Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Nonfiction, Animals/Philosophy/Science
Themes: Cross-Genre, Seafaring Tales
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Description
For a long time, many humans - especially in the "Western" world - considered ourselves the sole thinking, self-aware animals on Earth. But that kind of thinking, even assuming it was true, never answered questions about how we came to possess the brains we have, able to process information and ideas as we can. More recently, research has shown us we are not as alone as we think we are; other animals have been shown to demonstrate behaviors and brain patterns we once reserved exclusively for ourselves, with increasing evidence that they possess some sort of "inner lives" too... but what might that look like? How and why, indeed, did minds like this evolve? Searching for answers, philosopher and scientist Peter Godfrey-Smith turns to animals with remarkable intelligence, animals that diverged from our own ancestors long before even the Cambrian "explosion" of life, animals that some have called the closest we humans may ever get to encountering a truly alien mind: the octopus.
Review
This is an interesting exploration of the evolutionary roots of brains and consciousness, a process that has led to two very different "solutions" in humans and cephalopods. To understand philosophical questions of awareness and what being a nonhuman is like, one must understand something about how humans and nonhumans came to be, the biological and environmental and social pressures that drove what was once a presumably content free-floating cell to transform over countless generations into the remarkably complex life forms with remarkably complex behaviors that we're familiar with today. Through fossil records, gene sequencing, experiments, and more, some truly mind-boggling answers have come to light, particularly in recent years - answers that, in true scientific fashion, lead to even more questions. It is difficult enough to put ourselves into the mind of another mammal, or even a bird, but the cephalopods are further removed from us on an evolutionary scale even than insects, and the intelligence they've developed may be that much further beyond our imagination, suited to entirely different bodies and lifestyles than anything remotely familiar to us. It makes for some interesting thought experiments, if nothing else.