Peter Godfrey-Smith

Metazoa

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The scuba-diving philosopher who wrote Other Minds explores the origins of animal consciousness
Dip below the ocean's surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom—the Metazoa—they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.
In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus—the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective experience with the assistance of far-flung…
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422 printed pages
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Quotes

  • Jan Nohas quoted4 years ago
    In some cases, the everyday life of a split-brain patient shows signs of ongoing disunity, as evidenced by disagreement; there are cases where one hand will put on a shirt or get out a cigarette, for example, and the other hand will oppose this action. If that sort of behavior was common, it would be tempting to say that the two-minds condition was permanent (as Schechter thinks it is).
  • Jan Nohas quoted4 years ago
    But there is a lot of it, from sea angels (perhaps) to sea dragons (for sure).
  • Jan Nohas quoted4 years ago
    Still, I’d bet on a view in which definite sentience exists not just in vertebrates, but in some groups very distant from our own: at least in cephalopods and some arthropods.

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