Other minds : the octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness / Peter Godfrey-Smith

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Meetings across the tree of life. Two meetings and a departure ; Outlines -- A history of animals. Beginnings ; Living together ; Neurons and nervous systems ; The garden ; Senses ; The fork -- Mischief and craft. In a sponge garden ; Evolution of the cephalopods ; Puzzles of octopus intelligence ; Visiting Octopolis ; Nervous evolution ; Body and control ; Convergence and divergence -- From white noise to consciousness. What it's like ; Evolution of experience ; Latecomer versus transformation ; The case of the octopus -- Making colors. The giant cuttlefish ; Making colors ; Seeing colors ; Being seen ; Baboon and squid ; Symphony -- Our minds and others ; From Hume to Vygotsky ; Word made flesh ; Conscious experience ; Full circle -- Experience compressed. Decline ; Life and death ; A swarm of motorcycles ; Long and short lives ; Ghosts -- Octopolis. An armful of octopuses ; Origins of Octopolis ; Parallel lines ; The oceans.

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.

English.