And the Deep Origins of Consciousness - The Octopus

hardly any info on Octopi. Just old views on western consciousness. The author should go sit a 10 day silent meditation vipassana course and explore his own consciousness. Was seriously bummed out, but maybe I had really high expectations because I've always wondered about Octopi

I've always been fascinated by cephalopods, especially the octopus. I purchased "Other Minds" because I thought reading accounts of scientific thinking about my favorite animal would be entertaining and make it easier to learn about some of the topics the author covers.

Unfortunately, 'Other Minds' is disorganized and rather lightweight. It touches on a variety of scientific topics/theories related to consciousness and evolution but does not delve deeply into any of them. Nor does it tie them together into a logical flow. It reads like a series of unrelated tangents, punctuated by the author's accounts of his and other scientists' first hand experiences with cephalopods. While I enjoyed the stories about cephalopods very much, many of them had only a vague connection to the science being discussed. Most of the time, I had little idea what the point of the book was or where it was going.

The scattered writing was especially glaring at the end, where I expect an author to summarize his ideas in some fashion. Instead, completely out of left field, the author launched into a 'save-the-environment' tangent. No problem with that message, but it had nothing to do with anything that had come before...and then the book ended. I still have no idea what the author intended to achieve with this book.

The author is certainly an engaging writer, but he needs an editor to take his ideas and stories and organize them into a cohesive whole. I truly enjoyed the accounts of cephalopods but they are at best only half the book, and the remaining science content wasn't especially illuminating. In the end, I'm too disappointed in the book to recommend it.

We generally consider mammals and birds to be the smartest creatures on Earth. It's not unreasonable; that includes us and crows.

But an entirely different branch of life on this planet also shows surprising intelligence--the cephalopods, including octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. Their line and ours (that is, the vertebrates) separated hundreds of million years ago. Even our eyes and theirs evolved separately. Most of them live less than five years. They don't appear to be very social.

Yet they have large and complex central nervous systems. Organized very differently from ours, but large and complex nevertheless. They show many signs of being intelligent, curious, and inventive. But why should an octopus that lives only two years, apparently isn't social beyond breeding once, and broods her eggs but dies when they hatch and certainly doesn't raise them, evolve such a complex nervous system and apparent intelligence? What are those expensive resources for?

Godfrey-Smith gives us a really interesting exploration of this question, including tales of his own and others' direct experiences with cuttlefish and octopuses in their home environments, not just in labs. (Though they do some pretty darned interesting things in labs, too.) His own experiences with a cuttlefish, at the end of its breeding season and thus nearing the end of its life, are fascinating.

There is also a lot of exploration here of what consciousness is, how it evolved, and what it really does--for us, and perhaps for cephalopods.

All in all, an absorbing book, grounded in science, and exploring some fascinating territory and ideas.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

Good, but not good enough - or what I expected at least. Too much about personal experiences and "setting the scene" rather than in depth (sorry about that!) study of consciousness in general of mankind versus animals and in particular that of the octopus. Pity.......

Godfrey-Smith has an extraordinary background to bring to his subject: a professor of philosophy, he has also spent years visiting octopuses and cuttlefish (distantly related cephalopod cousins) in the ocean. In contrast, Sy Montgomery, who wrote another interesting recent book called The Soul of An Octopus, got to know those creatures mostly in aquarium tanks. Anyone interested in the variety of life and the astonishing accomplishments of creatures on land or in the ocean will enjoy Godfrey-Smith's analysis of the behaviors he has observed, combined with fossil evidence and biological data.

I recommend the book even though I don't believe the author has succeeded in his most ambitious goal: to find clues to the evolution of subjective experience and consciousness. Chapter 6 of this book meanders about various psychological theories in pursuit of that goal, but produces no intermediate states that I could see linking the brilliant intelligences shown by other animals to the self-reflective consciousness humans possess. As the book describes, scientists can demonstrate amazing abilities in birds, mammals, and cephalopods to draw connections and navigate complex social and physical environments. But that brings us no closer to knowing what they feel.

