What do North Korea and an octopus have in common? More than you might think

Is there any way I might persuade you that the behaviour of North Korea might seem less animalistic if only we understood where the hard-to-figure octopus was coming from?

I propose this because I despair of learning anything new from conventional political science, which has been on this for decades and yet we still don’t know really why North Korea is the way it is or even what it is.

So why don’t we try something different? Let’s dip into the deep of neuroscience, which studies the nervous system and the brain, and which in recent years has been stirring the imagination of our naturalists and philosophers to wondrous effect.

Start with the famed research at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, England, that about 10 years ago advanced our sense of human consciousness.

They were able to show (via MRI technology) that consciousness, at some level, could exist even in a human being in a brutally degenerative state, as long as the brain was still functioning. Through advanced neuro-imaging, they could track the brain of the patient “listening” to them, even though she could not respond or even signal with eye movement.

Consciousness, then, is no less conscious in the absence of communicability. It gets better: human consciousness clearly arises from the neural processes of the central brain, but research on animals high up on the evolutionary ladder suggests that consciousness (or “subjective experience”) may be the product of the total organism, not just of one organ in that animal, as with the “human being” animal. And this turns out to be the case with the octopus, weird-looking and sometimes bizarre-acting, but almost always misunderstood, as it is not human.