Sentient Cuttlefish: The Novel?

I've mentioned on this blog thoughts on intelligent cephalopods a few times. The concept fascinates me: here is a group of animals at a completely different spot in the evolutionary chain from ourselves, lacking our mammalian social instincts, but yet with a high degree of intelligence. What if they were to cross some threshold and become self-aware? What would this look like? I've played with the idea of sentient dolphins also, but that seems more boring: they'd look like cavemen of the sea at first, and then build up something like an underwater, mammalian society, not too different from what humans would do. It would be a good test case in how a different environment can shape intelligence, but cephalopods are cooler. So, I want to start writing about them. Maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe an epic poem, but I want to make this happen, and I'm looking for input.

I'm still working on the setting. These beings lack social instincts, and this will change them at their very core. What does reason look like for them? Language? They don't use language primarily to communicate, so where does it come from? I'm thinking that it will arise from evolutionarily beneficial mnemonic systems, with perhaps some adaptation to rudimentary communication (such as "stay off my territory"). This entails that writing comes before speech for them.

They would also be solipsistic in a sense since they would have no innate feeling for others. But they wouldn't even have a well-defined sense of themselves, since there would be no other over which they could define themselves as separate individuals. Ethically, they would appear amoral, not having basic social feelings, but it's not as though they would actively try to be bad, either - they just wouldn't recognize each other. They would in some ways be more like those with extreme autism than, say, psychopaths, except that their entire evolution would have been guided by this.

Could these beings ever have anything remotely resembling a society? It would still be beneficial to them, but then how would they maintain it? Would they end up like Vulcans of a sort? What would happen if they encountered human beings (or sentient dolphins)? Just some of the ideas with which I am playing.