The meaning in the sea
Catalogue of delights: 7
Sometimes you read something in a book that is so moving that you can’t help feeling that something in you has literally shifted. This was the effect of chapter 28 of Ray Naylor’s “The Mountain in the Sea.” The book is, in part (there is so much in here!), an exploration of AI, octopuses (yeah, it’s octopuses, not octopi, due to the Greek origins of the word), and the ends that sentient beings will go to preserve themselves.
In times of distress, the domain of our objective functions are flattened to the sole aim of self-preservation. In the process trust is diminished, aggression and vigilance rises, others become means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Sometimes though, in the trenches of our struggles, we produce art, as if it were a necessity. There are things that must be said given the precariousness of the situation, forms of expression that must come out of us if we are not only to survive, but also retain the soul of our humanity. That may be one function of art, if we are to give it one among its many pluralities.
An enclave of octopuses are being spied on from a camouflaged vessel. The humans have been tasked to do so in an effort to exploit what they don’t yet know about intelligence. They once believed that the octopus was a creature of solitude, one whose life span is like that of a firework, here and then gone in a brilliant blink in the grand scheme of things.
What they find is something to the contrary. The cephalopods are also capable of communicating with one another in a form that feels both foreign and familiar to the humans. The octopus at the center is dashing off symbols into the oceanic ether. There is repetition and a cadence to the act, and then the humans realize it: the octopus is performing a poem. It’s unclear what it means. But there is something haunting and beautiful to the act as their world is being fished out of existence.
Maybe it all really does boil down to a survival function. But I’d like to think – to believe – that we live for something more, that more is living for something beyond what evolution had in mind. What survives matters. We must look beyond our genes. Beyond our bodies. Beyond utility. Perhaps we must look beyond terraria too and into the umwelt of the other worldly creatures we share a home with.