Other Minds

by Peter Godfrey-smith William Collins 272pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17 Octopuses, the subject of Peter GodfreySmith’s Other Minds, are extraordinarily intelligent, adaptable creatures, said Damian Whitworth in The Times. They can navigate mazes and unscrew jars. Because their bodies contain so “few hard parts”, they can squeeze through holes the size of their eyeballs, which helps to make them “adept escapologists”. They have strong likes and dislikes, and are canny at getting what they want. At a lab in New Zealand, an octopus “took exception” to one staff member and spurted jets of water at her “whenever she passed”. Others have learned to short-circuit annoyingly bright lab lights by squirting them with water, or to express resentment at unsatisfactory meals by throwing food down the drain. But octopuses can also be friendly – as Godfrey-smith, an Australian philosopher of science and a keen scuba diver, has observed. He writes of octopuses curiously exploring his fingers, and of seeing one grab a fellow diver’s hand before leading him off for a “tour” of the seafloor. An ingenious blend of philosophy and science, Other Minds is “fascinating” and “delightful”. The octopus’ intelligence is all the more remarkable for being so far removed from our own, said Charles Foster in Literary Review. Cephalopods and humans belong to entirely separate branches of evolution. Our last common ancestor was probably a “small, flattened worm” that lived around 600 million years ago. Cephalopods, a kind of mollusc, emerged about 290 million years ago, when they ditched their shells and acquired complex nervous systems. They are, in other words, a “highly successful experiment in the building of large brains, but one wholly independent of that which produced Mozart”. Wideranging in focus and “crystalline” in its prose, Other Minds is a “superb, coruscating book”, even if reading it has rather “spoiled” my enjoyment of barbecued octopus.

An octopus typically has about 500 million neurons, giving it a “smartness” equivalent to a dog or “even a three-year-old child”, said Philip Hoare in The Guardian. The difference is that its neurons aren’t concentrated in its brain, but “suffused” through its body. The octopus lives outside the usual brain/body divide. Its tentacles act as “agents of their own”: it can sense by “taste as much as touch”; it can even “see” with its skin, which is sensitive to light and shade. It is, in short, a “wondrous being”. Or as Godfrey-smith puts it in his “brilliant” book: “this is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”