My girlfriend is in love with the octopus, with the sort.

Today she sent me this article:

"You don’t need to go to outer space to encounter an alien. To find otherworldliness here on Earth, meet an octopus. Like many other people who have spent time with these remarkable creatures, I’ve been left with a vivid sense of an intelligent presence very different from our own.

The octopus is our very own terrestrial alien, with eight prehensile arms lined with suckers; three hearts; an ink-based defense mechanism; highly developed jet propulsion; a body that can change size, shape, texture and color at will; and cognitive abilities to rival many mammals. They can retrieve hidden objects from nested Plexiglass cubes, find their way through complex mazes, utilize natural objects as tools, and even solve problems by watching other octopuses do the same. The common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about half a billion neurons, roughly six times more than a mouse. If there are sentient aliens in the universe, one way of trying to understand what sort of consciousness they may have is to think about the inner universe of the common octopus.

To do this, we need a working definition of consciousness, although there is none that is universally agreed upon. A simple approach is to say that, for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism. Or one can say that consciousness, at least for humans, is what disappears when we fall into a dreamless sleep and what returns when we wake up. For conscious organisms, there seems to exist a continuous, though interruptible, stream of conscious scenes or experiences."

Read the article by Anil Seth here.

I would say that consciousness is the distance between you and your existence, i.e. the ability to reflect on your existence.

But the bigger question is: are we allowed to eat intelligent beings? Or should we allow ourselves only animals that we consider stupid?

Perhaps it makes more sense to say that you eat only animals that eat other animals.

In order to minimize the harm you do not living may be your best bet. But I know, the human being as carnivore won't last forever. We are doomed to munch on fake-meat, probably this is true progress.