Communication in Color

The title of my khutbah today is “Communication in Color”.  While you might think this was inspired by the oncoming fall foliage, it was actually inspired by a line from the Quran and octopuses- as well as cuttlefish (cousins to the octopus).

The line from Quran is found in 2:138 “Colors from Allah! And who could give a better color than God, if we but worship Him?” Sibghatal-lahi wa man ‘ahsanu minal-lahi sibghah. Wa nahmu lahu ‘abidun.

It is a curious ayah. Sometimes “color” is translated as “Hue” or “Dye”.  The translators have a bit of a problem with it.  The root letters – suad ba ghyn- - signify savour or relish. As an artist I love that, but that is not much help to a translator.  Since the ayah comes in the middle of the theological debate with Jews and Christians, many commenters have said that the “color” or “Dye” is a colloquial expression for “Baptism”, the ayah then means that it doesn’t matter who baptizes you, the fact that you worship God is baptism enough. That is certainly one way of interpreting the ayah and you can leave it at that.

However, when I was reading a philosophy/natural history book called “Other Minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness” by Peter Godfrey-Smith, I thought again of this ayah as I came across passages of the octopus and cuttlefish.

Why write a book about octopuses and what does this have to do with consciousness? Godfrey-Smith wrote the book because he is a philosopher interested in consciousness, and he was wondering what it would be like to encounter an alien from a different planet and what that consciousness would look like. If you’ve seen the science fiction movie “Arrival”, that is a similar thought experiment, and interestingly, the aliens from that movie look like octopus or squids. Since he didn’t have access to an alien, he looked at our evolutionary tree. Octopuses and humans share a common ancestor, but our paths diverged millions of years ago. Octopuses live in the sea, we carry the sea within us.  We are related to primates and mammels, octopuses are related to molluscs and clams. Over millions of years, as cephalopods (octopuses, squids and cuttlefish) shed their shells and opted for mobility, they developed a very complex neural network which Is very different from ours. Their brains are organized in a way that looks nothing like ours. Instead of one central brain controlling and directing all action, they have a brain that coordinates discrete activies (i.e. their arms). The analogy Godfrey-Smith uses is human brains are like Paul Revere and the sexton. The sexton lights a candle (one if by land, two if by see), Paul Revere sees the candle and acts. Cephalopod brains are more like a rowboat with eight oarsmen and a coxswain. The coxswain navigates the boat and calls out the time to coordinate the rowers, but each of the rowers is a fairly independent agent. 

We are used to our own consciousness, where environmental stimuli streams are integrated into one single picture. But for many species, this is not the case- the left side doesn’t know what the right side is doing. Particularly for animals with eyes on the sides of their head (not in front like us), the eyes have separate visual fields, and the information is not always passed on to the other side of the brain. For some species, they may be better positioned to evade predators or find food on one side of their body versus the other. Scientists think that if different tasks require different kinds of processing, it might be easier for a brain with specialized sides and not tie them too closely together. I am reminded of studies done in Russia on dolphins (which can’t be done nowadays), but they showed that dolphins sleep on one side of the brain, and then switch- alternating sleep patterns (one side awake, other side asleep). Humans that have had their corpus callosum severed (an early treatment for severe epilepsy) behave fairly normally, unless they are put under special experimental conditions where different halves of the brain are exposed to different stimuli.

“The left side of the brain usually controls language (though not always) and when you talk to a split-brain person, it is the left side show speaks back. Though the right side cannot usually speak, it can control the left hand. So it can choose objects by touch, and draw pictures. In various experiments, different images are provided to each side of the brain. If the person is asked what they have seen, their verbal response will follow what was shown to the left side of the brain, but the right side-controlling the left hand- may disagree. The special kind of mental fragmentation seen in split-brain humans seems a routine part of many animals’ life.” P 86

“To some degree, unity is inevitable in a living agent: an animal is a whole, a physical object keeping itself alive. But in other ways, unity is optional, an achievement, an invention. Bringing experience together- even the deliverances of the two eyes- is something that evolution may or may not choose to do.” P 87

So how does this relate to color? Most cephalopods (not all, but most) are very good at camouflage. They can change their color within seconds to blend in with their surroundings. Remember, these are animals without bones, teeth, or fangs,  who wander along the ocean floor looking for food and evading a huge variety of predators. Furthermore, most of you are familiar with the ink that cephalopods squirt at predators to avoid being eaten. The ink jet is often accompanied with a dramatic color change to scare the predator- or at least get him to open his mouth to release the arm.

