Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

"Nor on consciousness. I should say he is a little naïve about consciousness but I think he’s a brilliant philosopher. I met him at a two-week working party at the Santa Fe Institute organised by Dennett a few years ago. He is brilliant and has the most fantastic ideas. I say that to begin with because I still want to say that I think he’s naïve about consciousness. Even so, this book is highly relevant to consciousness and that’s why I chose it – partly too because I’ve only just read it and it’s a thrilling book to read. Again and again it makes you wonder what is it like to be an octopus ? OK, a bat is pretty different from us, but a bat is a mammal. If you think about what it’s like to be a bat, you can imagine that you have wings and your little heart is beating and you have your little legs. This is because you have the same body structure as every other mammal. You have a spine and four limbs and a head. If you think about the intelligence of all other mammals, we all emerged somewhere after the dinosaurs became extinct around 65 million years ago. But the last common ancestor between us and an octopus is way back, possibly 600 million years ago. It would have been some kind of little wormy thing. The intelligence that we have must have evolved entirely separately in us, bats, whales, pussycats, and all of that, as opposed to the octopus. And there are many consequences of this for thinking about the nature of its consciousness. “If you ask what it is like to be a certain creature, then that’s a question about consciousness” If you ask what it is like to be a certain kind of creature, then that’s a question about consciousness. But then you try to imagine it. I cannot imagine having eight limbs, all of which are semi-autonomous. Godfrey-Smith goes into wonderful detail about how the system works. If you chop one of the tentacles off, it can still carry out meaningful movements and actions. I cannot imagine this and I cannot imagine not having a skeleton and being able to squeeze myself through the tiniest little gap and my limbs going through and then reaching out and grabbing eight things at once and doing different things with them all. It’s so hard to imagine. That’s what I loved about the book: the intricate details that he gives on octopus behaviour and on octopus evolution. This question came to my mind – if not to his – over and over again: What is it like to be an octopus? Yes, only in the way that he tackles the very important and difficult question of the evolution of consciousness. In writing my textbook – in the three times I’ve done it in different editions – I’ve found it the hardest chapter to deal with. Some people, like Nicholas Humphrey, for example, start by saying that obviously we are conscious and therefore consciousness must have evolved for a function because nothing evolves that doesn’t have some kind of a function. But I don’t think that is necessarily true. To me, the big dichotomy is this: is consciousness an added extra that appears at some stage during evolution (in which case we can ask when this happened) or is it intrinsic to being alive, or something very fundamental like that, (in which case we don’t have to ask when it evolved). For example, I could take the view that as soon as anything has a representation of itself in the world or makes any kind of distinction between inside and outside – this is me and this is the outside world – then ‘what it is like to be’ it would be whatever that distinction describes. In that case, a bacterium which has a membrane and chemical sensors and goes towards some chemicals and away from others, has got some kind of very basic representation of this and that . If you ask ‘what is it like to be’ that bacterium, then I would say it’s what it is like to be that representation. This is an idea that I have toyed with for a long time in different versions. If we take it up to cats and dogs, then this is very complex thinking. It gets even more complicated with humans, with all their delusions and their illusion of self and so on. With any view of that kind – and there are plenty of related views of this kind – you don’t need to ask when consciousness arose. You don’t ask when it emerged, because it is absolutely intrinsic to everything else that is going on. But Godfrey-Smith doesn’t raise that problem at all. He just asks when it arose and tries to find out by looking at the different things that different organisms do. The book’s not all about consciousness, but the chapter he has on the evolution of consciousness doesn’t really engage well with the current arguments that are very deep and very difficult about what we mean by the evolution of consciousness. Nevertheless, running through that book all the time is this question of what it is like to be an octopus. It is a brilliantly written book and absolutely gripping (and, as I mentioned, I find it hard to be gripped by a book.) So, I’ve included it among my five choices as a much more light-hearted option– something that’s an enjoyable read that will also make you think."