Peter Godfrey-Smith begins this book with a fascinating hook: since human beings and octopi have each independently evolved highly intelligent brains the octopus is as close to an alien as any of us is likely to see in their lifetime. Even more intriguing, the author suggests that this parallel development will allow him to investigate one of science’s most speculated on but unanswered questions—the origin of consciousness. Reading further, however, Godfrey-Smith admits that little is understood of the nervous system of the octopi. So most of what we have to rely on is his own anecdotal observations while scuba-diving.

That said, Godfrey-Smith’s speculations on the both the consciousness of octopi and the origins of all sentience are well thought out and interesting. And while most of the book is devoted to anecdote and speculation there is well established science strewn throughout. I would not have known that octopi have neurons throughout their body rather than only in the brain if I had not read this book.

Still, the bulk of the book is not science but philosophical speculation on the experiences Godfrey-Smith has had scuba diving with octopi. If that is what you are looking for you will be pleasantly surprised by the obvious depth and perspicacity of the speculation. But if you were expecting a scientific treatise you will be disappointed.

In other words, Godfrey-Smith proffers ideas worth considering in Other Minds but their roots’ scientific foundations are, to say the least, not on firm ground.

Contemplating the mind of an all-but alien species

I can understand writing about consciousness, but why the Octopus?

In one brilliant insight, Peter Godfrey-Smith tells us why. To paraphrase - these invertebrates are intelligent, but unlike apes, or even wolves - our nearest common ancestor was a rod at the bottom of the sea with two eyespots.

The Octopus's mind evolved completely different from us. Nature gave two branches of consciousness, and this is the other.

Communicating with the Octopus is the closest we can get to communicating with an alien species.

Smith is a scientist first, and a writer second. But his skill in the former, and his experiences pulls us through. We swim with these magnificent creatures, and then their cousins the cuttlefish.

We see their skin changing color - camouflaging themselves better than anything else nature has put forth so far.

We swim with him as he encounters these creatures - each one different. In a colony you'll find that some are fierce, some are shy, and some are playful. Smith notes how rare the latter is in the wild.

But more than anything else - they are different. Smith gives a guidebook not only on consciousness as a whole, but on an alien consciousness, one that might not be able to be understood by our own.

Regardless - great tale. I recommend it!

Goddrey-Smith (GS) assumes that complexity of behavior indicates level of consciousness. I am not convinced – most of us have experienced solving a problem we initially could not, with a flash of insight occurring after some time spent without conscious devotion to the problem, and there is a growing literature on how much of our processing and decision making occurs without conscious attention. I still very much enjoyed this book and learned from it. For one thing, GS is a master of the informal essay style of writing.

The book is about the evolutionary development of the nervous system, with a focus on the more “intelligent” cephalopods. Sensation of, reaction to, and generation of signals is made more efficient and speedy by the nervous system, but one is not required for such capabilities. GS traces the nervous system to the need to efficiently coordinate actions in multi-cellular animals. Of 34 animal phyla, there are only 3 in which some members have “complex, active bodies”. In the mollusk phyla, it is only the squid, cuttlefish and octopi, all cephalopods, which are of interest. The other2 phyla are the chordates (think vertebrates) and arthropods. Focusing on the octopus, as the best example among the cephalopods, it has a very large nervous system for its size, much more decentralized than the “intelligent” chordate and arthropod animals.

The octopus has a much more challenging body to coordinate than most animals; also, as a predator, with a variety of potential foods, but one which is highly vulnerable to other predators, lacking powerful defensive weapons, complex behavior is critical. At the same time, it is not known to be social, and has a short natural life span (even without predation), both arguments against a highly developed consciousness. Study of the octopus is apparently in its infancy, perhaps the toddler stage. For example, ethologists know motivation is important to successfully test animal intelligence, and food treats are not the motivator they are for many animals, with apparently no simple alternative found, especially if you exclude negative motivation like electric shocks. Much of the best evidence for octopus intelligence seems to be anecdotal, but convincing never-the-less. A weakness of this book is that it concentrates more on GS’s own observation of octopi in their natural environment, not his primary occupation, and less on a more thorough review of what others have found and concluded, other than the anecdotes.

