp jaws and sits on the back of the shark as the predator navigates in the water. As expected, the octopus outwits the shark exhibiting high level intelligence to not only survive an attack but to do that with sheer elegance and smartness.
If an animal has the ability to navigate itself out of such clever attacks and save itself from such merciless predators, what makes us say confidently that these species are having limited or no consciousness? The possibility of us not being able to understand their consciousness the same way we do understand their cognition and its processing using our tools and science is immense. We haven’t made the tools and created sophisticated science of understanding our consciousness the same way we understand how we gather information from around and how we process it.
What makes humans different from other species is our consciousness! To ask the question ‘why’? To dig deep in quest of the ‘purpose’. Is there a possibility of us being unable to understand consciousness of species other than ours?
Octopuses are semelparous animals. Basically, they die after giving birth to the new ones. Their purpose essentially is to procreate. What a waste of such an intelligent being? Or is it? Our understanding tells us these are species with little to no consciousness. What if our understanding is limited? Could these be beings which have transcended already? A small part of this could be explained by saying something absurd- ‘they are where we try to reach with awareness, meditation and mindfulness.’
The argument might seem rubbish or inconclusive because of its absurdity to our existing assumptions about how the world works. If we really do get into it, the argument is simple, do other species such as octopuses have the ability to be conscious? If we go by our definition of consciousness, they might not have it. If we remove the contextual limitations of our understanding of consciousness, there might be a lot to explore from encounters like that of Craig’s.
What if the octopuses here could move beyond dimensions and timelines using the neuron signals in their suckers? Absurd right? But what if, we just don’t know yet?
Think, limitless.
Adios!
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