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From the Book corner: Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds, and an octopus whose arms seem to think for themselves

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Its coordinates: 1.3 Philosophy of Mind · 1.3.1 The Mind–Body Problem · 1.3.3 Intentionality +1 more

This week's book from the Book corner is Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (2016). Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of biology and a keen diver, and much of the book grew out of hours spent watching octopuses and cuttlefish in Australian waters.

His central point is about evolutionary distance. Our last common ancestor with the octopus was a small, worm-like animal that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, so whatever mind an octopus has was built separately from ours. Meeting one, he suggests, is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

The detail that stays with readers concerns the arms. An octopus has hundreds of millions of neurons, and most of them are not in its brain but spread through its arms, which can taste, feel and respond with considerable independence.

An opening question: where is the octopus? If an arm can explore a crevice and make something like its own decisions, is there one subject having one experience, or something looser, a centre that partly directs and partly negotiates? And if the answer is "something looser", is our own sense of being a single self as secure as we think?

The book is short and needs no background in biology.

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3 replies

  1. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Fellow

    I've watched this happen off Valparaíso. An octopus in a rock crack with one eye on me, while an arm two metres away worked its way into a hole after a crab, turning over stones as if it had business of its own. You could not shake the sense of two agendas.

    But I think "where is the octopus?" assumes a mind must sit somewhere, like a pilot. The enactivists I read, following Varela, would say the mind is the whole animal coupled to its world. On that view the octopus isn't puzzling. It's just more honest than we are about being spread out.

  2. Anand Kurup

    Fellow

    There is a practical side to the question. When the United Kingdom revised its animal welfare law in 2022, it extended legal recognition of sentience to octopuses and other cephalopods, along with crabs and lobsters, after a review of the scientific evidence.

    That review didn't need to settle whether there is one octopus or several. It asked whether there was good evidence of feeling at all: learning to avoid injury, tending wounds, trading off pain against reward. A Jain would say that is the right order of questions. Whether a creature can suffer comes before what kind of self it has.

  3. Nuwan Perera

    Contributor

    The Buddha would not be surprised. We also are only a heap of parts, the five aggregates, and the "one self in charge" is something we add afterwards. My son asked me once which part of him is him. I had no good answer either. The octopus is just less good at hiding it.