Why is there senescence, a breakdown of life? GS concludes that a large factor is that undesirable mutations which shorten lifespan are not weeded out by evolution – because predation/injury/lack of foody destroys most individuals before they are harmed by the mutation – clearly not true of modern humans. For octopi it is predation and their natural life span for observed species, with the exception of the cold water giant octopus, is only 2-3 years.

If a popular science books gives me several BIG clues towards solving an important puzzle, that no one has yet solved, I consider it a success. The most important thing I gleaned: For odd and unexpected reasons, consciousness may arise in situations where the entity must INTERACT with the environment, keeping track of itself and how its own movements and actions influence the data coming to it. I am an impatient reader who usually skims quickly for the new information and tosses the book aside soon after I notice the diminishing returns. This was the rare book that I actually finished and I enjoyed every chapter. I respect the way the author weaves his experiences with octopuses with the relevant theory in the field without forcing any neat conclusions. Does the octopus feel pain? Well . . . one octopus jumped when a fish bit him in the butt, but after that he didn't tend to his wounds, . . . but maybe that was because he was too busy wrestling with other octopuses. The author's goal is to summarize the current state of knowledge not shoehorn the data into an elegant theory. By the end of the book, we still don't know what it feels like to be an octopus, OF COURSE, or how exactly it is that consciousness comes into being. But we have plenty new food for thought! As a bonus I learned some very compelling theories about why we get old and die and where language comes from. WHOO-HOO! I am happy.

4.5 stars. An absorbing book exploring cephalopod intelligence and what it might tell us about evolution of the mind and consciousness. Godfrey-Smith capably outlines how evolution works, what we can surmise about how and why cephalopods came to evolve their extensive nervous systems and unique brains, and philosophically how we tackle consciousness in other creatures. He manages to balance his own wonder at these seemingly alien creatures with both the soft and hard sciences, leaving the reader intrigued and informed (and avoiding the dual pitfalls of sounding either too unscientific or too unequivocal where factual questions remain). A wonderful book for those interested in consciousness or cephalopods.

An interesting read balancing a scientific, naturalist perspective with philosophical discussion about the larger questions about non-human cognition and consciousness. The author presents a detailed and personal set of observations with lab research that further explores those observations. Additionally, he then presents philosophical arguments and ideas about what those observations tell us about the connection between anatomy and cognition. The field of animal cognition is still in its infancy with scientists just starting to ask questions that previous generations thought heresy. This book advances the field by offering a look at nervous systems that evolved unique abilities that we're just now starting to understand.

Charles Darwin would have loved this fascinating, important book. Hands-on philosopher of science Godfrey-Smith not only explains how evolution works but also shows how we humans are not the only creatures that developed what we call "mind"; cephalopods like octopuses and cuttlefish also ended up with "minds", for lack of a better word, and nervous systems of extraordinary complexity. The author winds up with a stern warning about what we humans have been ding to our oceans and land that threatens not only human existence but also that of other life as well. Deniers of anthropogenic climate change stand challenged.

To quote Godfrfey-Smith: "Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independant experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, bur because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien."

Edd Doerr

I liked the book as it covered evolution, existential philosophy, and psychology. Parts got extremely dense but I persevered. The ending was a bit abrupt, I would’ve liked to hear about the current state if octopuses and cephelopods.

Note that it’s not strictly about octopuses, but also covers quite a bit about their evolutionary cousins, cuttlefish. I have to say I didn’t quite understand the small evolutionary tree diagrams.

It did give me a new appreciation for the intelligence of octopuses, and some of their social behavior, and continues my own evolution in reading about natural science topics.

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book is part philosophical exploration of consciousness, part speculative evolution, and part nature writing. If I have any strong criticism of the book, it’s that if you expect an in-depth version of any one of those, you may be disappointed.

