Deep learning: the remarkable evolution of octopus intelligence
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.00, 255 pages
You are looking at an odd creature, and it is returning your stare. Its eyes, surmounted by diagonal crests, convey an air of knowingness mixed with curiosity. You have just trespassed on an octopus, and it is likely judging you just as much as you, it. The wisps above its eyes and its pensive gaze are reminiscent of an owl’s, and though it is the latter that we associate with wisdom, we are increasingly aware of how an odd mollusk, too, can embody an intriguing form of intelligence.
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness is an intimate visit into the world of cephalopod evolution, physiology, and, most importantly, psychology. It traces the divergence between humans (vertebrates) and the cephalopods (invertebrates) from their last common ancestor 600 million years ago to two vastly different organisms. And yet, while the gap between jelly-like, jet-propelled, aquatic beings and bony, bipedal terrestrial primates is significant, Godfrey-Smith ably chronicles the remarkable convergence of our nervous systems that make cephalopods and humans simultaneously alien and kin.
Other Minds is the creature of a biologist-philosopher, and the two disciplines blend almost seamlessly in the book. Godfrey-Smith details cephalopod bodies and behaviors vividly, tracing their evolutionary origins through the perspective of different schools of thought. His ability in selecting what to showcase and in canvassing extensive academic debates makes Other Minds an engaging and accessible read.
Only in one chapter (“Our minds and others”) does the narrative stumble. Instead of interweaving examples of marine life with scholarly literature, this segment remains too focused on the latter. It breaks the rhythm of the book and plucks readers from the oceans, forcing them into a library.
Throughout the rest of Other Minds, readers swiftly become enamored with the quirks of octopuses and cuttlefish. It is easy to reach the end of the book wanting more details and stories of the author’s tentacled companions.
Cephalopods possess intriguing features. Among others, they are both color blind and able to match their skin’s hue to that of their surrounding environment, and possess tentacles with cells that can taste and perceive light. Their greatest asset and peculiarity, however, lies in the size and structure of their nervous systems. In the case of octopuses, the brain contains merely 35 percent of the animal’s neurons, the others being distributed among the tentacles. The average octopus, with its 500 million neurons, vastly outperforms other mollusks on this measure, comfortably surpasses rats’ brain capacity, and clocks in just short of the common housecat’s 700 million neurons. Such computing power endows these cephalopods with great curiosity and a distinct problem-solving ability.
The decentralization of their nervous system also inspires thoughts about political organization. Can human society mimic the octopus, a paragon of federated authority where each tentacle maintains relative autonomy from the central brain? This would imply surpassing the infamous leviathan as an organizing concept.
In the United States, in 2014, 17 percent of government employees (four out of 23 million) were employed by the federal government, with the remainder working for state and local authorities. These proportions do not carry over in the balance of resources consumed across the governmental organism: in the same year, Washington accounted for nearly 66 percent ($3.5 trillion) of all government expenditures across the U.S.; state and local governments came in at just under $2.5 trillion. While these figures offer an initial point of discussion, we eagerly await a political philosopher that can offer us the allegory of the octopus.
Despite the progress that scientists have made in recent years, there is much to discover about cephalopods. Researchers have only just begun to answer questions about the sociality of octopuses — once thought to be loners, this is now being revised. Squids, who live in deeper waters, offered fewer opportunities for study. That, too, is changing. And, while Godfrey-Smith briefly mentions the psychologist Michael Tomasello, he does not engage with a most fascinating question: whether cephalopods possess some of the advanced metacognition behaviors (thinking about thinking, within the self and others) that humans and some other primates possess.
Other Minds crowns the ascent of the cephalopod in the popular imagination. From the fearsome, ship-devouring krakens of yore (think Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) to the post-crisis depiction of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” passing through the lascivious octopuses of Hokusai’s “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” these animals have aroused our fear and curiosity for centuries.
The more we learn about their minds, however, the more intelligence — rather than malignant tentacles — becomes the trait we first associate with them. (You may recall the helpful octopus Hank in Finding Dory.) If cephalopods are as metamorphic in culture as they are in reality, Godfrey-Smith has skillfully fixed them in this book to draw out what makes them truly special.
This article was originally published on May 6, 2017, on my old blog, Perpetual Peace. It is reproduced here with minor edits.
