alt Hacker News> With the octopus thought experiment, I initially had told the story in terms of a dolphin, because dolphins clearly are intelligent animals. My co-author on that paper, Alexander Koller, said it should be an octopus, because first of all, the environment that octopuses live in is much more distinct from where people live. It makes the metaphor more vivid, that the octopus is just feeling these pulses in the cable and has no way to look at what the people are looking at.
On a completely tangential sidenote, octopusses are actually very very intelligent: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...
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Also, last time I checked, the environment where octopuses live is actually the exact same environment where dolphins live?
The continued use of animal metaphors is doing them a great disservice. Esp as we learn more about animal cognition, on first look, it smacks of human exceptionalism that has littered the historic scientific consensus.
Now if they had said, "Imagine your average American ..." (/s)
It's such a tragedy that they're also extremely solitary animals and die shortly after reproducing the first (and only) time.
Almost all other particularly intelligent animals seem to be gregarious, and it's easy to conclude that a social lifestyle tends to select for more intelligence, a sophisticated theory of mind, and so on (I like to think that that's exactly what was responsible for a runaway intelligence explosion in humans). But in the case of cephalopods, there's something else that has been applying selection pressure towards exceptional intelligence.