"Godfrey-Smith’s main focus is octopuses, which are in many respects the most alien form of intelligent life that we can imagine at least for now. He describes how they evolved and what they are like in fascinating detail. And his approach, as a philosopher of biology, chimes with that of Damasio: albeit approaching their subject from different perspectives, both of them are looking back at the origins of life in single-cell creatures to explicate the emergence of consciousness. Both, in fact, are interested in placing consciousness firmly within its biological home, thereby shirking any “hard problem” of consciousness. I’m attracted to these approaches and find them very important, even though I can’t help being perpetually puzzled still by the metacognitive, or meta-representational capacity we have that enables us to develop these theories in the first place, with a sophisticated language that designates abstract entities, and that remains hard to account for in biological terms. Octopuses are very bright, but they don’t write books – as far as we know. Maybe there are vast octopus libraries hidden under the sand floor, but well, they are well hidden if so! What is so compelling about octopuses is, as he says, that they are “suffused with nervousness”. They are radically different from vertebrate creatures in that their very body is in part their nervous system. There are twice as many neurons in its tentacles as there are in its brain – about 10,000 neurons per sucker. They can sense the world through their arms. Their nervous system is diffused, not centralised. It is, as he says, a totally “different embodiment”, and so it is hard for us to imagine what it is like to be an octopus, perhaps more significantly than to imagine what it is like to be a bat, to take on the title and topic of the famous article by Thomas Nagel. We do not know how to relate to an octopus body. But we can communicate with an octopus. Godfrey-Smith certainly knows how. This is also why his book was, or rather still is, such a success. And why the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher , about filmmaker Craig Foster’s relationship with an octopus, was so compelling, too. We are rightly fascinated by these alien, communicative, intelligent creatures. Exactly. The backstory is, in my view, actually the front story. The “purer” philosophy of mind as it has been traditionally practiced, particularly in circles of analytic philosophy, strikes me in part as a deceptive abstraction from felt, subjective, embodied experience. It can amount to a refusal to accept the body as the given – to use a notion developed so brilliantly by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology is an inspiration for the 4E movement and related research. And what you say about Other Minds is exactly what is great about this book, and why I believe it should be part of a list on the philosophy of the body: you really can’t understand humanity without understanding animals and their embodiment. We are evolved animals. We are an integral part of the natural world. This crucial starting point is finally starting to take hold in collective consciousness, perhaps in reaction to the destruction we have been wrecking on this natural world. We are finally realizing – a bit late, and not even strongly enough–that killing other creatures on the scale we have been doing is akin to suicide. And the increasingly mainstream nature of arguments for the centrality of the body to all mental life is connected to this realization. We can’t avoid or escape our biology, or if we try, we do so at our peril. We are our biology. Most cultures have some sort of soul story, which is also a reification of the thinking, metarepresentational being we are. It’s quite understandable. Death as the final curtain is not a particularly appealing proposition. I don’t like it either, and I don’t like the fact that we must spend our lives reconciling ourselves with its ending in order to be “wise”. I’m not enjoying this wisdom… Our capacity to abstract ourselves from the here and now through sophisticated language and concepts is the other side of the coin of our awareness of death, which comes along with this annoyingly advanced consciousness of ours. It is precisely what creates cultures, and art, and all those efforts at leaving some trace before we die. Back to the bacteria-culture continuum Damasio traces. It is hard to tell if octopuses, whose lifespan is incredibly short – given their sophistication, in comparison with our lifespan – know about death, as elephants seem to. Obviously, that’s not a question one can really answer, either way. This may be one other reason for our fascination with the octopus. It is an inconceivable creature, in a way – the literal incarnation of a conceptual limit. When we say it is “alien”, we mean that we can’t really make sense of what it would be like to be that animal – again, to use Nagel’s phrase. Yet, as Godfrey-Smith shows, the octopus is another form of sentient animal capable of extremely adaptable behaviours, of play, attention, and so on. The book gives a very precise description of the evolution and biology of octopuses, comparing their minds to ours. Because they are indeed comparable, even if we last shared a common ancestor about 600 million years ago, the time at which the branches of cephalopods and vertebrates diverged. And at a phenomenological level–using our metarepresentational capacities – it is compelling to conceive of our own arbitrariness, to be able to compare ourselves with this utter other mind, to relativise ourselves to such an extent. How do we square our capacity to think of ourselves as potentially different from what we are, with being inevitably the bodies we are? This creates a fertile, even moving tension. We are capable of thinking of ourselves from outside ourselves, as weird aliens, just as we think of the octopus. As this bipedal, almost hairless, vulnerable, needy, not that well designed creature that knows about death and does both wonderful and terrible things as a result."