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Summary
Summary
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 ina 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.
Author Notes
Peter Godfrey-Smith is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several books, including Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection , which won the 2010 Lakatos Award. His underwater videos of octopuses have been featured in National Geographic and New Scientist , and he has discussed them on National Public Radio and many cable TV channels.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Deftly blending philosophy and evolutionary biology, Godfrey-Smith (Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection), an Australian philosopher of science, uses his passion for cephalopods to address "how consciousness arose from the raw materials found in living beings." Comparing vertebrate consciousness and intelligence with that of cephalopods is not as odd as it might seem, because "cephalopods are evolution's only experiment in big brains outside of the vertebrates." Godfrey-Smith demonstrates that octopuses are constructed from a dramatically different plan than vertebrates, with each of their arms having the ability to act and sense their environment semi-autonomously from their central brains. This striking difference raises intriguing questions about the nature of communication within organisms, as well as about the meaning of intelligence. Godfrey-Smith couples his philosophical and scientific approach with ample and fascinating anecdotes as well as striking photography from his numerous scuba dives off the Australian coast. He makes the case that cephalopods demonstrate a type of intelligence that is largely "alien" to our understanding of the concept but is no less worthy of wonder. He also ponders how and why such intelligence developed in such short-lived creatures (they generally live only a few years). Godfrey-Smith doesn't provide definitive answers to his questions, but the journey he leads is both thoroughly enjoyable and informative. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Philosophers don't usually practice their discipline at the bottom of the sea, but, for Godfrey-Smith, observing and videotaping octopuses in the wild have provided invaluable keys to the evolution of consciousness. In an engrossing blend of avidly described underwater adventures off the coast of Australia in what he dubbed Octopolis for its unusual congregation of busy cephalopods, and a fluid inquiry into the brain-body connection, Godfrey-Smith considers the protean nature of the octopus, a complex animal utterly divergent in its evolutionary trajectory from our own. Nonchalantly elucidating complex concepts, he describes the octopus' decentralized nervous system, phenomenally malleable body, and multihued light-show skin, all propelled by a mischievously curious and intrepid intelligence, well illustrated by lively tales about laboratory octopuses with attitude. Godfrey-Smith also performs an exceptionally revealing deep dive into the evolutionary progression from sensing to acting to remembering to the coalescence of the inner voice, thus tracking the spectrum between sentience and consciousness. Godfrey-Smith concludes with wonder The mind evolved in the sea, which is the origin of us all and concern: the sea must be defended and preserved.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IKE'S GAMBLE: America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, by Michael Doran. (Free Press, $17.) In the early years of his administration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower set out to woo President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. But instead of stabilizing the Middle East, the efforts helped further inflame the region. Doran's account offers a cautionary tale for contemporary diplomatic interventions. HUMAN ACTS, by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. (Hogarth, $15.) The 1980 massacre of student protesters in South Korea is the subject of this novel, as a teenager searches for his best friend's corpse. Han, who won the Man Booker International Prize for "The Vegetarian," helps readers "witness the impossibly large spectrum of humanity, and wonder how it is that one end could be so different from the other," our reviewer, Nami Mun, wrote. OTHER MINDS: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) Humans and cephalopods appear to have little in common but share some crucial characteristics, including complex nervous systems. Godfrey-Smith's investigation takes him millions of years into the past and miles below sea level. As he put it: "When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all." HIMSELF, by Jess Kidd. (Washington Square Press/Atria, $16.) The supernatural and the past commingle in Kidd's debut novel. A mysterious letter leads Mahoney, a car thief in Dublin, back to his childhood village, where he was left at the door of an orphanage. As he untangles his family's history and coaxes out village gossip, he's joined by a bored, aging actress. "Add poisoned scones and letter bombs, and you have a fast-paced yarn that nimbly soars," our reviewer, Katharine Weber, said. ON LIVING, by Kerry Egan. (Riverhead, $16.) As a hospice chaplain, Egan writes, she deals in the "spiritual work of dying." Some patients asked her to share their stories, which resonate long after their death; Egan uses her book to recount them, along with reflections on her work and the issues surrounding end-of-life care. Together, these perspectives offer a guide for how to live with urgency and meaning. A GAMBLER'S ANATOMY, by Jonathan Lethem. (Vintage, $16.95.) Alexander Bruno - a debonair expat backgammon player with telepathic capabilities - travels the world beating wealthy opponents at the game. But when a tumor causes him to collapse during a high-stakes match in Berlin, he returns to California for an experimental treatment, on a wealthy childhood friend's dime.
