Summary, Analysis & Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds by Instaread

By Instaread Summaries

Summary, Analysis & Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds by Instaread

 

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Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses the evolution of intelligence in cephalopods in order to better

• Language: English
• Publisher: Instaread, Inc
• Release date: Feb 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683786719

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Overview

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses the evolution of intelligence in cephalopods in order to better understand the development of consciousness and cognition. Cephalopods like octopuses and cuttlefish have the most complex nervous systems in the invertebrate world. Examining the similarities and differences between octopus and human brains illuminates what scientists know and don’t know about both.

While on a dive off the east coast of Australia in 2009, Martin Lawrence discovered an unusual community of octopuses. Octopuses are generally solitary, but this location, dubbed Octopolis, was home to many octopuses who interacted regularly. The complexity of the behavior in Octopolis demonstrates octopus intelligence.

The last common ancestor of human and octopus was probably a worm-like creature living 600 million years ago. This creature did not have a complicated brain. That means that octopuses and vertebrates developed neural systems separately. Intelligence evolves, in part, to allow organisms to sense and understand the environment around them. It also evolves to allow complicated organisms to develop internal coordination and connection between neurons. Octopuses have developed quite differently from mammals in this regard. Mammal nervous systems are controlled by the brain. An octopus’s neurons, in contrast, are spread throughout its body, so that each arm functions to a