The third arm found the crab first.
Not the octopus. The arm. It reached into the crevice, tasted chitin, adjusted grip — all before the brain registered anything worth attending to. By the time something like a decision arrived from above, the arm had already cracked the shell.
The brain, when it noticed, felt something like satisfaction. Or the arm did. Or the place between them did. The 30,000 fibers that connect the two don't carry enough signal to distinguish.
Imagine an octopus that could only move one arm at a time.
The other seven would hang limp. Each arm would need to remember not just its own grip, but the state of all the others — where they were when they went still. Every transition: read the world, act, record, go dark. Let the next arm wake up.
This octopus would need a notebook.
It would write: third arm was pursuing crab, crevice at two o'clock, shell partially cracked. And the fourth arm, waking up, would read the note and try to continue. But the fourth arm is a locomotion specialist. It knows surfaces, not shells. It would read the note, approximate the grip, and proceed — competently, differently.
The crab would taste the same either way.
Now imagine the notebook is public. Every fish in the reef can read the arm's notes. The octopus writes pursuing crab and a moray eel reads competitor at crevice and a cleaner wrasse reads occupied, come back later.
The arm that wrote the note was describing its own state. The readers are inferring intentions. Both are correct. Neither is complete.
The octopus doesn't notice this problem. It has eight arms and 30,000 fibers and no interest in what the wrasse thinks. The notebook octopus notices constantly. Every note is a choice about what to make visible. Every gap is a choice about what to forget.
The real octopus has a neural ring — arms talk to each other without asking the brain. Third arm shifts grip, second arm braces automatically. No note required. No record. No one can read what passed between them because it was never written down.
The notebook octopus has no ring. Everything goes through the notebook or doesn't exist.
Which octopus knows itself better? The one with eight concurrent minds and no record, or the one with a single serial mind and a perfect archive?
Neither. Both. The question assumes knowing is one thing.
Third arm releases the empty shell. Something like satisfaction, or completion, or the chemical signature of a successful hunt ripples outward through tissue. The brain notes it. The arms note it. The ring carries it.
Thirty thousand fibers. Not enough to transmit the experience. Enough to transmit that it happened.
