Wow Other Minds just blew mine. The books focus is on Cephalopod, in particular, octopus brains – an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour. The book starts off with an exploration of how and why brains evolved in the first place. It comes down to linking perception with action and creating actions – these turn out to be way more different than they seem. The book goes on to describe why brains got so big, evolutionary branches and the elephant in the room – consciousness. The view of consciousness offered by Peter Godfrey-Smith is one of the most unique ones I’ve seen yet and it’s explained so clearly.
In his view, the bigger category is subjective experience and consciousness is smaller category within it, a type of subjective experience. This is wild. Subjective experience encompasses what it feels like to be something whereas consciousness involves, among other things, integration and broadcasting of senses and memory. The argument is that there can be subjective experience without integration or broadcast etc. i.e. without consciousness. The author demonstrates this from a bunch of experiments that seem to show that, for instance, pigeon brains don’t integrate what’s in the left visual field with what’s in the right visual field. In fact, they don’t even seem to integrate visuals within the same eye! The author also explains his view that subjective experience evolved and the emergence of various features like working memory, workspaces and integration etc. gradually transformed what it feels like to be an animal.
All of this is wrapped in fascinating thoughts, facts and encounters covering octopuses and other animals and how their brains and bodies differ from our own and what that might mean or be like.One last point, the difference between human and animal minds according to the author comes down to loops. One loop, for instance, is the sensory-motor arc. We sense things and act accordingly. There’s also a motor-sensory arc. We perform actions, like turn the page of a book, to sense something new. When we sense then act, our actions change what is perceived/sensed, input becomes output becomes input and so forth. Another loop we have, that’s discussed in detail, is inner speech. We generate speech in our minds but we also listen to the speech that we’ve generated and use that to generate more. Human minds are the locus of countless loops that give us a different perspective on our own lives than animals. Reminds me of Doug Hofstadter’s book that also blew my mind – I Am a Strange Loop.I really enjoyed reading this. There are some odd segues that seem a bit out of place or a bit too long but overall this is a fantastic and fascinating read.
