Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. Peter Godfrey-Smith
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016 as Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Copyright © Peter Godfrey-Smith 2016
An excerpt from Other Minds originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Scientific American.
Cover art: Kunstformen der Natur (1904), plate 54: Gamochonia, Octopus vulgaris by Ernst Haeckel
All photographs were taken by the author, unless otherwise stated
Drawn figures are by the author, unless otherwise stated
Peter Godfrey-Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008226299
Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780008226282
Version: 2018-01-11
For all those who work to protect the oceans
The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.
– William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890
The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages … At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive. Parallel with this evolution of animal forms, plant life begins on land and in the sea – at first with the algae, followed by seaweeds and rushes. As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.
– Roland Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, 1916
CONTENTS
1. Meetings Across the Tree of Life
4. From White Noise to Consciousness
1
MEETINGS ACROSS THE TREE OF LIFE
Two Meetings and a Departure
On a spring morning in 2009, Matthew Lawrence dropped the anchor of his small boat at a random spot in the middle of a blue ocean bay on the east coast of Australia, and jumped over the side. He swam down on scuba to where the anchor lay, picked it up, and waited. The breeze on the surface nudged the boat, which started to drift, and Matt, holding the anchor, followed.
This bay is well-known for diving, but divers usually visit only a couple of spectacular locations. As the bay is large and typically pretty calm, Matt, a scuba enthusiast who lives nearby, had begun a program of underwater exploration, letting the breeze carry the empty boat around above him until his air ran out and he swam back up the anchor line. On one of these dives, roaming over a flat sandy area scattered with scallops, he came across something unusual. A pile of empty scallop shells – thousands of them – was roughly centered around what looked like a single rock. On the shell bed were about a dozen octopuses, each in a shallow, excavated den. Matt came down and hovered beside them. The octopuses each had a body about the size of a football, or smaller. They sat with their arms tucked away. They were mostly brown-gray, but their colors changed