Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: a review of a philosophical journey into octopus thought and intelligence.

Author and Title: Peter Godfrey-Smith – Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Summary: A philosophical-scientific essay that invites us to see intelligence as an evolutionary plurality and consciousness as a non-anthropocentric phenomenon.

Recommended for: Anyone seeking an authentic dialogue with the radical otherness of marine life.Disclaimer: After reading this book, you may become a conscientious objector—and never again eat octopus with potatoes and parsley. Are you sure you want to take the red pill?

Rating: 5 / 5

What happens when consciousness takes a radically different evolutionary path from ours?

Among recent works of scientific non-fiction, few succeed in blending empirical rigor with philosophical depth like Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. The author, a philosopher of science and avid diver, takes us on a journey—not only metaphorical—into the waters where one of the most singular intelligences in the animal kingdom emerged: that of cephalopods, and in particular, the octopus.

A different way of being intelligent

The book’s central thesis is as simple as it is dizzying: consciousness is not a human privilege, nor is it exclusive to mammals. It can emerge elsewhere—and it has. The octopus is an evolutionary alien, looking at us from a completely different trajectory in the history of life. It is a soft-bodied mollusk with no skeleton, whose last common ancestor with us dates back over 600 million years. And yet, somehow, it possesses a flexible, exploratory, curious kind of intelligence. Not mechanical, not reflexive, but plastically creative.

Godfrey-Smith moves along the ridge between biology and phenomenology: he doesn’t just describe the octopus’s skills (camouflage, problem-solving, tool use), but asks what it means to be an octopus. The quintessential Husserlian question—“What is it like to be?”—is here directed at a creature that lives without bones, with a brain distributed across its limbs, and with a fleeting lifespan of just 1–2 years.

The octopus as an evolutionary mirror

One of the book’s most powerful insights is that octopus intelligence is parallel but not derivative. It didn’t arise from social pressures (as in primates), but from interaction with a changing environment and the motor freedom granted by a soft, boneless body. It’s as if nature ran a parallel experiment—another path toward something that resembles a mind.

Godfrey-Smith narrates all of this in clear yet unsimplified prose, weaving together neuroscience, ethology, and philosophy. His voice is that of a man in awe, not a scientist explaining from a position of mastery.

The sea as the matrix of mind

Beyond the octopus, the book’s true protagonist is the sea itself—the original habitat of consciousness. The sea here is not mere backdrop but existential condition: fluid, unstable, immersive. An experienced diver, the author recounts real-life encounters with octopuses as silent dialogues between radical forms of life. There’s a poetics of otherness in these pages—a continuous wonder at the existence of minds that think without thinking like us.

A must-read for those seeking to understand consciousness beyond the human

Other Minds is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy of mind, ethology, evolutionary biology, or simply in breaking free from the anthropocentrism of contemporary culture. The book resonates with the works of Oliver Sacks, Frans de Waal, and ideally, Beyond Words by Carl Safina—but with a more meditative tone and a metaphysical breath.

This is not a militant manifesto, yet its ethical impact is profound: if creatures so radically different from us can develop forms of subjectivity, then the mind is not a human monopoly, but a distributed possibility of life. And perhaps our respect for other living beings should rest precisely on this awareness.