Godfrey-Smith describes an encounter with a cuttlefish:

“This animal is three feet long with a skin that can appear just about any color at all and can change in seconds, sometimes much faster than a second. Thin silver lines wander over its head, as if the animal is visibly electrified. The electric lines make the cuttlefish look like a hovering spacecraft. But the disruption to one’s impressions, to all attempts to make sense of the animal, is continual. As you watch, bright red trails lead from its eyes. A spaceship crying tears of blood? …IN the case of large cuttlefish, the entire body is a screen on which patterns are played. The patterns are not just a series of snapshots, but moving shapes, like stripes and clouds. These seem to be immensely expressive animals, animals with a lot to say. If so, what is being said, and to whom?” p 108

“Colors from God! And who could give a better color than God, if we but worship Him?”

What makes the color change capacity of cephalopods so interesting is that they are rather solitary creatures, they tend to be loners and do not tend over their young. They are said to be color blind.

PAUSE

In order to tell the difference between brightness of light  versus color of light, you need to have photoreceptors. Photoreceptor cells have molecules that change shape with different frequencies of light. Most humans have three kinds of photoreceptors, most color vision systems need at least two. Cephalopods have only one.

In behavior test where cephalopods are asked to distinquish between two stimuli that only differ in color, the ones who have been tested, fail.

How can you match color if you cannot see? One explanation is that you use reflecting cells, mirrors in the skin, to reflect back the color from outside. Cephalopods do have these reflecting cells in their skin. But if the animal is matching color behind its back and the color from the front is different, then the cephalopod would need to actively produce the right color- which it can also do using chromatophores it its skin.

What researchers have learned is that the octopus skin can both sense light and produce a response  that affects the skin’s color. The octopus can see with its skin.

Godfrey-Smith writes,

“What could it be like to see with your skin? There could be no focusing on an image. Only general changes and washes of light could be detected. We don’t yet know whether the skin’s sensing is communicated to the brain, or whether the information remains local. Both possibilities stretch the imagineation. If the skin’s sensing is carried to the brain, then the animal’s visual sensitivity would extend in all directions, beyond where the eyes can reach. If the skin’s sensing does not reach the brain, then each arm might see for itese, and keep what it sees to itself.” P 121

“I think that these animals have a sophisticated system designed for camouflage and signaling, but one that is connected to the brain in a way theat leads to all sorts of strange expressive quirks- to a kind of ongoing chromatic chatter.” P 128

By now you are probably thinking, Ok this is interesting but what does this have to do with God?

When we learn about how other organisms live and perceive the world around them, we gain a sense of humility. There are animals that can take the same thing I perceive, light for instance, and they can see it absorbed as a color, or know how it is polarized, or use it to determine what season it is or navigate a thousand mile migration pattern. I can’t do those things, I am not built that way. In appreciating the diversity of others, I am reminded that my perception is limited. I am not omniscient and I am not omnipotent. I am not a god.

In the Quran, 21:28-30

“(God) knows all that lies open before them and all that is hidden from them; hence, they cannot intercede for any but those whom (God) has graced with His goodly acceptance, since they themselves stand in reverent awe of Him. And if any of them were to say, ‘Behold, I am a deity beside Him’- that one We should requite with hell; thus do We requite all such evildoers. Are, then they who are bent on denying the truth not aware that the heavens and the earth were once one single entity which We then parted asunder? And that We made out of water every living thing?. Will they then not believe?”

It is also my hope that as we gain knowledge of the world around us and we see the amazing and beautiful creations God has rendered, that we will become more appreciative of the air, the earth, and the water and all the creatures that dwell therein. If we are grateful and filled with wonder, then we will be less prone to destroy and exploit our world. We will become better khalifas of this planet and strengthen our accountability to God who has charged us with this task of caring for our world.

REFERENCES:
Quran translations: "The Message of the Qur'an" by Muhammad Asad

"Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" by Peter Godfrey-Smith 2016  (Fararr-Strauss and Giroux: New York)