Book Review
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (by Peter Godfrey-Smith)
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- I think Godfrey-Smith’s ultimate conclusion is that both humans and octopuses have subjective experiences like pain and pleasure, which arise due to some basic level of neural complexity which both attain. But humans, due to our far greater mental capacities, also have “more sophisticated kinds of subjective experience — conscious experience, in a substantial sense of the term.” This more sophisticated experience is closely linked to the development of “inner thought” which itself is linked to the internalization of language. The idea is that complex thought which leads to conscious experience in humans is closely connected to the way we frame our thoughts in a linguistic fashion — something that octopuses entirely lack.
- For all his logical rigor, I was sometimes frustrated by Godfrey-Smith’s lack of clarity in the usage of “consciousness.” On the one hand, it seemed like he took consciousness to mean subjective experience. But then he subtly redefined it to mean a more “sophisticated” or complex experience, probably like the active reasoning involved in Kahneman’s “System 2” processing. That shift threw me off. Plus, I came to this book far more interested in philosophical analysis than evolutionary reconstruction, and was a bit disappointed to learn that the latter formed a major chunk of it. Finally, I wasn’t always sure how Godfrey-Smith’s anecdotes about scuba-diving related to the philosophical questions at hand. More than once, I found myself “at sea.”