Octopus as a Self Aware Organism

I saw and interpreted a neural development of self awareness in the octopus from watching a Nova documentary with the capacity of basic reflecting on itself in its environment like humans. Its neural matrix is its whole body because it has no skeleton. On the ocean floor it wraps itself around all of life in its surroundings—sees, hears and uses judgement in its circumstances. It also identifies itself as an independent self, stepping out into its environment with a sense of individuality. It is clear that the octopus has a sense of itself being separated and identified as independent and different from the others.

Octopi generally live independently of others, with no fixed social patterns demanding connection—other than what they find within their given environment. No parents, brothers or sisters. 

Their evolutionary path having been one of the longest in the animal kingdom—separated from vertebrates 500 million years ago. They have also to come to a kind of common juncture in a capacity of self awareness, conceiving its individuality that seems to me to be something that is given as an outcome of what lay at the core of the neural path of creation and eventual manifestation of self reflecting and thinking. 

If I were to think of it as “a manifestation of consciousness and self awareness” I can understand the sense of “God” as a question of life becoming a “Self”.

I don’t wish this to be confused with “believing” but more of something embedded in neural story and pathways in evolving into billions of organic relationships generated and created in the growth and accumulated experiences of bio-organic interactions.  

Eventually it “has” to develop a vision of itself in order to manage the continuing dimension of expansion of all its life giving relationships.

The downside is that it has to continuously “recycle”—in birth and death—in order to “reassemble” itself in offspring and integrate them with the “new”.

Question: “How does it modify in its progression and expansion from the experience of its ancestors?”

It is obvious that it needs to carry forward what worked from the past in order to manifest itself in the present. It also needs to find and meet a place, a relationship, with the new. This neural biography and constructing becomes the common bonding in “The Life of All”.

If we look at the story of life on Earth, we are observing a 500-million-year evolutionary biography of life proceeding into consciousness as complexity and unity in self awareness.

The story of life on earth is unique as far as we can see, because like the first molecules of neural life it took 500 million years to develop the current mind of seeing itself. 

We are yet to see what can’t yet be seen. . . without more time to bond consciously with life as bio-life develops evermore neural patterns, interactions and relationships. 

“An octopus is a neural Spider.”