Other Minds
"Peter Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science. He is also a scuba diver whose underwater videos of warring octopuses have attracted wide notice. In this book, he brings his parallel careers together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sprouted surprising intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. New research shows that these marvelous creatures display remarkable gifts. What does it mean that intelligence on earth has evolved not once but twice? And that the mind of the octopus is nonetheless so different from our own? Combining science and philosophy with firsthand accounts of his cephalopod encounters, Godfrey-Smith shows how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colors and human beings to speak. By tracing the problem of consciousness back to its roots and comparing the human brain to its most alien and perhaps most remarkable animal relative, Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds sheds new light on one of our most abiding mysteries." -- Goodreads.com summary.
Stats for nerds
34recommend
53mentions
45people
2017–2026years
75% recommend21% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- And the gist of Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, a brilliant book on animal consciousness, is that evolution tends to give rise to things by degrees, such that a vague alertness to photoreception and full scale self awareness and abstract thinking may be on a continuum rather than just being lights on or lights off.
- I've been fascinated by Cephalopods since reading (the excellent) book "Other Minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. They are probably the closest we'll get to an alien intelligence. Their nervous systems evolved along a completely different evolutionary path from us vertebrates. It pains me that they are so short lived, though. I wonder what potential could be unlocked by their intelligence if they lived for 40 years or longer.
- You will be happy to read this then:
https://www.ciwf.org/media-and-news/press-releases-and-media...
"Other Minds" is definitely worth a read.
- Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [excellent]
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...
- You might find the recent Theories of Everything podcast interview [0] with Peter Godfrey-Smith interesting. Godfrey-Smith is the author of "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness," which is a great read to delve further.
Two other interesting aspects of cephalopods:
0. https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/peter-godfrey-smith-thi...* Make many more changes to RNA than other invertebrates [2] * Have only one type of light sensing cell in eyes, so may detect color by chromatic aberration1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...
2. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/octopus-squid-rna-editin...
3. https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopu...
- Even cooler, IMHO, is that invertebrates evolved intelligence (and almost identical eyes!) parallel to primate's and corvids'.
Squid, octopi, etc have cognitive abilities that sometimes overtake that of "intelligent" mammals or birds. Yet common ancestors are about as far away as is possible in animal kingdom.
(And also please remember this when ordering calamari next time ;)
Edit: I very much enjoyed this bestseller popular science book on invertebrates intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds%3A_The_Octopus%2C_...
