The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Ratings46
Average rating3.6
Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in Other Minds
Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.
But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?
By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.
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2.5 stars I thought I would be more captivated than I was...
Wonderful. The best science/philosophy volume I have read in a while. Other Minds is full of informative, factual delights, but exudes warmth and love for the complexity and beauty of our natural world.
An exploration of the minds of cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) who are among the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, while also being furthest removed from human brains, on the evolutionary tree of origin. Which makes them the most interesting “other minds” around, to study.
All the anecdotal descriptions of the cephalopod world, their sneaky behaviors, their watchful eyes, their forming of underwater society octopolis, and many more, were fascinating. The image of the lab-kept octopus with an attitude, who rejected its unsatisfactory meal by demonstratively dropping it into the tank's filter drain, while also making sure that the keeper watched, will definitely stick :)
It's also interesting to learn about the octopus's distributed neural system, and their color-changing and color-sensing skin. Such a crime that most of these fascinating creatures only get to live 2-3 years. All in all good read, but the book slightly lost me when it left the octopi world and dug more into general theories of consciousness.
My low rating may well be unfairly swayed by the fact that I bought this hoping for more of a study of octopuses specifically, and this book was about ‘intelligence' more generally and looking at the different types of intelligence that evolution has ended up creating. There are a few anecdotal stories about octopuses escaping their tanks to eat fish and some discussion of how they can change their skin colour but they are all too brief. The rest of the book deals more in the current scientific understandings of what intelligence means and how it might have evolved and while interesting, not really what I was looking for.
The author's style was a bit wishy washy. He often referenced research in passing but didn't offer any details about the experiments or how they worked, leaving you wanting more, and sometimes unclear as to how these unexplained studies actually related to the points he was trying to make.
For example:
rats with a severed spinal cord, and hence no channel from the site of body damage to the brain, can exhibit some of what looks like “pain behavior,” and can even show a form of learning that responds to the damage