/pedant
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So, problem solved:
The octopus has a dream about being hunted down by a grammar pest.
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Our dog runs “at full speed” while asleep. 
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Because octopuses are in many ways very different indeed from us humans, and that includes their brain structure. It’s obvious (to me, at least) that dogs dream, and probably all mammals. I can easily believe that birds dream. Fish? Not sure, but either way wouldn’t surprise me. But octopuses? They’re very clever critters, definitely, but also very alien from us land-dwelling air-breathing endothermic mammalian vertebrates.
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I think we are working with an absence of evidence on the matter. Octopi are extremely different from and distantly related to mammals, but we know we have a lot of things in common. Humans may be more like dogs than like octopuses, but we are certainly a lot more like octopodes than we are like mushrooms.
It’s not like I am married to the idea that cephalopods must dream, and I can understand if someone just says, “well, we don’t know, do we.” But when I encounter people (as I have) who seem to think the idea of animals dreaming is a mind-blowing possibility that you might think of while you are high, I just find that odd. I figure if an animal behaves as if it has a sort of “mental theater” of the sort we do then the most likely explanation is that it does have that. And if you have that, I think odds are pretty good you dream (that is, your mental theater sometimes tries to interpret what is going on when you are sleeping with odd results).
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I think a lot of this comes down to the idea that if you accept that non-human animals can dream it really starts to screw up the food-not food divide.
But like you said, will we ever know the minds of the 10,000 things?
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What if plants dream too?
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Exactly! As alien as the octopus is to our biology, plants are far more alien. So much so, that can we really be sure our evaluation of them as unaware and unfeeling (thus morally acceptable) food is based on anything more than they are different enough from us that we do not care that they are living things?
FWIW I don’t think they feel bad as their roots digest our rotting corpses. So even Steven maybe.
Also, I have been watching the channel Journey to the Microcosmos and the one thing consistent with all of these early forms of life is that everything is trying to consume everything else. The need for energy is baked into the biology of the planet. I wonder if aliens from other planets might observe our planet and just wonder WTF is wrong with all of them?
Latest video:
(I love the narrators voice. 
)
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