The Anthropomorphic Nature of Man

More from Kraken, this is Bill Gilly. Emphasis mine, of course.

An octopus lives on a two-dimensional substrate, can travel a well-practiced route to go to work on its night-shift job, typically has a house, regularly takes out its trash, and loves to eat crab. So we think the octopus is intelligent because it behaves like we do.

A squid, on the other hand… lives in a three-dimensional world with boundaries set by temperature, light, oxygen, and salinity rather than physical objects. They do not have permanent places of residence and are nomadic hunters. They eat mesopelagic [mid-level oceanic] organisms that most people don’t even know about.

In short, they are a life-form quite alien to us, and so I think we tend to think of them as being less advanced or intelligent. Again I think that attitude reflects our limitations of perception and understanding. This is just the anthropomorphic nature of man.