page_title: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Peter Godfrey-Smith reads from his book "Other Minds" at Adelaide Writers Week 2018
context_page_description: Other Minds is a 2016 bestseller by Peter Godfrey-Smith on the evolution and nature of consciousness. It compares the situation in cephalopods, especially the octopus and the 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 admired by reviewers, the New York Times for example calling it "never dogmatic, yet startlingly incisive".
context_section_description: Carl Safina, in The New York Times, calls 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, quotes 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 view, 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, admits to a love affair with octopuses, having read Jacques-Yves Cousteau's 1973 Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence. She notes 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 argues 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."
  The biologist Meehan Crist, in The Los Angeles Times, calls the book an "elegantly materialist telling", describing cephalopod intelligence as "subjective experience ... deeply embodied in physical form." Since most of the animals' neurons are in their partly-autonomous arms, "'for an octopus, its arms are partly self – they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain's perspective they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own.' This is as alien a mind as we could hope to encounter." Crist notes, too, that Godfrey-Smith reflects on the short (1–2 years) lifespan of octopuses. He wonders, in what Crist calls "a precipitous existential abyss", why they have such a large nervous system, so costly to build and to run, to learn about the world, when they have almost no time to use the knowledge.
  The ecologist Marlene Zuk, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, calls Godfrey-Smith "something of an Oliver Sacks of cephalopods" and his subjects "uncannily personable without being at all human." She notes that he meets two obstacles to seeing cephalopods as "rubbery versions of people": they are barely social, interacting mainly to mate; and they have such short lifespans that experience can never become very well-developed. She remarks that sexual selection is not covered, though given how important it has been to humans (she speculates that human brains may have grown under the influence of "selection for mate attraction"), "it is tempting to wonder how it has influenced the octopus."
  The neuroscientist Stephen Rose, in the Times Higher Education Supplement, calls Other Minds "a delightfully written book and a model of engaged science writing." He writes that Godfrey-Smith handles both biology and philosophy "profoundly but without ever talking down to his audience."
  Drake Baer in New York Magazine compares octopuses and philosophers: "They are both given to exploring their worlds, they both have a reputation for peculiarity, they both handle multiple subjects with ease." Octopus eyes, too, look and work much like those of vertebrates; but there, Baer remarks, the similarities end. Cephalopods are "immensely foreign", with "a distributed sense of self" and a "lived reality" quite unlike human consciousness, a feature that, he notes, Godfrey-Smith calls "the most difficult aspect 
caption: Peter Godfrey-Smith reads from Other Minds, 2018
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