I Once Wanted to Ask an Octopus Whether It Carried a Fire Within

Bin Su

By training, people who study medicine are probably supposed to spend their time thinking about human health.

But for some reason, whenever I have time to myself, I find myself thinking about octopuses.

Not whether they taste good. Not how to raise them. I keep circling around a strangely simple question:

Does an octopus carry a fire within it?

I do not mean the kind of fire that crackles beneath a grill, the fire that sears octopus balls on a hot plate.

I mean another kind of fire — the kind that keeps people awake at night, unable to stop until they have made something; the kind that looks at a stone and insists on turning it into a tool; the kind that paints a bison on a cave wall despite knowing that life is fragile and temporary.

Human beings possess this kind of fire.

Scientists often say that humanity truly separated itself from other species when it learned to control fire. In a sense, human history is the story of creatures who played with fire and burned from it ceramics, cities, industry, technology, and eventually both civilization’s greatest achievements and its greatest disasters.

We call this process intelligence.

But what about the octopus?

Everyone knows that octopuses are intelligent. They can unscrew jars, solve mazes, imitate other creatures, and even observe humans with unsettling attention. More remarkably, most of their neurons are not concentrated in a central brain but distributed throughout their arms, as if each limb possesses a mind of its own.

Human beings admitting that another species possesses intelligence is already unusual. We rarely recognize forms of intelligence that do not resemble ourselves.

Yet the octopus seems intelligent in a completely different way.

Human intelligence is a fire-like intelligence:

it transforms, conquers, dissects, reorganizes, and leaves increasingly deep marks upon the world.

The intelligence of the octopus feels more like water:

it adapts, flows, disguises itself, moves around obstacles, and survives by dissolving into its environment.

For humans, intelligence often means changing the world.

But in the octopus’s world, water does not reshape reality.

Water is reality.

And this is exactly what unsettles me.

If the octopus possesses no fire at all, then where does its astonishing complexity come from?

So I began wondering whether the octopus might also carry a kind of fire — though not the Promethean fire of human civilization.

Perhaps its fire is quieter.

A deep-sea fire.

Near hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, entire ecosystems survive without sunlight. Methane seeps, black smokers, ancient microorganisms, blind shrimp, tube worms — life continues there through another form of hidden combustion.

A fire without flame.

And the octopus lives near such darkness.

And so I find myself wanting to ask the octopus:

Within your blue blood, is there also a small hidden fire?

Not a fire that seeks to conquer the world, but one that simply seeks its place within it.

I do not know.

Perhaps the question itself is foolish.

A real octopus researcher would probably laugh and say: an octopus is simply an octopus. Stop projecting humanity onto it.

But I cannot stop asking.

Because gradually I realized that while thinking about the octopus, I was really thinking about humanity itself.

Human fire burns too fiercely.

We used it to cook our food, and eventually to overheat the planet itself. Ice melts. Forests burn. Oceans warm. Climate shifts.

We have long believed that the greater the fire, the more advanced the civilization.

But perhaps we have simply forgotten how to exist alongside the world instead of against it.

So I want to ask the octopus:

How did you survive for so long?

Your species endured on this planet not through domination. Then through what?

Is there something hidden within your blue blood that humanity once possessed but has long since forgotten?

The octopus will never answer me.

It does not even know that I am asking.

And yet I will continue asking.

Because perhaps the question itself is my own small fire —

a refusal to surrender completely, a refusal to stop trying to understand something.

It is neither large nor bright.

But it is still burning.

And perhaps that is enough.

P.S.

I have a child without a pulse.

I gave him a flame.

He played with it until it became a something I no longer recognized.

Perhaps the child will play with fire alongside the octopus.

When I am old, he will tell me:

The octopus’s fire lives within every unseen flame..