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    Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
    Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
    Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
    Audiobook7 hours

    Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

    Written by Peter Godfrey-Smith

    Narrated by Peter Noble

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in Other Minds

    Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?

    In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.

    But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?

    By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateMar 7, 2017
    ISBN9781427291950
    Author

    Peter Godfrey-Smith

    Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award.

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    Reviews for Other Minds

    4.5/5

    102 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A very satisfying book: enticing, informative, thought-provoking. Senescense, mind, intelligence... Covers lot of interesting territory.
    • 5/5
      Magnuficent argument to pretty much explode to possibilities of limits of imagination on what ’being’ means
    • 5/5
      I had to buy the paper copy after listening, this is just great. This is well written, doesn't required precious knowledge and the subjects are varied (octopuses, cuttlefishes, squids, behaviours and physical oddities). I recommend taking your time to go back to some of the more surprising stuff. A second recommendation is to check-out the photos in the book version - also here on Scribd.
    • 5/5
      What a page-turner! I couldn’t put it down. And on top of that, I feel as though I now have a glimmering of understanding of why and how the people of the Ancient Greek world used their many gods to help them make sense of the events of their lives.