Watch one of the world’s most fascinating creature performing a stunning dance of immediate self-enfoldment, color and surface texture change.
Wave upon wave of bright yellow, white, brown and vermilion flashing neon-like on its burly body. Nature indeed performs its miracles in wondrous and mysterious way!
Cuttlefish, like squid, octopuses and nautiluses, are marine animals belonging to the Cephalopoda class. Studies indicate that cuttlefish are among the most intelligent invertebrate species. They hunt small shrimps in the daylight, changing its external appearance to that of a silt-covered stone before striking out.
The origin of the word cuttlefish can be found in the old English term cudele, derived from the Norwegian ‘koddi’ (testicle) and the Middle German ‘kudel’ (pouch), a literal description of the cephalopod’s shape. The Greco-Roman word ‘sepia’ described the cephalopod as a source of the unique brown pigment released from its siphon when alarmed.
Late psychedelic researcher and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna had this to say about the amazing color-change ability of the cuttlefish:
I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future.
In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.
(Terence McKenna)
Hence the problem: common language.
Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, “that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,” instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word.
All mystery is gone, the child learns ‘this is a bird’, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. “This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky”, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception, and what the psychedelics do is they burst apart this cultural envelope of confinement and return us really to the legacy and birthright of the organism.
What these psychedelics do is they dissolve cultural conditioning.
Cultural conditioning is like software, but beneath the software is the hardware of brain and organism and by dissolving the cultural conditioning to speak English, German, Swahili or whatever, then one returns to this ur-sprach, this primal language of the animal body and can explore the real dimension of feeling that culture has a tendency to cut us off from.
The solution: ‘Visible Language’?
What if language were visible?
If we could see language, if language were a project of understanding that used the eyes for the extraction of meaning rather than the ears, it would be a kind of telepathy. There would be both a fusion of the observer with the object observed, and with the person communicated with. The place in nature where something like this has actually evolved is in the cephalopods.
These octopii have chromataphores all over the exterior of their bodies. Chromataphores are cells that can change color. Now many people know that octopii can change color but they think its for camouflage, for blending in with the environment, this is not at all the case. The reason octopii change colors in a very large repertoire of stripes, dots, blushes, travelling shades and tonal shifts is because this is for them a channel of linguistic communication.
In other words they don’t transduce their linguistic intentionality into small mouth noises like we do. Small mouth noises which then move as sound across space in the form of vibrations of the air. Rather, they actually change their appearance in accordance with their linguistic intent.
What this boils down to is they physically become their meaning.
They can also, because they’re soft-bodied, fold and unfold and reveal and conceal, very rapidly, different parts of their body. So they’re capable of a visual dance of communication.
How can an octopus have a ‘private thought’?
In fact the only way an octopus can experience a private thought is to release a cloud of ink into the water into which it can retreat briefly and hide its mental nakedness from its followers. This kind of biologically intrinsic wiring into the potential of language is something that we may be able to mimic and achieve using psychedelic drugs as the inspiration for the direction given to a virtual reality development program. In other words we might be able to create kinds of visibly beheld syntax that would be the human equivalent of the dance of light, texture and positioning that constitutes the grammer and syntax of squids and octopii.
(Terence McKenna in ‘Visible Language and Virtual Reality’)
Could a ‘Second Skin’ applying visible language be useful for humanity in the future?
Imagine a ‘visual live lie detector’, an artificial skin which instantly reflects our mood, thoughts and feelings – a Second Skin.
Your body will be painted with a specially formulated ink via brush, spray or stamp. The paint acts, similar to a computer screen, as a medium to send information from a person to another (or even to transmit data via gestures and touch directly from a person to a computer). Many different areas of application of such an ‘augmented skin’ can be proposed, for example:
Dating
Is honesty the best policy in the world of dating? Does honesty harm or improve the dating scene? Second Skin technology would certainly reveal what’s really going on between the genders. For example blushing, which reveals shame or insecurity, would be impossible to hide. However, a great advantage would be that disguising becomes literally impossible. Imagine a woman sitting in a café. She finds the guy sitting close to her very attractive – immediately her Second Skin turns red, indicating her attraction. The darker the red, the more interest she discloses…
Psychotherapy
Another area of application can be anticipated in psychotherapy. Patients would not be able to deceive themselves and fool the therapist anymore – their second skin would give tell-tale signals to the therapist immediately. On the other hand, evaluating the integrity of the therapist will also be much easier; putting the psychologist’s candidness to the test by asking about various personal values and moral issues will be a thing of the past. Therefore successful therapy results will be reached much faster.
