Other Minds – The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

The author brings together two of his passions to this fascinating book, namely history of science and scuba diving, combining philosophical rigour with empathy towards his aquatic subjects, with whom he spent many spellbinding hours. His starting point is that life and sentience developed in the oceans, and he focuses specifically on cephalopods - mainly cuttlefish and octopuses. It is interesting to discover that the octopus has 500 million neurons and that its tentacles are partly a law unto themselves. He speculates about the various evolutionary pathways of the development of subjective experience and consciousness, a differentiation from what he calls white noise. In developing his view, he draws on work of Vygotsky on inner speech and Bernard Baars' theory of a global workspace. Interestingly, octopuses and the like have very short lives, four years at most, which sets the author of on another interesting train of thought about compressed experience. As most of his observations took place 50 feet below the surface in Octopolis, Godfrey-Smith ends with a plea to care for the oceans, citing the extraordinary success of a nearby marine reserve – we just need to work with nature rather than try to maximise extraction of natural resources, which is better all round in the long term.