Other Minds

This book is the best combination of engaging and informative, with a dazzling exploration of cephalopod behavior and cognition layered atop a deep examination of evolutionary history. It's rare that a book with so many academic citations remains so readable to those outside the field, but Godfrey-Smith's personal experience with these fascinating creatures and witty narrative style make this a must-read page turner. Highly recommend

Whyyy oh why must I have high expectations of things?

In short, I expected a way more philosophical approach to this. This being the utterly complex and ungraspable concept of consciousness. There's a lot on evolution, cephalopod biology, and plenty of experiments and anecdotes on octopuses and cuttlefish, which dont get me wrong its all great!!! But for me it was more of tid bits of facts rather than a deep dive on (human and cephalopod) consciousness.

Highly scientific read, at times quite engaging but many other times a tad boring. Good if you want to learn about the fascinating beings that are cephalopods!

I expected more of this. I'm not sure why and what exactly, but somehow I thought this would be a much more satisfying read.
I read the ebook, so I guess I missed all the wonderful colour photographs, too.

Lots of biology in here, some of which was new to me as I didn't know a lot about cephalopods, lots of philosophy, some of which was new to me as the cephalopod angle raises some interesting questions about how we think.

Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher and diving enthusiast, with particular interest in cephalopods, which goes someway to explaining this book. I did find it quite hard to absorb and switched to an audiobook part way through. I possibly missed something important but it seemed to drift from topic to topic and not really explain how the octopus can show us how human intelligence evolved.

You have to go a long way back the evolutionary tree to find a common ancestor between humans and octopus; our intelligence evolved in parallel. The book starts out explaining how single cell organised evolved into more complex creatures, how eyes might have coming into being and most importantly, the development of the nervous system. There was plenty of interesting bits but it was hard to just sit down and read it for long periods of time. It is a little dry in the delivery.

Godfrey-Smith recounts some of his experiences diving with cephalopods, including quite a moving scene where he sees cuttlefish at the ends of their lives; slowing decaying into the water. These creatures only live a couple of years and he ponders why they are as intelligent as they are in such a short lifetime. I loved the fact that Octopolis exists, a community of, usually anti-social, octopus living together off the coast of Australia.

Some of the experiments documented will be distressing to animal lovers, and octopus have only fairly recently been granted honorary invertebrate status to help protect them from cruelty.

It's not all about cephlapods though. There is a chapter about inner voice, how it's an important part of our intelligence. However it's not something scientists think octopus have, so I can only guess it was put in to show how we evolved differently.

If you are particularly interested in marine biology, I would say it's worth reading but it wasn't a very engaging "popular science" type book.

This is a fascinating look at the lives of cephalopods, with a focus on their evolution, nervous systems and minds. Along the way, these are compared and contrasted to chordates, human beings included.

It raises questions about how we think, the origin of consciousness and the origin of language.

If you’re looking for a book that offers easy answers to these questions, this isn’t for you. Many theories and ideas are explored here, but a lot of these are tentative and more research needs to be done.

If, however,you’re looking for a book that takes seemingly simple questions and takes you in a journey that arrives at more nuanced questions that still need to be answered, I can highly recommend this book.

Really great read. I didn't know much about the Cephalopods before reading this and thoroughly enjoyed it. We often wonder what it would be like to meet an alien intelligence but the Octopus and its relatives are the closest we have to an alien intelligence on Earth and how mysterious they are!

The other side of the book is about the general nature of consciousness which is also of great interest to me.

Good insights into what the definition of intelligence can be, and identifying our own chordate biases when approaching the development of artificial intelligence.

At points, he waxes philosophical, but never very deeply. I'd be more interested in examining how our monolithic human brain biases us when we think about our thoughts, our bodies, or intelligence. Explore the idea that our integrated subjective experience called "consciousness" is largely independent of our body's mechanisms for deciding to lift our arms or move toward food, as measured by neuroscientists who (perhaps wrongly) interpret it as neurological proof of our lack of "free will."

Even speculation into octopus qualia -- what does it feel like to be an octopus with semi-autonomous limbs -- or perhaps some thought experiments drawing analogies between human patients with inactivated brain regions vs an octopus with missing limbs.

Interesting, if a bit unfocused. The news that cephalopods use extensive RNA editing to modify their brain structure came out about 4-5 months after this book was published, but I can't help but feeling that the author tilted more toward the side of diving into the water and playing with them to collect fun stories rather than toward the side of studying them in a lab and understanding the underlying physical mechanics. Even Disney in the movie "Finding Dory" spent considerable time writing software to simulate the physics and autonomy of Hank the octopus's limbs.