Review: Other Minds...

GODFREY-SMITH, Peter, Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, 2016, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York NY.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 257pp., with a decorated title page, 8pp. of full-colour plates and many monochrome illustrations and diagrams. Dustwrapper. Fine.

In the last couple of years, elements of the philosophical world have drifted off into regions that would - prima facie - have little to do with the way that human beings think or how they go about doing it. This is actually deliberate and such musing bears the title "post-humanist" theory. For many these philosophical writings would seem to have a practical focus upon the ethical treatment of animals, while others feel that cogitating upon these matters prepares us for what they feel is an imminent alien interaction. We've seen that many of these philosophers are fans of HPL and his writings as they indicate a probable response to trying to become familiar with the "unknowable".

One of these writers - although he'd probably hesitate to count himself amongst their crowd - is Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York and professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, who encountered alien minds while diving off the coast of Australia.

A longtime fan of SCUBA diving, Godfrey-Smith was invited by a colleague to visit "Octopolis", an underwater site off the coast of New South Wales. This place had become a veritable "octopus's garden" wherein scores of the cephalopods congregated to interact on a daily basis. Intrigued by their friendliness and their curiosity, Godfrey-Smith began to catalogue their movements and attempt to determine not only how it is that they do what they do, but how it came about that they ended up like this. The result is this book.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, intelligence - specifically intelligence such as that displayed by human beings - serves a particular purpose. There are trade-offs to having a big brain, things that evolution lets drop by the wayside in order to ensure 'thinky-ness' as a lifestyle. Godfrey-Smith argues that cephalopods and humans had, at one point, a common ancestor, from whom the attempt to discover consciousness, self-awareness and higher brain functions split off into two very different directions. Intelligence as we know it, he declares, arose in the trees of Africa on the one hand, and in the depths of the ocean on the other.

The book trails the evolutionary path of cephalopods from their inception, examining the trade-offs that octopus, cuttlefish and squid encountered on the way to their current status. Godfrey-Smith examines the fossil record to determine when shelly molluscs went from bottom-crawling to floating in the water column, trading-off clamp-down security on the sea floor for a greater ability to hunt prey; he follows the decision to forego a bony shell in order to increase mobility, trading-off armour for speed and predatory dexterity; then, having exposed themselves to the predations of others, he examines the development of camouflage and improved eyesight, allowing the cephalopods to see the enemy coming and to do something about it. The connective tissue between all of these bodily developments, Godfrey-Smith argues, is a huge leap forward in brain-power.

Not all cephalopods followed the same path. At some point the Nautilis split off from the main crowd and became content with a hard shell, the ability to jet along through the water and eyes of a somewhat lower order. Cuttlefish, on the other hand reduced their armour and also internalised it, retaining a small surfboard shaped "cuttlebone" to support their bodies. Squids and octopuses however, have no set shape, having completely eliminated a fixed bodily structure. Octopus, for example, are so fluid in structure that they can pass through any opening through which they can push an eyeball. To maintain some kind of cohesion, these creatures have developed massive neural networks that keep track of the multifarious parts of their bodies. Each cephalopod has a central brain, but also, each tentacle has its own neural network that controls that particular limb. The main brain makes decisions that can co-ordinate activity between separate organs, but for the most part each element of the body amuses itself doing whatever it wants. It's like your 'head brain' watching your arm reach out to pick up a sandwich without really being involved in the activity at all.

This is a very simplified view of the process which Godfrey-Smith talks us through, but it holds water in essence. Along with this comes a superior form of vision that allows the cephalopod to spot danger and co-ordinate itself for a response. Apart from being quite peculiar-looking, cephalopod eyes are very similar to ours, and this is another experiment which evolution has resolved the same way at two very separate ends of the Tree of Life. The odd thing though, is that cephalopods are colour-blind, which begs the question of how they can duplicate their surroundings so well, even down to the colour of the coral that they're hiding in front of? Colour camouflage in cephalopods is maintained by special cell structures in the skin called chromatophores which allow the creatures to switch colours almost instantly, but without the ability to 'see' colour, how does and octopus know what colour to switch to?  Well, it comes back to the massive neural networks in the tentacles - the main eyes of the octopus are good for seeing danger approach; the tentacles and their chromatophores "see" colour and texture around them in order to mimic them. Yes folks, cephalopods "see" with their skin. 

So, with all of these funky abilities, what, asks Godfrey-Smith, is the trade off? It turns out that with great brain power and chameleon abilities that even chameleons wish they had, comes a limited life-span. Octopus, cuttlefish and most squid live for only about two years. During that time they have to weigh up the decision to reproduce (which kills the female octopus) and do the other sorts of things that living creatures become fixated upon - food, security and territorial dominance. Cephalopods have an enormous capacity to learn and to overcome obstacles but they have no possibility of passing that information on to successive generations; in that sense, every individual cephalopod is a largely unique being, in no way dependent upon its forebears and owing nothing to its descendants. Of course, if they could pass on knowledge to their spawn, we'd probably be less sure of our position as top dogs on the planet Earth.

If the posthuman debate in all of its tortuous jargon is getting you down, this is the book you've been looking for. While there is no mention of Great Cthulhu or HPL between its covers, it is at once engaging and thought-provoking, and it will make you think twice about ordering the calamari salad.

Four Tentacled Horrors.