Oberhauser

The Smythes both put on weight and Major Smythe had the first of his two coronaries and was told by his doctor to cut down on his alcohol and cigarettes and take life more easily. He was also to avoid fats and fried food. At first Mary Smythe tried to be firm with him; then, when he took to secret drinking and to a life of petty lies and evasions, she tried to back-pedal on her attempts to control his self-indulgence. But she was too late. She had already become the symbol of the janitor to Major Smythe and he took to avoiding her. She berated him with not loving her any more and, when the resultant bickering became too much for her simple nature, she became a sleeping-pill addict. Then, after one flaming, drunken row, she took an overdose ‘just to show him’. It was too much of an overdose and it killed her. The suicide was hushed up, but the resultant cloud did Major Smythe no good socially and he returned to the North Shore which, although only some three miles across the island from the capital, is, even in the small society of Jamaica, a different world. And there he had settled in Wavelets and, after his second coronary, was in the process of drinking himself to death when this man called Bond arrived on the scene with an alternative death warrant in his pocket. 

Major Smythe looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after twelve o’clock. He got up and poured himself another stiff brandy and ginger ale and went out on to the lawn. 

James Bond was sitting under the sea-almonds, gazing out to sea. 

He didn’t look up when Major Smythe pulled up another aluminium garden chair and put his drink on the grass beside him. 

When Major Smythe had finished telling his story, Bond said unemotionally, ‘Yes, that’s more or less the way I figured it.’ 

‘Want me to write it all out and sign it?’ 

‘You can if you like. But not for me. That’ll be for the court martial. Your old Corps will be handling all that. I’ve got nothing to do with the legal aspects. I shall put in a report to my own Service of what you’ve told me and they’ll pass it on to the Royal Marines. Then I suppose it’ll go to the Public Prosecutor via Scotland Yard.’ 

‘Could I ask a question?’ 

‘Of course.’ 

‘How did they find out?’ 

‘It was a small glacier. Oberhauser’s body came out at the bottom of it earlier this year. When the spring snows melted. Some climbers found it. All his papers and everything were intact. The family identified him. Then it was just a question of working back. The bullets clinched it.’ 

‘But how did you get mixed up in the whole thing?’ 

‘MOB Force was a responsibility of my, er, Service. The papers found their way to us. I happened to see the file. I had some spare time on my hands. I asked to be given the job of chasing up the man who did it.’ 

‘Why?’ 

James Bond looked Major Smythe squarely in the eyes. ‘It just happened that Oberhauser was a friend of mine. He taught me to ski before the war, when I was in my teens. He was a wonderful man. He was something of a father to me at a time when I happened to need one.’ 

‘Oh, I see.’ Major Smythe looked away. ‘I’m sorry.’ 

James Bond got to his feet. ‘Well, I’ll be getting back to Kingston.’ He held up a hand. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll find my way to the car.’ He looked down at the older man. He said abruptly, almost harshly – perhaps, Major Smythe thought, to hide his embarrassment – ‘It’ll be about a week before they send someone out to bring you home.’ Then he walked off across the lawn and through the house and Major Smythe heard the iron whirr of the self-starter and the clatter of the gravel on the unkempt drive. 

Major Smythe, questing for his prey along the reef, wondered what exactly those last words of the Bond man had meant. Inside the Pirelli his lips drew mirthlessly back from the stained teeth. It was obvious, really. It was just a version of the corny old act of leaving the guilty officer alone with his revolver. If the Bond man had wanted to, he could have telephoned Government House and had an officer of the Jamaica Regiment sent over to take Major Smythe into custody. Decent of him, in a way. Or was it? 

A suicide would be much tidier, save a lot of paperwork and tax-payers’ money. 

Should he oblige the Bond man and be tidy? Join Mary in whatever place suicides go to? Or go through with it – the indignity, the dreary formalities, the headlines, the boredom and drabness of a life sentence that would inevitably end with his third coronary? Or should he defend himself – plead wartime, a struggle with Oberhauser on the Peak of Gold, prisoner trying to escape, Oberhauser knowing of the gold cache, the natural temptation of Smythe to make away with the bullion, he, a poor officer of the Commandos confronted with sudden wealth? Should he dramatically throw himself on the mercy of the court?

Charles

Charles’s ornery personality, although extreme, 

would probably not surprise people who have 

worked with octopuses in laboratory conditions. 

Octopuses come with many differing personalities, 

but they are antisocial creatures in The Wild 

and they do not play nicely with others.

Have You Come Far....?

....So, Wong has to fight The Octopus, 

and he is just reduced to  providing him with some back-up as Wong’s partner — the most powerful human being in the entire MCU, and he’s someone else’s sidekick !!

….That’s a hard thing for the Ego of ANY man over the age of 40 to have to cope with, and then you have Strange’s extra-normal, over-stuffed sense of Vanity layered on top of all that…..

“What fell out in the course of the analysis was the story of a horrific childhood involving emotional, physical, and most likely sexual abuse. 

My patient reported that her mother chained her to her crib, abandoned her, and told her that she wished she had never been born. Her birthdays were always marked by this statement of her mother's, and instead of feeling that her birth was something to be celebrated, she felt nothing cliches of the false self no longer worked for her, and her sarcastic humor came to the fore. 

In response to those who would say things to her such as "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," she wrote alongside her second self-portrait these lines: "Yeah, right. And it's better to have skied and broken every bone in your body than to have never gone skiing! 

And it's better to have raised pit bulls and gotten torn to shreds than to have never raised pit bulls! 

