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Octopi can change color, well most people I think assume that they do this for camouflage. That would be a reasonable assumption. They don't do it for camouflage. Let's talk about octopi for just a moment. First of all, they're mollusks. They divided from our evolutionary line 700 million years ago, they're related to escargot. They have no back bone, for crying out loud, they're not even vertebrate. But what is always said in biology classes about octopi is that they're a wonderful example of parallel evolution because their optical system is very much like a mammalian optical system, well why is this? Well its because they evolved in an environment, the reef environment, that is an environment as dense with signals as a rain forest is. An octopus is soft bodied, it can not only change color, but it can also change its surface from smooth and rubbery to bumpy, pinkly, rugose, ribbed, so forth and so on. And also, because it is soft bodied and in an aqueous environment it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body very very quickly. All of these behaviors and physiological characteristics go together to make the octopus an excellent visual communicator and the color changes, the blushes, travelling dots and bars that these creatures manifest, and the squids do it too, are language. And if you're interested in this there's a wonderful book by a guy named Moynihan called "Communication and Non-communication Among the Cephalopods," and he goes as far as creating a grammar for this stuff. So then, in a way, if you pull back from the mundane assumptions about this...whats happening is, the octopus wears its mind on its skin! It is dressed in its mental state. One octopus encountering another can tell its mood, how recently its eaten, how recently its had sex, whether its ovulating...all by looking. And so the only way an octopus can have a private thought is by squirting ink into the water and then hiding inside it. This is essentially its correction fluid for mispoken octopi, you see. So in a sense this is what I think we are being beckoned toward...that we want to clothe ourselves in language. We do it to a degree in a funny way, I mean...if you want to think about virtual reality, this is a virtual reality...all this stuff, these fixtures, the architecture, the infrastructure, the roads...these are ideas. It was an idea, and it has then been summoned into matter by the alotment of funds, the spending of money, the hiring of craftsmen. So for the thought...our whole civilization is an excreted sack of interlocking ideas, agreements...we're like coral animals. And somewhere there's this naked pulpy creature, but clothed in denim, clothed in a harder shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet, moving around inside a larger environment produced by the state of Colorado...and so forth and so on. And so I think octopi offer an excellent metaphoric example of what naked-mindedness would be. and some of these octopi, they evolved in the coastal reef domain, but thats a very competitive domain. Everybody in the ocean wants to be there, that's where the sunlight and the food is. So if you're smart you'll try and evolve into a more hostile niche and some of these octopi become what are called benthic or abyssal. It means they exist in the parts of the ocean where light never reaches. And they have retained this communication ability by switching over to interially generated phosphorescence. So there are species of octopi which actually are studded with organs that have the equivalent of eyelids over them, but they're flasher lights. So when you descend into the benthic depths of the ocean you enter a domain where all one octopus ever sees of another octopus is its linguistic productivity because of that interior generated light.