Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind

"Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote Other Minds , a bestselling book about octopuses where he made the case that these soft, short-lived, rubbery animals are really like an alien life form. He’s an Australian philosopher who is also a scuba diver and snorkeler. He goes outside Sydney, dives a lot and observes carefully. Other Minds was a mixture of science, philosophy, and personal observations. He explained how the complexities of the octopus nervous system produce an animal that’s capable of complex behaviour even though it only lives for a few years, mostly alone. It’s an animal which learns a lot, which seems to have independent minds in its different tentacles, but has a very different sort of mind or minds from our own. That book is a philosopher’s take on that and it was brilliant. This new book, Metazoa , is about animal minds and the birth of consciousness. It’s a much more ambitious book, because he’s talking about the whole animal kingdom and how nervous systems have evolved, the ways in which various animals act in the world, and how these have given rise to different sorts of consciousness. His central theme is sentience, the capacity to feel things, to have a point of view on the world, and he’s trying to understand how that emerges in the history of animal development and which animals might be said to have a point of view on the world. This is a kind of spoiler, but the surprising conclusion is that insects, and some apparently quite primitive aquatic animals, have this way in which they act in the world, in which they sense and react to stimuli, that justifies thinking of them as on a continuum with human minds. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What makes this such an interesting book for me is the combination of the first person and the more scientific and philosophical analysis. I’ve already mentioned that the author is a scuba diver. He’s brilliant at describing just what he sees, the patterns of behaviour of the animals he observes, whether they’re little worms or parts of coral, sharks, whales, or whatever. I found reading the book stimulated me visually. It includes some photographs, but the verbal descriptions are so evocative that they’re barely needed. It’s a bit like the way Oliver Sacks had a great capacity to describe as well as to reflect on things. That first person description, while it’s delightful in its own terms, is also I think an important part of the argument of the book, because it would be hard to persuade anybody about the mind of an animal without getting a sense of how that animal encounters and moves around in the world. He’s such a brilliant, close observer of the way animals behave that this is completely convincing. And then he steps back and reflects, from a philosophical point of view. He’s very opposed to the idea that minds are things which you can simply upload like computer programs, that they’re just about relationships between neurons that could be instantiated in some kind of other system. His approach is much more tied to the flesh of animals as it were, it’s much more intimately connected with evolutionary development and how neurones have developed, and how animals operate in the world, and how minds are connected with action and particular sorts of action, and the complexities of the nervous systems that develop, which facilitate survival in different environments. Yes, certainly with computers at the moment. He thinks that’s not a useful way of thinking about minds and consciousness. He’s approaching these issues from a completely different direction, as a philosopher-biologist-naturalist, giving an evolutionary account. But it’s a subtle one that, as I said, combines first person observation with findings from scientific research. He gives you some science, and he gives you some philosophy, but it’s all in a very palatable form. One of the other things I like about his writing is that he doesn’t pretend he knows when he doesn’t know. He’s speculative, but still sceptical. He will speculate, for instance, on the way in which certain sorts of brains set up patterns of waves beyond the electrochemical reaction between individual cells. There are waves of electrical energy that pass across a complex system like a brain and he reflects on what the significance of that might be, but doesn’t claim to know, because the science hasn’t really determined that. He’s got sufficient humility not to claim things that he can’t substantiate, and you see him reflecting. It’s really interesting. It’s almost as if you’re witnessing an intelligent person grappling with ideas in front of you, rather than simply presenting the conclusion that he’s reached as an absolutely certain outcome about the world. I’m sure some people will criticize him for selecting some animals to reflect on and not others, but he’s a unique voice within philosophy. There are few philosophers who have such an intimate knowledge of animal behaviour. He’s obviously biased towards marine animals, that’s his passion. And so he moves a lot faster when he gets to discussing animals on dry land. The real strength of the book I think is in the parts where we’re underwater. It’s a great book. It doesn’t give you the last word, but it’s a book that makes you think differently about animals that you might have presumed to be more like little robots than they probably are. And he couldn’t resist including a chapter on octopuses. He’s passionate about understanding octopus behaviour. He’s not sentimental about them. He doesn’t think they’re smart in the sense that we’re smart, but it’s just that they have certain kinds of minds that are on a continuum with ours. He’s not claiming they’re super intelligent because they can solve some puzzles, but he suggests they might have nine minds, which is slightly weird, something like a central control system and then eight further minds, one in each tentacle. They act independently as well as in a coordinated way. It’s just such an interesting way of thinking about a different kind of mind from our own. Part of our best books of 2020 series."