(2025-01-10) Webb Keeping The Seat Warm Between Peaks Of Cephalopod Civilisation

Matt Webb: Keeping the seat warm between peaks of cephalopod civilisation. I often wonder what it felt like for the ancient Greeks, circa 800BC, to be wandering in the ruins of the previous Mycenaean civilisation. These cities they can no longer build; staring at writing they can’t read. The Greeks had to re-discover literacy.
I think perhaps they wouldn’t have known what they were looking at.

I know that dinosaurs aren’t our ancestors but… it’s adjacent? We live in a world of humbled kings. Birds were once dinosaurs. Don’t you suppose that, given the chance, they would again rouse themselves?
When they look at you with their beady eyes, what are they thinking?

thought experiment of the Silurian hypothesis, as previously discussed: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?

Squid. Octopus. Cuttlefish. There have been a bunch of books recently about cephalopods as terrestrial aliens

What if cephalopods already had their complex societies? 2024-11-11-TheSilurianHypothesisItWasTheCephalopods

The argument is that cephalopods are super sophisticated:

Cuttlefish hunt by seemingly hypnotizing crabs by generating highly psychedelic moving stripe patterns on their bodies

And tool users

And language users

But they get eaten too much by fish.

So what about BEFORE FISH?

A crucial window where cephalopod civilization could have occurred is the time between when mentally high-performing cephalopods came to their own, and the time when aquatic vertebrates really took over.

It’s very Last and First Men (Wikipedia) – Olaf Stapledon’s 2 billion year future history from 1930 about rise and fall of eighteen human species (we’re the first).

If you recall, the Eighth Men escape Venus by engineering a new human species to inhabit Neptune, but it collapses, and the Ninth Men splinter into all kinds of beasts

It takes 300 million years but they claw their way back via a rabbit-like species to become the Tenth Men. Then all die in a plague

It works out. By the end of the book (SPOILERS) humans are vegetarian, there are 96 sexes, and they live to a quarter million years of age. They have six legs and an eye on the top of their heads, and the race is telepathic. They can join themselves together into a huge Neptune-wide telescope, just by looking up.

I think we often pattern-match to “progress” because that (a) matches what the exponential looks like from our perspective in the Anthropocene, and that means we’re inclined to look for the progress of octopuses; and (b) we centre ourselves, humans, in the historical story, because of course.

But maybe we’re not the main character here.

Birds are just little Napoleons, exiled on their St. Helena of deep time, before they make their vengeful return. Octopus patiently biding their time until the fish clear off again. And here we are, just keeping the seat warm.