If we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.The tagline for Other Minds is: A philosopher dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness. And that's exactly what this book is – a philosophical (so, thought experiments rather than empirically sciencey) look at consciousness, and despite the monstrous octopus dominating the cover, cephalopods are so little understood that rather than truly making them the stars of this book, author Peter Godfrey-Smith recounts what we understand about the evolution of human consciousness and then holds up the octopus as an example of “other”; we don't know how or what (or if) they think, but it's not like us. As a scuba enthusiast, Godfrey-Smith has spent a lot of time under the sea watching octopuses and cuttlefish, so this book features many beautiful pictures and eyewitness anecdotes, and there are several lab-based octopus experiments discussed, but this isn't really a book about octopuses. The bottom line is that this wasn't the book I was expecting, I wasn't entirely engaged by Godfrey-Smith's writing style, and I was often bored – but still don't regret reading it; there are enough interesting nuggets along the way.
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 independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. 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. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.After making this intriguing statement in the book's introduction, I mistakenly believed that Godfrey-Smith would then explain to me this alien mind, but he really can't – octopuses can seem curious, display novel thinking to solve problems in the lab, even recognise familiar human faces, but scientists have no idea how they do any of it. Godfrey-Smith goes over the best guesses we have about the evolution of sentience in vertebrates – from simple attract/avoid responses to stimuli, to the body/mind divide, feedback loops and afference, interior monologues as a precursor to language, etc. – and stresses there's no reason to believe that our interior experience is anything like that of the cephalopods. He cites Thomas Nagel and his seminal work What is it like to be a bat? , and really, if Nagel's point was that conciousness is so subjective that humans will never understand the experience of being a related creature like a bat, for example, how could we ever hope to understand the experience of being a creature like an octopus that developed brains in a process completely independent to our own? Godfrey-Smith is constantly asking questions he can't quite answer: Octopuses and cuttlefish engage in nonstop, ever-changing, colourful displays, but are colourblind; why do they bother? Octopuses and cuttlefish only live a year or two before breeding and then suddenly dying; why invest resources into a costly large brain if it's not for a long learning curve? With most of their nervous system distributed through their tentacles – which operate without the central brain's command or even awareness – just what is the role of that central brain?
In an octopus, the nervous system as a whole is a more relevant object than the brain: it's not clear where the brain itself begins and ends, and the nervous system runs all through the body. The octopus is suffused with nervousness; the body is not a separate thing that is controlled by the brain or the nervous system...the body itself is protean, all possibility; it has none of the costs and gains of a constraining and action-guiding body. The octopus lives outside the usual body/brain divide.Is that an answer? In the end, I suppose, it's the questions that matter most to philosophers, but I didn't find my own mind expanded by what I encountered here; and that's what matters most to me.
In my memory, I was sure that I had liked The Soul of an Octopus much better than this book, but rereading that review, I guess it disappointed me in other ways. I then thought, I really did enjoy that similarly molluskian book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, but it turns out that I wasn't actually blown away by it at the time either. I am willing to accept that I'm just a know-nothing crank.