3D Cyberworlds
Finally, avatars in virtual cyberworlds could be connected to the real bodies of the users. Their emotions would instantly change the color and demeanour of their virtual representations. Imagine not only navigating your avatar in 3D worlds with your thoughts, but also changing its colors just with your emotions! This would lead to a much more realistic and emotionally touching experience in cyberspace – and through the instant feedback loop it could certainly have an interesting effect on real life.
(See also: Mind and brainwave controlled devices.)
14 Comments
If language is projected with the body doesn’t it doesn’t mean Human would be any better at communicating states of consciousness. The issue is that emotion has more nuance than the words that constitute the neural correlates that represent state, and this would be true in all cases of a language system. If you are describing a “body language”, then it’s not clear why all members of the group should understand each and everybody body language.
Watching a documentary on cuttlefish inspired the emotional vulnerability aspect of my mindfulness practice. Imagine a world where we were all just ourselves… no hidden pretenses… no hiding anything… because we’re all beautiful, whole, and complete… a place where we’re not scared to be ourselves. That’s why I aim to be like a cuttlefish. I talk about it, and reference it in my blog (makeadent.ca) regularly. Thank you for this wonderful article. Namaste.
Indeed we’ ourselves are using words and hence language very quickly. That might be the explanation, it’s obvious actually. Thanks Roy!
I meant to comment @Lumpi a while ago, he’d asked how the octopus changed colors so rapidly – perhaps the octopus would wonder how we use words so quickly, one after the other? But I would think it’s the same kind of mechanism.
Rob Hughes and theskeptic, for shame! Making broad sweeping generalizations such as you have made without one shred of proof to back you up is worse than bad science, it’s superstition of the first (dis)order.
The blush responce in women is not a display of shame.
@theskeptic….I’m with you on this. I’ve seen better science on star treck.
A lot of this article is simply fiction. I know there is a thin line between speculation and science sometimes but this is just wrong.
These octopuses look great in 3d
Es zeigt sich immer wieder: Die Natur ist ein einziges Kunstwerk!
This information jives well with our recently-concluded “Learn Telepathy Quickly” program, in which more than 100 people worldwide took part. We have established beyond doubt that telepathic communication exists between all humans. Three features were noted during the 2 1/2 years in which we conducted the exercise. The first was that telepathic communication between human beings and between human beings and animals was primarily emotion-based. It was also found during the course of our work that it is impossible to lie in emotionally based communication. The second point we noted was that imagery was often transmitted from person to person; people with whom I had not had previous contact could tell what color my shirt was, what the lighting in my room was like etc. The least common form of communication was verbal, that is, verbal thoughts, the kind that by which you perceive your own verbal thoughts, were extremely rare. Therefore that a cephalopod, whic family has also shown remarkable intelligence, should communicate with colors and patterns is not that much of a shock, rather, it is one more thing to confirm that we really are all connected.
For “theskeptic,” you will be finding in the days ahead that your worldview is going to fade out in the face of REAL science, things that can be repeated by others; this is known as “peer review” and has been the mainstay of empirical research since Galileo. I will post our e-mail for anyone wishing to correspond about any of these things, but on request.
Roy Waidler
Outlands Community USA
This is a very interesting article. It borrows HEAVILY from the teachings and talks of Terrence McKenna.
Most of this is a lie. ‘Sepia’ and ‘cephalopod’ have nothing to do with each other from a linguistic point of view. Look it up. And humans already do favour sight over hearing, which is why visual art is so massively important, language (and music) are written down, and music is considered the ‘intellectual’ art.
Also, it would suck bigtime to have your skin constantly betray your thoughts and emotions. How easy would it be to control a society in which this phenomenon was rampant? How long would it be before humans learned that it was best to refrain from emotion entirely, lest their inner secrets be revealed? I realize that this rant is becoming just as far-fetched as this (perhaps dubiously) original article, but one should not indiscriminately vomit out one’s inane philosophies on the internet, just because one can.
Honestly, is this a joke?
“Imagine a woman sitting in a café. She finds the guy sitting close to her very attractive – immediately her Second Skin turns red, indicating her attraction. The darker the red, the more interest she discloses…”
Imagine a world where every man is constantly dark red!
So so spectacular these stunning fish are….I’d try this second skin. Wonder whether it would really change human communication. Maybe we would get used to it as fast as we are used to verbal communication now…however, it would sure as hell is an innovatie idea!
Wow, those are indeed incredible colors! This octopus is indeed a psychedelic fish. How does it manage to change its colors so damn quickly!?
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