Other Minds is a 2016 book by the Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith on the evolution and nature of consciousness. It compares the situation in cephalopods, especially octopuses and cuttlefish, with that in mammals and birds. Complex active bodies that enable and perhaps require a measure of intelligence have evolved three times, in arthropods, cephalopods, and vertebrates. The book reflects on the nature of cephalopod intelligence in particular, constrained by their short lifespan, and embodied in large part in their partly autonomous arms, which contain more nerve cells than their brains. The book has been praised by reviewers, who have found it delightfully written, undogmatic but incisive in its analysis, and its account of intelligence as a subjective embodied experience elegantly told. The author's octopus subjects come across as "uncannily personable without being at all human".
Book
Context Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher of science, specialising in the philosophy of mind and its relationship with the philosophy of biology. He is an experienced diver.
Publication Other Minds was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in the US in 2016 and subsequently in the UK by William Collins, in 2017. It is illustrated with 17 colour plates and monochrome photographs and diagrams in the text. All the photographs of octopuses and cuttlefish were taken underwater by Godfrey-Smith.
Content
Godfrey-Smith's premise in the book is the fact that intelligence has evolved separately in two groups of animals: in cephalopods like octopuses and cuttlefish, and in vertebrates like birds and humans. He notes that studying cephalopods is "probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien" and that "the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all".
He describes many encounters with octopuses during dives in the shallow waters off Australia, especially in a favoured place that he names "Octopolis", where many of the animals gather. He notes that octopuses are inquisitive, observant, even friendly, but the architecture of their nervous systems is entirely different from the vertebrate plan. The octopus's intelligence is distributed throughout its body: there are almost twice as many nerve cells in their eight muscular arms as in their brain. Intelligence is predicated, Godfrey-Smith argues, upon the "complex active bodies". Three groups of bilaterian animals with that kind of body plan evolved in the Cambrian period, some 500 million years ago: the arthropods (such as crabs and insects), the vertebrates, and within the molluscs, the cephalopods. Godfrey-Smith disagrees with an old philosophical idea that consciousness suddenly emerged from unthinking matter. According to him, it is an active relationship with the world, built up in small steps with separate capabilities for perceiving the world, taking action with muscles, and remembering the simplest of events. In Godfrey-Smith's view, such capabilities are present in some degree even in bacteria, which detect chemicals in their environment, and in insects such as bees, which recall the locations of food sources. As for feeling, both crabs and octopuses protect a part of their body that is injured; they evidently feel pain and are sentient to this extent. Cephalopods like the octopus or giant squid represent "an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour" predicated on the same neural systems as our closer mammalian relatives. Neither language nor a worldview is needed for a measure of intelligence in these "other minds" that share planet Earth.
Reception Carl Safina, in The New York Times, called Godfrey-Smith "a rare philosopher", both knowledgeable and curious, who good-naturedly explores the world for insights, "never dogmatic, yet startlingly incisive". Philip Hoare, in The Guardian, quoted Samuel Taylor Coleridge's couplet "Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea" to evoke the "eldritch other[ness]" of octopus intelligence, "with its more-than-the usual complement of limbs, bulbous eyes, seeking suckers and keratinous beaks voraciously devouring anything in its slippery path". In his opinion, the book "entirely overturns" such preconceptions, with what Godfrey-Smith calls "an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour" forming a "fascinating case study". In Hoare's view, Godfrey-Smith's empathy with the animals comes from his personal observation, scuba diving in the Pacific Ocean near his university in Sydney. He concludes that "perhaps these animals, so incredibly sensate, learning from each other's behaviour, shifting in shape and colour, are more social than we ever suspected". Olivia Judson, in The Atlantic, having read Jacques-Yves Cousteau's 1973 Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence, noted that Godfrey-Smith follows the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene in suggesting that "there's a particular style of processing—one that we use to deal especially with time, sequences, and novelty—that brings with it conscious awareness, while a lot of other quite complex activities do not". She argued that the ability of octopuses to learn new skills, of the kind that may demand consciousness, indicates the possibility of "an awareness that in some ways resembles our own".
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