#screw it this counts
one can only imagine the religions that octopuses would dream up, intelligent creatures that never meet their own parents, each generation discovering the world anew.
Humans spend many years dependent on their parents or other adults. This has caused us to evolve a mental module specialized to predict the behavior of vastly powerful, vastly knowledgeable entities, who are generally benevolent but sometimes wrathful. This module encourages behaviors of petitioning these entities for boons and propitiating them to turn away wrath. The persistence of this module into adulthood causes the hallucination of gods.
No parents, no religion.
k-strategy religion vs. r-strategy religion
Dogs are superstitious animals. They watch very carefully for one thing to predict another. The sound of the refrigerator opening predicts food. The sound of the car pulling into the driveway predicts the owner entering the house. They learn predictors that we’re not even aware of giving. When I’m getting ready to go out my dog has no obvious way of telling whether I’m planning on taking her with me or not, but if I’m taking her, she’ll be jumping and wagging around the door, and if I’m leaving her behind, she’ll be ready to get in her crate.
-Sue Ailsby
Sue is deliberately anthropomorphizing here to make a point (we probably don’t know enough about dogs’ internal states to definitively describe them as superstitious) but I think it’s still interesting. She’s referring specifically to the way dogs learn via clicker training.
Dogs are notoriously poor at generalizing behaviors to different situations. “I taught my dog to sit for his dinner, why won’t he sit in the living room?”
It’s a very common frustration point for trainers who don’t anticipate it. It’s often perceived as a failure of the intelligence of the dog, but it’s usually more a failure of communication.
The dog may be lifting the right front paw off the ground (what YOU think you’re clicking), but she’s also breathing out, facing west, 6.2 feet from the south wall, on the 17th tile from the east wall, wagging the tail to the left, looking at your right shoulder, and wondering if you’ll quit training before she wets herself
Dogs don’t normally sit (in the human-desired way) to get the things they want! That is a very unusual circumstance for a dog, so it’s not necessarily going to be the primary thing the dog notices about the situation. They’re going to be looking at any and all cues that might help them get the reward again, and it can be pretty challenging to get them to disregard extraneous information! Our frustrated kitchen trainer above didn’t just teach her dog to sit for his dinner, she taught him to sit in the kitchen, next to the counter, after the bag of kibble’s been opened etc. It’s often necessary to teach a dog a behavior in many different situations before they understand the specific thing being asked of them. It’s not uncommon for dogs to need to be re-taught a behavior with their collar on vs. off, for instance. (Many service dog handlers take advantage of this quirk by using the service vest to signal “work time” and thus a different set of default behaviors from down time).
This kind of thing is the root of superstition. If an action was taken and rewarded, most animals try to repeat it. But when you’re dealing with an incredibly complex world with thousands of possible stimuli, it’s really difficult to determine what elements are actually relevant and what actually caused the thing you want. The more novel the situation, the more superstitions surround it.
I’m willing to argue that in most animals, just about any new, truly adaptive behavior is preceded by a bunch of “superstitious” behaviors, all attempts to recreate the reward-circumstances from something that originally happened by chance (likewise for avoiding aversives). Adaptive behaviors are what come after failed rituals get pruned out. And much like vestigial limbs, insufficiently harmful ritual behaviors can potentially stick around for a very long time, as long as the combination of adaptive and ritual behaviors is still rewarded. (Like that thing where people used to cure a nutrient deficiency with a goat-sacrifice ritual that just so happened to include consuming its liver–the adaptive behavior)
This kind of learning applies across most of the animal kingdom. If it can respond to stimuli and pattern-match, it can be clicker-trained. (clicker here meaning any consistent reward marker. +r trainers also use things like light flashes or vocal cues to similar effect) That means anything from a human to a fish (even fruit flies can be “trained,” albiet in very basic ways, to respond to arbitrary stimuli as rewarding or aversive!). If it can be clicker-trained, it’s able to model the world sufficiently to know that “some combination of actions + stimuli” = “reward” and is able to apply this to new situations by iteratively whittling down all presented information until they have a system that works–whether that system is based on an understanding of the causal chain or not.
The precondition for superstition isn’t parents, it’s a world that’s more complicated than you understand that you have to make do in anyway.
So I think I’m willing say that any sufficiently intelligent animal is probably capable of being at least superstitious, but they are likely to model that in different ways than we do. Full religion, though, I think requires a social element. The most intelligent species are also usually social, and probably not by coincidence. Octopi are kind of a weird outlier. Intelligence is expensive and group membership is one of its biggest benefits, so investing in it without reaping that reward is kind of odd. I think just about any social animal group that gets smart enough to have a “culture” at all probably has a religion to go with it.
Octopi would probably have some kind of superstitious spirituality, but unless (even if) they also evolve in a more social direction (and I feel I should mention they aren’t asocial, they regularly live near each other and appear to be able to communicate with each other, they just don’t form cohesive cooperative units that I know of) it would be as intuitively unrecognizable to us as the rest of their cognition.
I’m not sure where else to go with this so let’s end on this weird note about octopus training:
“We reward the arm that is doing the behavior we’re looking for,” explains Eve, and suddenly the complexity of this animal hits home. The arms are almost like eight separate animals, all capable of independent activity. Training involves interacting with, and rewarding, just one of those arms so that the octopus—and the session—stay focused.
the octopus version of Kali has 8^8 arms, I know that much.