Choice Review
Saul (emer., Royal Holloway, Univ. of London) has written a masterful account of the relationship between the English gentry and the parish church from the Norman Conquest to the early 16th century. The author of Chivalry in Medieval England (CH, Apr'12, 49-4681) and English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages (2009) combines analysis of episcopal registers and testaments with an encyclopedic knowledge of surviving church fabrics to argue that the gentry did not retreat from involvement in the parish in the late Middle Ages. Despite the popularity of domestic chapels and books of hours, the gentry remained invested in communal religious life. They built and modified churches, created family mausoleums, and established perpetual chantries, both to obtain intercession for their souls and to fulfill the responsibilities of what Saul calls "Christian lordship." Their stone tombs and heraldry made the parish church a "setting for lordly display," but the need for intercession meant that gentry families took their responsibilities as patrons and advocates seriously. By necessity, Saul employs a host of architectural terms that will be unfamiliar to many readers. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students through faculty. --Matthew Wranovix, University of New Haven
Guardian Review
A scuba-diving philosopher of science explores the wonder of cephalopods, smart and playful creatures who live outside the brain-body divide 'Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea." Coleridge's lines evoke those Precambrian depths where sensate life first stirred, and which remain lodged atavistically in our collective imaginations. Perhaps that's why we look on the octopus as an eldritch other, with its more-than-the usual complement of limbs, bulbous eyes, seeking suckers and keratinous beaks voraciously devouring anything in its slippery path. Peter Godfrey-Smith's brilliant book entirely overturns those preconceptions. Cephalopods -- octopuses, squids and nautiluses -- "are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals", he writes, having developed on a different path from us, "an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour". This is why they present themselves as a fascinating case study to Godfrey-Smith, who is a philosopher of science -- because of what can be learned from them about the minds of animals, including our own. His book stands alongside such recent works as Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell's The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins as evidence of new and unconstrained thinking about the species with which we share our watery planet. Unlike cetaceans -- whose sentience it is possible to imagine, partly because they demonstrate our mammalian connections so vividly and physically -- cephalopods are entirely unlike us. "If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over," says Godfrey-Smith. "This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien." The fact that they have eight legs, three hearts, and blue-green blood allies them more with The Simpsons ' gloopy extra-terrestrials than anything earthly. The beauty of Godfrey-Smith's book lies in the clarity of his writing; his empathy, if you will. He takes us through those early stirrings in the seas of deep time, from bacteria that sense light and can taste, to cnidarian jellyfish, the first organisms to exhibit nervous systems, which he describes wonderfully: "Picture a filmy lightbulb in which the rhythms of nervous activity first began." The ocean itself became the conduit for evolution; we feel a magnetic attraction to the vast waters that gave us birth because we still carry the sea inside us. "The chemistry of life is an aquatic chemistry. We can get by on land only by carrying a huge amount of salt water around with us." In the same way, the octopus's fluidity seems like a collation of the sea itself. Its ancestors evolved defensive shells and became the first predators: the frills of these snail-like creatures, which crawled on the ocean floor, became tentacles and they began to swim. Then they discarded their shells; the first octopus probably appeared 290m years ago. They also developed large brains to compensate for their new vulnerability. A common octopus brain has 500m neurons, a "smartness" that ranks alongside dogs and even a three-year-old child. But unlike a vertebrate's, an octopus's neurons are ranged through its entire body. It is "suffused with nervousness" -- including its arms, which act as "agents of their own" and sense by taste as much as touch. For the octopus, "the body itself is protean, all possibility"; it "lives outside the usual body/brain divide". The result is a wondrous being. In lab experiments, octopuses attain good results, able to negotiate mazes and unscrew jars containing food, using visual cues to achieve their goals. They also show a sense of craftiness -- squirting water at researchers they don't like, for instance. One celebrated aquarium-kept octopus proved its skill when staff noticed fish from a neighbouring tank had gone missing overnight -- CCTV revealed the smooth operator. The octopus was lifting the lid on its own tank, slithering over to the fish, claiming its prize, then crawling back, covering itself again as if