Other Minds

Octopuses evolved a big, weird nervous system on a branch of the tree of life so far from ours that the last common ancestor we share was probably some flattened worm with barely any neurons at all, and Godfrey-Smith’s argument is that this makes them the nearest thing to genuinely alien intelligence we can actually study. That premise alone earns the book a place on my shelf.

Where it runs into trouble is structure. The book moves between hard evolutionary biology, philosophy of mind, and first person diving anecdotes about watching octopuses and cuttlefish in open water, and the transitions aren’t always earned. One critical reader called the chapters disjointed, jumping between lessons in evolution and unintelligible musings on the philosophy of language and then a call to sea conservation in the final pages, and while I don’t think it’s quite that scattered, I understand the complaint, there’s no single thesis statement this book is building toward and closes on, it’s more a tour through everything Godfrey-Smith finds fascinating about cephalopod cognition, loosely stitched together.

The parts that work, work extremely well. The material on camouflage as a form of communication a color-blind animal somehow performs anyway is genuinely mind-bending, and his account of octopus short lifespans against their apparent intelligence, why would evolution build something this smart with barely a year to use it, is the strongest chapter in the book. I found myself wanting more of exactly this and less of the philosophy-of-consciousness detours, a complaint I saw echoed by at least one other reader wishing there was simply more cephalopod material and less theoretical scaffolding around it.

It’s not a tightly argued book and it doesn’t pretend to be one by the end. It’s closer to a curious, well-read scientist thinking out loud across a subject he clearly loves. Four stars, docked for the wandering structure, not for the substance.