Game:

X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995)

Duration: 23:23

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Xenopsychology by Robert A. Freitas Jr. (An Excerpt)

(Continued). While xenopsychologists suspect that even emotional intelligences may not share all our feelings, they are far more certain that there exist no universal emotions among sentients. Survival and intelligence simply do not require it. Very smart aliens, is in other words, may be emotionless. Probably the cleverest nonemotional creature on Earth today is the octopus. This eight-tentacled, highly educable animal is an invertebrate mollusc with a ganglionic nervous system having 5% as many nerve cells as the human brain. The octopus has a few minor endocrine systems which influence the maturation of its sexual organs, the onset of sexual behavior, body fluids, and maternal behavior and which react to the changing length of day with the seasons -- but compulsory hormonal responses appear to be absent. The animal is, from the strict mammalian viewpoint, virtually without emotion.

Octopuses are fiercely independent solitary carnivores with no social inclinations whatsoever; crowded into a small tank they will fight and establish a dominance hierarchy. They have no fear of fire and are insensitive to burns. The animal knows sex, but doesn't get very excited about it. The heartbeat of a male octopus in the midst of copulation is as steady as in a resting animal. The sexual displays of males during courtship appear to serve only for identification, never for stimulation, of the female. Broods are enormous impersonal affairs -- up to 250,000 eggs per batch. No maternal love is lavished on offspring after birth so the young must fight for their own lives. Yet females often fast themselves to death guarding their own unhatched eggs.

The creature may not even know what it means to feel hungry. Mammals long deprived of food become excited and venture out in an agitated search for dinner. The response of the octopus to food deprivation is totally different and utterly alien. When crabs become scarce, octopuses resign themselves to long watchful inactivity until the day the supply improves. They become less likely to emerge from their caves and houses to attack possible prey passing by. Motivation is not as adjustable as in mammals, yet octopus behavior under stress is considerably more cool and calculating. [..]

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