Explaining to all companies that the three requirements for me to use a social media with any frequency are:
A chronological follow-only feed, ideally which I can set as default
Anonymity (my real name and face are not required)
Have a desktop version
You may call me boomer or whatever but if a social media doesn’t have bare minimum these three things then I will never use it ever. I won’t even make an account. You can suck at everything else but these are non-negotiable. The fact that they are anathema to profitability does not matter to me. If you cannot provide me these three things then I will simply not use any social media at all.
You probably know that humans can experience “phantom limbs,” but did you know that the limbs of an octopus can have a “phantom body”? If you cut off an octopus’ tentacle, it will try to feed a mouth that is no longer there. A severed octopus tentacle also curls up when it’s exposed to negative stimuli like acid. Essentially, if an octopus dies and its tentacle is cut off, the tentacle can outlive the original animal by a whole hour.
Octopi have as many as 130 million neurons, but the vast majority are located in their limbs, not their brains. Their mind is “distributed.” That is fundamentally unlike the human mind. We have muscle memory, but our arms can’t move completely independently of our brains.
What does this mean for octopus consciousness? Well… we don’t know. There’s no way to observe or deduce via experiment what it’s like to be a particular animal. We can see how they behave, but we won’t ever see the world through their eyes. Science can study what is outside, but not what’s inside. So, animal consciousness isn’t really the domain of science.
As is always the case, philosophers have attempted to do what scientists cannot. The philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has a really great way of explaining what’s at stake: “Octopuses let us ask which features of our minds can we expect to be universal whenever intelligence arises in the universe, and which are unique to us.” There’s a decent chance you’ve seen a popular Tumblr post about Umwelt Theory—the idea that animals have access to senses that we do not. Smells too refined for our noses, pitches too high for our ears, colors outside the range of our eyes. But the inner worlds of animals might be even stranger than that. The postmortem movement of octopus limbs suggests that some animal minds might be fundamentally different from ours. Simply put, it’s not just that some animals have access to sensations that we will never feel. They might have access to types of thoughts that we will never be able to think.
slowly disintegrating friendships are like. i miss you. i love you. i wish so many good things for you. i wish for all the love u can get. i wish i was eating chaat with u rn. i hope we never meet again.
Yes I would do anything for you. No I can’t hold eye contact with you. I wish you goodness but I can’t be around to see it. I want you to miss me like I miss you. I love how you know me. I hate how you know me. I wonder if we’re thinking about each other at the same time. When did we become a thing of the past. Why are all of our memories from so long ago, why is our history the only thing we have in common. Your happiness heals. Your happiness hurts. I love you. I resent you.
admirable restraint with the room temperature monster energy so far. i am interested in the potential for the garlic to overtake the actual spaghetti. the amount of oregano is fine