nothing had happened. But Godfrey-Smith finds another anecdote more revealing: an octopus at the University of Otago in New Zealand learned to turn off lights by squirting water at the bulbs; brightness annoys an octopus. Cephalopods are not only aware of their environment; they seek to manipulate it. Godfrey-Smith's interest in octopuses goes beyond the academic. An experienced scuba diver, his empathy is a product of personal observation, mostly in the Pacific Ocean close to Sydney, where he teaches. It is this that makes him ask what it feels like to be an octopus. Consciousness is required to perform novel acts -- beyond routine or instinct. Octopuses will manipulate half-coconut shells in ways that suggest they are investigating the shapes as much as using them. They play; they recognise individuals (both human and octopus); and, like us, they exhibit qualities of caution and recklessness as they intuit the world. Octopuses play, they recognise humans and, like us, they exhibit qualities of caution and recklessness As those autonomous arms reach out and touch-taste the diving author, he reads their gestures as friendliness rather than possible predation. They even see with their skin, replicating the terrain around or below using a layered screen of pixel-like cells known as chromatophores, iridophores and leucophores to detect and reflect the shade and pattern of rocks or sand. Nor is this almost photographic ability solely for camouflage; cephalopods flood their bodies with colour according their moods. Godfrey-Smith's Romantic flourishes summon up almost angelic, Blakean spirits: one octopus on the offensive, flushing red with horns, seems to create "a real sense of what is frightening for a human, and was trying to produce a vision of damnation". Wondering if he is "entirely real in their watery world", and not "one of those ghosts who does not realise they are a ghost", the author hypothesises that this "chromatic chatter" is a subtle kind of communication. We now know that speech isn't needed for complex thought; perhaps these animals, so incredibly sensate, learning from each other's behaviour, shifting in shape and colour, are more social than we ever suspected. Yet what they might know or feel still eludes us. Returning again and again to his many-armed friends in their Octopolis off the Australian shore, Godfrey-Smith evokes a cephalopod utopia. In the process, he proves that, like all aliens, these strange, beautiful creatures are more like us than our hubris allows. Only evolutionary chance separates us. After all, as he concludes, "When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all." - Philip Hoare.
Library Journal Review
What happens when a scuba-diving philosopher observing an octopus realizes that the octopus is observing him? The answer is this book: Godfrey-Smith (philosophy, CUNY Graduate Ctr.; Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection) weaves his undersea experiences with octopuses and cuttlefish with scientific and philosophical analysis. Conscious awareness has evolved more than once, Godfrey-Smith explains, as he investigates these otherworldly creatures and their ways of experiencing their aquatic environment. Avoiding technical scientific data, he -focuses instead on a few key evolutionary concepts explained by means of simple analogies comprehensible to the general reader. Philosophically-oriented readers will be left wanting more precise explorations of the nature of consciousness, self-consciousness, awareness, sentience, and so on. Others will wish the author had more imaginatively conceived the creature's inner life. Godfrey-Smith ultimately stops short of such speculations, remaining the outside observer, a philosopher of science, even while haunting the imagination of readers after the book's covers are closed to wonder, "What is experience like for them?" VERDICT Godfrey-Smith's forays into philosophical analysis here are immanently readable. [See Prepub Alert, 6/19/16.]-Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| 1 Meetings Across the Tree of Life | p. 3 |
| Two Meetings and a Departure | |
| Outlines | |
| 2 A History of Animals | p. 15 |
| Beginnings | |
| Living Together | |
| Neurons and Nervous Systems | |
| The Garden | |
| Senses | |
| The For | |
| 3 Mischief and Craft | p. 43 |
| In a Sponge Garden | |
| Evolution of the Cephalopods | |
| Puzzles of Octopus Intelligence | |
| Visiting Octopolis | |
| Nervous Evolution | |
| Body and Control | |
| Convergence and Divergence | |
| 4 From White Noise to Consciousness | p. 77 |
| What It's Like | |
| Evolution of Experience | |
| Latecomer versus Transformation | |
| The Case of the Octopus | |
| 5 Making Colors | p. 107 |
| The Giant Cuttlefish | |
| Making Colors | |
| Seeing Colors | |
| Being Seen | |
| Baboon and Squid | |
| Symphony | |
| 6 Our Minds and Others | p. 137 |
| From Hume to Vygotsky | |
| Word Made Flesh | |
| Conscious Experience | |
| Full Circle | |
| 7 Experience Compressed | p. 159 |
| Decline | |
| Life and Death | |
| A Swarm of Motorcycles | |
| Long and Short Lives | |
| Ghosts | |
| 8 Octopolis | p. 179 |
| An Armful of Octopuses | |
| Origins of Octopolis | |
| Parallel Lines | |
| The Oceans | |
| Notes | p. 205 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 239 |
| Index | p. 241 |
