Human and octopus consciousness can meet in a rather profound way, experiencing a distinctive "I-Thou" moment, according to some humans, even though their evolutionary history is so different. They seem to be able to recognise each other and acknowledge a commonality which is not narrowly historical or ontogenetic - there is no parallel childhood or infant experience as there may be with other mammals - but drawn, if from a deeper history, from a shared inheritance at the cellular level and shared responses to solar and lunar cycles, and to similar ranges of energy levels, embodiment via the physics of matter at the intermediate scale. If intelligence were purely historical then human intelligence would be indelibly social and octopus intelligence as bluntly isolated and instrumental. There might be interaction, but it would not have that peculiarly empathic dimension, that sense of meeting an other across a divide, and the sudden abolition of that divide. Without any apparent need for it it seems that the unfolding of octopus intelligence includes a full emotional as well as cognitive life. It is as if once a certain threshold of intelligence is crossed the spirit in its entirety starts to break through, so that as mind develops it inevitably pulls spirit in with it, possibly, probably, in forms that are almost always latent.