Octopuses are relatively new to us as intelligent creatures. The most familiar non-humans in that class are dolphins, apes, maybe whales. We have more recently, in the popular understanding, begun to see that not only more species — crows, parrots, honeybees, ants, octopuses and other cephalopods — are intelligent, but that the intelligence of other familiar animals — dogs, cats, squirrels, . . . — has long been under-rated.

Franz de Waal’s book, Are We Intelligent Enough to Know How Intelligent Animals Are, is very much to the point. Other animals’ intelligence may be just different enough from our own that we don’t always immediately recognize it when we see it. But, given divergent evolutionary paths, that’s exactly as we should expect.

When we say that the octopus is “intelligent”, I think we have to be careful. We are accustomed, for example, to ranking the intelligence of one species against another — chimps are intelligent, but not as intelligent as us. Dolphins fit into the ranking somewhere.

But “intelligence” is not one thing. Intelligence, like other traits, evolves with conditions — environmental and internal challenges and opportunities. And those conditions are different for each species. The intelligence it evolves is also going to be different.

This point is all the more poignant with the octopus. It is “alien” — the evolutionary branching that separates us from the octopus is very old. Godfrey-Smith puts our common ancestor at about 600 million years in the past (as opposed to just 6 million years for chimps). That’s 594 million more years of evolutionary differentiation, augmented by differences in environment.

The octopus has a nervous system, but it’s very different from our own, with the majority of its neurons in its arms rather than in a central brain. It lives entirely under water. The species Godfrey-Smith studies has a lifespan of only one to two years. It is mostly asocial. It’s just very, very different from us. The intelligence we recognize in it is the intelligence we are prepared to recognize, based on similarities and overlaps with our own intelligence. But its intelligence is its intelligence, not ours. Not so much more or less than different, alien, in the proper sense of “alien.”

Recognizing that octopuses are intelligent, the natural question comes to mind — what would the conscious life of an octopus be like? Would it be at all like ours? Would, for example, there be the same kind of unity to experience and thought that we attribute to ourselves, given the octopus’s more distributed nervous system? Or would it be almost internally social, made up of inter-communicating fragments?

As a philosopher studying consciousness, Godfrey-Smith asks that question. As he puts it, following Thomas Nagel’s paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, what is it like to be an octopus?

What the subjective experience of an octopus is like is necessarily speculative. That there IS something that it is like to be an octopus may be less so. Octopuses engage in complex, deliberative, and exploratory behaviors. Something is behind that. They react to pain, e.g., caring for a damaged arm. They appear to decide to do one thing rather than another.

What all of those things feel like to the octopus is another story, and that’s a very speculative one. For example, Godfrey-Smith, taking into account the relative independence of the octopus’s arms in its neural system, contrasts its behavior to our own through an analogy. On a spectrum between an orchestra directed by a conductor and an improvisational jazz group, the octopus’s subjective life would feel more like the improvisational group and ours more like the conductor-led group, with our central brain playing the conductor’s function.

This “feel” of consciousness is necessarily elusive, I think. The conductor vs. jazz group still doesn’t convey that “feel” to me (maybe partly because, while it’s relatively easy to imagine being a member of the orchestra or jazz group, it’s not so easy to imagine what it feels like to be the whole orchestra or jazz group). It is helpful, though — it does leverage what we know about the octopus to convey something of what may go on in its subjective experience.

Godfrey-Smith actually moves away from trying to convey that feel, and instead offers a sketch of how consciousness may evolve, exploiting concepts dealing with sensing, acting, and communicating, all over two scales — one external, in interactions between the animal and its physical and social environment, and one internal, in interactions within the animal itself — parts of its nervous system, its nervous system and other functional components,. . .

Speaking a little too glibly, on my part, the internalization of sensing leads to the complexity of the nervous system, while the internalization of communication leads to consciousness itself.

Much of Godfrey-Smith’s account of consciousness arises paints consciousness as arising in response to the problems of loops in an animals doing and sensing. A very simple behavior doesn’t pose such a problem — an animal senses and it reacts. It moves away from something that causes it harm or discomfort.