And I suppose it's better to have drunk drain cleaner and dissolved your insides than to have never drunk drain cleaner?" 

The weight of these feelings contributed to her feeling alienated from herself and from God, not knowing where to turn. At times these feelings led to suicidal ideation and the desire to say good-bye to this world. 

At one point in our work she produced the following drawing (figure 2.11), which summed up her feelings of being overwhelmed by her emotions. 

This work resembles a personal mortificatio in which she emphasizes her feelings of inadequacy, entrapment, grief, immobilization, hopelessness, worthlessness, fragmentation, bewilderment, resentment, loss, chaos, and voidness. 

The octopus in the upper left-hand emotions, which, like tentacles, grab at her and are linked to one dark center. 

I think it is not far fetched to see the octopus, with its dark center and penetrating, raylike tentacles, as another version of Sol niger.”

“Can anything non-human be conscious? The lack of a definition of consciousness makes this tricky to answer, but it is still a question worth considering because of the implications for AGI. 

It can be enlightening, at this point, to consider the octopus. From a human perspective, octopuses are about as weird as life gets. For a start, they can squeeze their bodies through a hole as small as their own eyeball. They have three hearts and blue-green blood. Their oesophagus, which connects the mouth to the stomach, runs through the centre of their brain. They also have twice as many brain cells in their arms as they do in their central brain itself, and they have the strange ability to tweak or edit the genetic instructions encoded in their DNA. 

You have to go back a long way – about 600 million years – to find a common ancestor of both humans and octopuses. This was long before life had crawled out of the seas and before there was any such thing as invertebrates and vertebrates. Our common ancestor would have been a tiny wriggling worm-like thing, only millimetres in size. It would have been sufficiently evolved to contain some neurons, and possibly a pair of light-sensitive patches that were the beginnings of eyes, but it was otherwise very far removed from the mammals, birds, lizards and cephalopods that its offspring would become. 

Because humans and octopuses have been on a separate evolutionary path for so long, researchers studying octopus DNA say that it is the closest thing we can get to studying alien DNA. 

If octopuses possess consciousness, then it has evolved entirely separately from our own. This would mean that consciousness is not some miraculous quality that only humans can possess. It would confirm that consciousness is indeed something that pops into existence when Evolution has produced a sufficiently suitable brain. 

This, in turn, would make the idea that computers could become conscious more plausible. 

Out of all the non-human animals on the planet, octopuses have the strongest case for possessing a form of consciousness that, while not exactly the same as Human, is sufficiently similar for them to both be classed together. 

It is not, admittedly, easy to be sure. 

Octopuses don’t play well with standard animal behaviour tests. 

For example, the Harvard scientist Peter Daws performed tests on octopuses in Naples in the 1950s, including seeing whether an octopus could be trained to pull a lever in order to release a morsel of food. 

Two of Daws’s three octopuses duly pulled The Lever and obtained The Food. The third octopus, named Charles, also passed the test, but in something of a begrudging manner. He anchored his tentacles on the side of the tank so that he could apply great force to The Lever. In this way he repeatedly bent The Lever, and eventually succeeded in breaking it off. 

Charles The Octopus did not seem happy to take part in these experiments. As Daws wrote, ‘Charles had a high tendency to direct jets of water out of the tank; specifically, they were in the direction of The Experimenter. 

The Animal spent much time with eyes above The Surface of The Water, directing a jet of water at any individual who approached the tank. 

This behaviour interfered materially with the smooth conduct of the experiments, and is, again, clearly incompatible with lever-pulling.’ 

Charles’s ornery personality, although extreme, would probably not surprise people who have worked with octopuses in laboratory conditions. Octopuses come with many differing personalities, but they are antisocial creatures in the wild and they do not play nicely with others. 

They are also very good at recognising different humans, even when those humans wear scuba masks or identical uniforms, and they often take against some people and not others. 

The philosopher Stefan Linquist had trouble when he worked with octopuses because they would deliberately plug the outflow valve of their tank with their arms, raising the water level and ultimately flooding the lab. 

As he explained, ‘When you work with fish, they have no idea they are in a tank, somewhere unnatural. 

With octopuses it is totally different. They know that they are inside this special place, and you are outside it. 

All their behaviours are affected by their awareness of captivity.’ 

When the BBC filmed a shark attacking an octopus off the coast of South Africa for an episode of the TV series Blue Planet II, they were amazed to see the octopus deliberately inserting its arms into the shark’s gills. 

Unable to breathe, The Shark had no choice but to break off the attack. The octopus then covered itself in shells from the sea floor and hid from The Shark. 

None of this could plausibly be dismissed as intelligent-seeming learnt or automatic behaviour. It appeared that The Octopus was aware of exactly what it was doing. 

As the camera operator Craig Foster later wrote, ‘watching her trying to outwit a deadly catshark was terrifying for me [ …] I totally fell in love with this octopus.’ 

Of course, octopuses have not demonstrated intelligence to the extent that We have. They have not invented Opera, or built Cathedrals, or launched a space programme. [ As far as We know. ]

But octopuses are relatively antisocial and the development of human culture was fuelled by co-operation. 

As the American biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes writes, ‘Countless individuals’ ability to think creatively is what led us to succeed as a species [ …] This cocktail of creativity and collaboration distinguishes our species – no other species has ever been able to do it so well.’ 

Being boneless sea dwellers with a lifespan of only a couple of years, octopuses have little use for Opera and Cathedrals. 

But if they learnt to co-operate and communicate, are they sufficiently aware and conscious to be able to produce their own examples of intelligence and culture?