Arbieroo reviewed Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Review of 'Other Minds' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Previously, all the books I've read that have dealt with the "mind-body problem" i.e. "where does consciousness come from?" have been woollier than a woolly jumper made from the wool of a woolly mammoth obtained in the middle of the harshest winter of its ice-age lifetime. This one isn't. It's about as woolly as a woolly jumper knitted from 30% sheep's wool, 70% acrylic yarn, instead.
Why is it so much less woolly than other books dealing with this subject? Mainly because, despite the author identifying as "a philosopher" it's mostly science; biology, evolution, geology, psychology. I learned some absolutely fascinating things about bacteria, octopuses, cuttlefish, humans and the evolutionary connections betwwen these different types of animal. Did you know that the common ancestor of humans and cephalopods was almost certainly a worm? Possibly a worm with eyes. Or not. Nobody's certain. Or that there are bacteria that are internally …
Previously, all the books I've read that have dealt with the "mind-body problem" i.e. "where does consciousness come from?" have been woollier than a woolly jumper made from the wool of a woolly mammoth obtained in the middle of the harshest winter of its ice-age lifetime. This one isn't. It's about as woolly as a woolly jumper knitted from 30% sheep's wool, 70% acrylic yarn, instead.
Why is it so much less woolly than other books dealing with this subject? Mainly because, despite the author identifying as "a philosopher" it's mostly science; biology, evolution, geology, psychology. I learned some absolutely fascinating things about bacteria, octopuses, cuttlefish, humans and the evolutionary connections betwwen these different types of animal. Did you know that the common ancestor of humans and cephalopods was almost certainly a worm? Possibly a worm with eyes. Or not. Nobody's certain. Or that there are bacteria that are internally light-sensitive in a way that allows them to seek brighter light sources? Or that an octopus can squeeze through any gap larger than one of its eyes, without harm? Or...I could go on at length...
Anyway, the author's thesis is that octopuses are intelligent, "conscious" animals and that, because the common ancestor of mammals, birds and cephalopods was a worm, conscious intelligence evolved separately in the tentacular beasties from the avian and mammalian ones. There's bucket loads of neuroscience, biology and psychology to back up his arguments, which are remarkably similar to the conclusions I had come to from my independent reading in these areas.
However, there is still a fair bit of wool; the mind-body problem is fuzzier than a peach. Nobody can define their terms, or more accurately, everybody defines their terms, just not the same way as anybody else. Thusly, by "conscious" some people mean selfconscious, others mean, capable of complex behaviour, others mean able to solve abstract problems, others mean, has any kind of mind, whether self-aware or not - just aware of anything outside it, will do. This sort of thing is comparatively rare in other fields. In physics, for example, whilst "speed" and "velocity" mean different things from each other and are not synonymous, it won't matter which physicist you ask, they'll say the same thing: speed is distance/time, velocity is distance/time in a specified direction. For the mathematically minded, speed is scalar, velocity is vector.
And then there's the fundamental problem of consciousness: Just about everyone these days who isn't invoking the supernatural (isn't a "dualist"), believes minds arise from information processing of stimuli, whether external, internal or both. The questions revolve around, how much processing (is a dog conscious? An insect? A worm? A plant? A single celled organism?) and what type of processing (is there something special about brains/nervous systems? What about algorithmic info-processing? What about algorithms that mimic nervous systems/brains?) But this all begs the fundamental question, why should any collection of atoms be aware of anything at all? Since there is no evidence that minds are made of anything unique (no "mind-stuff") why do some types of arrangements of atoms lead to awareness at all? Why aren't humans just zombies? Nobody knows and this book shoves the question under the carpet almost as firmly as every other book I've ever read on the subject.
It's a very rewarding read, though. Mostly very well explained, properly referenced and accessible to any well educated reader, I would think. Also personally gratifying, in that its clear that there are other scientists (actual experts in the area) who have arrived at similar conclusions to my own dilettante and unpublished ones. It's mercifully short by standards of typical books about the subject, too...