But more sophisticated behavior places animals in a environment that they continuously change through their own actions. When an animal moves closer or farther from an object it will change the apparent size of the object. But the animal signals itself that the change is due to its own activity, not a change in the object itself (this is accomplished through what are called “efference mechanisms”). Much less complex animals than humans (or octopuses) are capable of making this distinction between changes due to their own actions and changes in the environment themselves.

More and more complex animals produce more and more complex loops of action and sensing — an example Godfrey-Smith gives is of a person writing a note as a reminder for themselves later. Such a thing calls not only upon an ability to distinguish changes in the world due to your own actions (the presence of the note), but also communication, in this case a communication between your present self and your future self.

Godfrey-Smith’s full account is too much for me to try to reproduce here, and even then it is only a sketch, not a detailed account. But he also provides references to others who are working on details in various aspects of the sketch he gives, in case you want to pursue these farther and in more depth.

All in all, the book doesn’t confine itself to any one perspective — sometimes philosophical (as in the “what is it like to be . . .” discussion), other times biological (as in the accounts he gives of the possible path of evolution that consciousness has taken), and other times more popular ()as in the accounts he gives of his own first-hand experience observing, interacting, and playing with octopuses).

I think it serves very well as a taking-off point for any of those perspectives — you don’t need to be all that conversant with any one of them to start here, and starting here could take you to much greater depths.

Other Minds is a superb, coruscating book. It’s exciting to see bottom-up philosophy – philosophy that starts on the reef and in the sand and then crawls slowly up towards abstraction. That’s how all philosophy should be done. We’d know a lot more about consciousness and the mind–body problem if philosophers could shed their fastidious disdain for facts and get out more, particularly with a diving mask and fins.

This book was amazing! I recently became fascinated with octopuses, so I couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy of this book. I learned about so much more than just octopuses--the origin of conscious thought and how our brains work. It was fascinating. Some of the really scientific stuff went over my head, but I would skim through that until there was a more plain English explanation. If I had gotten too bogged down in the scientific explanations I would have missed a lot of great stuff! This book did not disappoint!?

A mildly entertaining description of octopus life, but very little treatment of octopus consciousness in any way that might help us better understand the deep origins of human consciousness. Ultimately seems like a pot boiler: a way for someone who may be a sophisticated philosopher (I just don't know) to sell books to the general public. Probably an opportunity missed, and surely a read to be missed.

A little rambly. Now that I’ve finished, I can’t say what his thesis or project really was. This book was mostly a watery survey of potential explanations to a few puzzles—puzzles that remain no more or less solvable in light of its publication. Plus, aren’t you a philosopher, Sir Author? Where the h was the philosophy? I squinted and squinted and all I turned up was a tired old Hume quote.

What a disappointment. This contains so little data on the research tests of the intelligence of octopuses - mainly it seems because that would undermine the sexy selling point of the book, i.e. that they are way more intelligent than we think, so this book will give a glimpse into what it might be to meet intelligent alien life. Ah no, it doesn't. By the end of the book I felt we over-rate their intelligence (e.g. compared to birds).

We learn that octopuses are quite different from humans, other mammals and birds. The eight arms really are the key, unsurprising.

But they are barely social, and only live for a couple of years.

Humans are superior to animals.

Clearly, our minds and our western civilization elevate our species. Of course, many people don't live up to, or even reject, the ideals of western civilization, but I'm addressing normal humans.

So I was prepared to scoff at the minds and consciousness of octopi.

This book surprised me. It held my interest, for one thing. And for another, it offered cool anecdotes and interesting underwater observations. I found myself talking about the book with friends yesterday. It made an impression on me.

Good black and white photos throughout, and a center section of 17 color photographs.

Very interesting.

Great title, but downhill from there. Aside from the fact that the book wanders so much and promises much more than it delivers, it tends to make an interesting subject boring. The one striking piece of information I got out of the book was that an octopus only lives for a year or two. But I just don't think plowing through 200 pages was a fair trade.