I do agree we need to respect them a lot more and make a much stronger public message that they're not food and certainly shouldn't be tortured and treated as inhumanely as we routinely do.

Yes, the mind of an octopus is unknowable, and it could be just acting on instinct.

As someone who studied a lot of neurology, I could make a very strong argument that much of our behavior, no matter how well-reasoned we think it is, no matter how complex it is, is actually also just a very sophisticated system for facilitating our instinctual needs. The brain has a very real tendency to post-hoc justify our decisions and actions so much that we never notice it, but if you start to explore it, you will realize really quick that a lot of what we do and think we're choosing to do, are just products of very basic wants.

This isn't to diminish either them nor us, only to say that whatever is going inside that incredibly ancient brain of theirs, it's still a lot like us and needs to be respected as such.