> If you took a human child and kept it completely isolated from all external teaching and human contact until after puberty, it's not obvious that it would appear that much more intelligent than an octopus.
Obviously we cannot deliberately test this hypothesis, but there have been a few cases of children raised in isolation who failed to ever attain an adult level of language [0]. In fact, if you measure by number of acquired words alone (a dubious metric), their capacity for learning language was at the same order of magnitude as gorillas [1] (the validity of gorilla language studies remains controversial).
To be taken with a rock of salt, of course, but it shows that development is far from guaranteed. This makes determining the intelligence potential of a species very difficult: what is the optimal environment for baby octopi to learn to communicate?
Obviously we cannot deliberately test this hypothesis, but there have been a few cases of children raised in isolation who failed to ever attain an adult level of language [0]. In fact, if you measure by number of acquired words alone (a dubious metric), their capacity for learning language was at the same order of magnitude as gorillas [1] (the validity of gorilla language studies remains controversial).
To be taken with a rock of salt, of course, but it shows that development is far from guaranteed. This makes determining the intelligence potential of a species very difficult: what is the optimal environment for baby octopi to learn to communicate?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation#Cases_of_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)