If this is philosophy, it works, because Godfrey-Smith is a rare philosopher who searches the world for clues. Knowledgeable and curious, he examines, he admires. His explorations are good-natured. He is never dogmatic, yet startlingly incisive. His refreshing guidance invites us, allowing breathing room, to consider, occasionally to respectfully disagree.
Godfrey-Smith has rolled his obsessions into one book, weaving biology and philosophy into a dazzling pattern that looks a lot like the best of pop science ... Godfrey-Smith relates dramatic stories of mischief made by captive octopuses and spends a delightful chapter exploring cephalopods’ sophisticated color-changing abilities, but this is not narrative nonfiction about the secret life of cephalopods, along the lines of Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus. This is a gifted philosopher and historian of science doing philosophy with octopuses. His project is no less ambitious than to work out the evolutionary origins of subjective experience ... he delivers philosophy wrapped even more firmly in the glittering cloak of popular science. The result is an incredibly insightful and enjoyable book.
At times, the science of this book is daunting, but its study subject is so amazing, it’s hard not to be drawn along, just as Godfrey-Smith was when he extended a hand to an octopus and it reached out to return his touch, echoing his interest.
...a smoothly written and captivating account of the octopus and its brethren, as observed by humans ... I found the facts more enlivening than the philosophy, but then philosophy is hard ... Mr. Godfrey-Smith mixes the scientific with the personal, giving us lively descriptions of his dives to 'Octopolis,' a site off the east coast of Australia at which octopuses gather ... Though it’s easy to think of octopuses as alien, a better view is that they are our cousins in biological destiny—spirits in a material world.
These sorts of details are sufficiently weird and interesting that after adding some stories of his own observations on dives off the coast of Australia, Godfrey-Smith might have easily written a book that was just an extended marshaling of evidence for the claim that octopuses are strange and beautiful creatures. But his ambitions are larger ... Godfrey-Smith skillfully links the details of evolutionary history and biology to broader philosophical debates about the nature and function of consciousness ... a valuable contribution to some of the most basic questions about the origins of conscious life.
Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher, skilfully combines science, philosophy and his experiences of swimming among these tentacled beasts to illuminate the origin and nature of consciousness.
...[a] fascinating book ... Interpreting what goes on in other minds is still beyond the capabilities of philosophy or science. After reading this book, to paraphrase Byron, you will 'love not man the less, but cephalopods more.'”
...[a] delightful book ... Godfrey-Smith explores the issue from many angles, beginning with a succinct and thoughtful discussion of the evolution of animals, and extending to a look at the octopus’ remarkable neurological systems. His book includes vivid descriptions of the unique capacities of the animal, and includes apt discussions of the ideas of consciousness of Dehaene and others.
...[a] brilliant book ... The beauty of Godfrey-Smith’s book lies in the clarity of his writing; his empathy, if you will. He takes us through those early stirrings in the seas of deep time, from bacteria that sense light and can taste, to cnidarian jellyfish, the first organisms to exhibit nervous systems, which he describes wonderfully ... Returning again and again to his many-armed friends in their Octopolis off the Australian shore, Godfrey-Smith evokes a cephalopod utopia. In the process, he proves that, like all aliens, these strange, beautiful creatures are more like us than our hubris allows.
Tracing the evolution of the cephalopod line from its earliest ancestors, Godrey-Smith wants to understand how it has arrived at a seemingly similar cognitive destination to our own … A renowned philosopher, he takes the sparse scientific literature on octopus cognition, combines it with his own observations scuba-diving at ‘Octopolis’ off the east coast of Australia, and then gracefully and unsparingly analyzes what these creatures can tell us about the mind, consciousness, and being human. He is not overly concerned with defining what a mind is, nor with any of the other tendentious minutiae that have caused many a book on consciousness to sink under the weight of its own prose. Godfrey-Smith is reasonably content with not having all the answers.
His book itself takes the form of a highly evolved yet reverse-engineered work, reuniting disciplines that over time became separate. Here, philosophy harks back to its origins as poetry; Godfrey-Smith, who teaches philosophy of science, is a clear-eyed and elegant writer. In turn this quality reflects, as always, an elegance of thought. Poetic, too, is the use of compression on his subject. In around 200 pages (minus notes) the author runs through a stunning array of material ... As Godfrey-Smith puts it in eminently graspable terms, life feels like something to the individual ... That is the foundation of sentience. How, why, and when that occurred for any given species is in the record — in this glorious profusion of biological fact. The philosopher asks us to consider that what is true for us is not to be taken on faith, nor to be assumed true only for us. The strength of Other Minds is its insistence on empirical evidence — and therefore its preparedness to question even it.
In his entrancing and profound Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a philosophical journey of a quite unique kind, for its backdrop is the sea. We accompany the author, an avid diver and admirable writer, as he explores the lives of the cephalopods and the origins of consciousness.