The middle squid is sending two messages simultaneously through it’s skin patterns – a challenge to the male on the left, while courting the female on the right. In the same way, there are multiple messages in this blog post. Hopefully that doesn’t make it too meandering or geeky

Digital Maoism

I was reading Jaron Lanier’s insightful piece on wikis and aggregation, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” last week. Lanier expresses an important concern about wikis, aggregators and social news sites: they subsume individuality, and have no room for individual voice or selection. This only becomes a really bad thing when people start ascribing the result to a mythical and near-infallible “consensus voice,” rather than a product of individual contributions. That’s exactly what I like about blogs – the individual voice. Lanier’s opinion is “The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?”

I don’t agree entirely with Lanier’s view, but it is refreshingly original and well argued. I’m a believer in emergent social phenomena – I mean, I support the free market. But Lanier is arguing for the individual voice against the collective, and for meritocracy, rather than unrestrained democracy.

Also check out the responses, discussion and criticism here.

Talk like a squid

I had never actually heard of Jaron Lanier until I read that piece. Turns out he’s a virtual reality pioneer – indeed, he first used the phrase “virtual reality”. He also writes about “post-symbolic communication”, which means communication by direct thought, or expression of direct thought. In a VR context this means by manipulating your virtual environment and the appearance of your avatar.
In his column in Discover, “What cephalopods can teach us about language,” Lanier expounds more on this concept.

Cephalopods – squid, octupuses, cuttlefish – can morph their bodies into different shapes, and change the patterns and colours on their skin. They use this as camouflage for hunting and evasion of other predators. But more importantly, they can use this ability to change their appearance at will as a kind of language – a language completely alien to us. Lanier on remarkable cuttlefish abilities:

The cuttlefish responds with a bizarre and ingenious psychedelic performance. Weird images, luxurious colors, and successive waves of undulating lightning bolts and filigree swim across its skin.

Imagine the potential of communication by instantly changing your appearance. You could describe ideas, express emotions, convey a massive amount of information through complex patterns. It could have virtually unlimited nuance – it could eventually be considered direct expression of thought. It probably will be the direction of communication in future MMORPGs and VR environments, and in an even longer term a communication method for uploaded personalities and AI.
This Monterey County Weekly story goes into great detail about the giant Humboldt Squid, Dosidicus gigas, which grows up to seven feet. Divers share their sometimes-chilling stories of strange and curious encounters, vicious beatings and bites, and alien communication:

Last month Cassell dove with three- to four-foot squid off Point Loma, near San Diego, and observed squid “stalking schools of fish, coordinating attacks on schools of fish, communicating with each other,” he says. “It was amazing.”

The Humboldt squid is capable of changing colors several times a second, from the deep maroon that prompted Mexican fisherman to dub them los diablos rojos, or “red devils,” to an opalescent white. They have been observed pulsating like jittery strobe at each other, principally while hunting or feeding, a behavior that some researchers theorize could be some form of communication.

The stories of attack are particularly scary. Squid are the ultimate sea monster. But consider the following description and scale it up several times, to the size of the colossal squid…

There is an alien intelligence residing deep within the Monterey Bay… It resides within creatures that have three hearts, primate-like stereoscopic eyes, blue blood and brains large enough to suggest they are among the smartest creatures on earth. They are giant raptorial predators with a taste for flesh. Growing up to seven feet long and occasionally bigger—possibly much bigger—these carnivores seize their prey with two lightning-fast, hook-laden tentacle clubs, draw it into a squirming nest of eight arms and proceed to tear chunks of flesh from its body with a disproportionately large, razor-sharp, parrot-like beak.

Intelligent squid

Squid and octopuses are effectively alien species. They inhabit a fundamentally different world, and live and interact in fundamentally different ways to us. They also have certain similarities to us – they are even more dexterous than us, they have binocular vision, some species hunt in groups, and they have a sort of language. All of those traits, in human ancestors, were crucial in our evolution of intelligence. See this Wikipedia article for more background on cephalopod intelligence.

The previous section explored how we can become more like squid, at least in our communication. Somewhat surprisingly, a major theme in science fiction has been how to make squid more like humans. Thus, science-fiction author Vonda McIntyre has created the “Squidliography,” subtitled “Talking Squid in Outer Space: The Pinnacle of SF.”

I was thrilled to see on the Squidliography the full text of Stephen Baxter;s awesome short story, “Sheena 5″. “Sheena 5″ is the story of a genetically engineered Caribbean Reef Squid, and her epic journey as NASA discovers a way to translate squid-speak, and teaches her to pilot an “unmanned” probe to an asteroid. But Sheena has other ideas…

The story later formed part of the excellent Manifold: Time novel. It appears to be partly based on this research on the Caribbean Reef Squid (also pictured above). As you can see, the story doesn’t exaggerate the beauty or variety of patterns that these creatures are capable of. Anyway, go read the story.

Posted by Phil on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 12:26 pm.