First, we need to take care of the conditions for the emergence of intelligence 1. The organism had to be generally developed, i.e. have an advanced metabolism, circulatory system, digestive system, musculoskeletal system, etc. (somewhere at the level of birds or mammals). 2. The organism must have developed social behavior, because this encourages the development of intelligence due to the need for communication.
3. The organism must have a calorie-rich diet, that is, eat meat or fruits, which is why rationality cannot be achieved by organisms that have a diet consisting of coarse plant fibers, and even less so by those that are obligate autotrophs.
Family size can vary greatly, from small families where one parent cares for a small number of children to huge eusocial colonies with hundreds of members.
Also, the society will be significantly influenced by the behavioral characteristics of the species, for example, more aggressive creatures will be more radical and xenophobic, for less aggressive creatures the opposite is true, and so on with each behavioral characteristic.
But still, culture will have no less influence on society.
Good point, however octopuses are still quite advanced life forms with an organism that is quite advanced for mollusks, and besides, I don’t think that they will be able to build a more complex society with more complex tools, because they don’t have education and the transmission of knowledge to their offspring.
While this is a true observation, elephants are an exception, other animals with high intelligence usually do not have a diet of leaves and grass due to their low calorie content (this is also the reason why flying animals also very rarely have a diet of grass and leaves).
To be fair it will likely be more of a bias on what such a species would choose between xenophobic/xenophilic behaviours. Just look at the diversity of interactions in humans across the ages and the continents.
If a coconut octopus with no one to teach it can figure out the shell it was using for a roof makes a good shield when fighting the shrimp whose punch breaks glass, than I think they can figure out not-welding based complexity. As has been stated repeatedly in other posts, under water civs can’t shape metal, but there are other “complex” things they might teach themselves.
Shouldn’t the ingame awakening transistion only need you to have a smart enough brain and good enough limbs to successfully get into the awakening stage?
An advanced brain requires a lot of energy, which is why it needs an ecosystem in which it can obtain a sufficient amount of high-energy food, adaptations for the efficient extraction of food from the ecosystem, an advanced respiratory system (to supply the brain with oxygen), a circulatory system (so that the blood has time to supply the brain with oxygen and food), as well as active movement.
What I’m saying is that you won’t be able to become an intelligent species if your species’ organism isn’t much more advanced than the lancelet or jellyfish.
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Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
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That’s one way to kill sapient plants. I feel like measuring energy into a system to gauge mental capacity makes very little sense. On earth intelligent lifeforms are all warm blooded, except cephalopods. I’d say total or relative energy flow doesn’t work, as an animal that consumes only low energy food can be smart, and we don’t want a HUGE bias towards warm blooded animals (for relative energy use) or large ones (for absolute.) As for adaptations for efficient extraction of food from an ecosystem I would consider parasites very adapted to get food from the ecosystem and sleeper sharks comically adapted to get food from an ecosystem. Not only are both typically dumb as rocks, but “adaptations for efficient extraction of food from an ecosystem” is a very hard to measure criteria.
This logic actually works, if one other thing is true about your species: it isn’t paper thin. If you are a paper thing organism and are always wet, you really don’t need either system. If you can survive and get to awakening with a paper thing body with brain matter spread out over a large surface area, can get limbs that work, and keep yourself wet without becoming an underwater civ, you deserve to do it IMO. I’d say organs have chemical needs to keep working, just give a brain a high semi-fixed cost in glucose and oxygen. Once you reach a threshold of resources continually supplied to the brain (and actually used up), the requirement for a big brain is completed.
Jellyfish don’t have brains and lancelets don’t have limbs and neither of them are very smart at all, no one is saying they should go to awakening stage, but why should it only be non-eusocial high activity vertebrates, arthropods, and maybe cephalopods? Additionally, your logic would be real hard to measure. Reminder this is supposed to run in a game.
the problem with a flat intelligent worm is that because its brain matter is not concentrated in the brain, but distributed in neural tubes, this does not allow the brain matter to specialize in different tasks, which will not give the possibility of advanced intelligence for anyone, if this type of nervous system were no less effective than nervous systems with nodes or a brain, then the nodes and the brain simply would not have appeared, since it is harder to supply them with energy. The brain also consumes a lot of energy, for comparison: the human brain weighs 2% of the body weight, but consumes 20% of the body’s energy, while skeletal muscles are 40% of the body weight, but they consume the same amount as the brain, that is, 20%, that is, 100 grams of brain consumes energy as 2 kg of muscle. This means that the body will require a huge amount of oxygen and energy to support the brain, which means that the body will need an effective respiratory, digestive, circulatory, and musculoskeletal system (to actively search for food and eat it). But some might argue that brains don’t require much energy because elephants eat leaves and grass, but elephants have large bodies which means they can have a smaller brain to body ratio, which means they can have a larger, more efficient stomach, lungs and heart.
It is not the number of brains that is important, but the amount of brain matter and the architecture of the brain. Although octopuses have 9 brains, the mass of their brain matter is less (because octopuses themselves are smaller than people), the brain of octopuses has a more energy-saving structure that allows them to save energy, but does not allow them to develop human-level intelligence, and octopuses themselves are smaller than people.
I would argue that some octopuses are smarter than some people I know. Also, some Giant Pacific Octopuses are arguably bigger than the average human, if much lighter.