Viviane Collier in Nautilus:
Philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith has spent decades considering the mental life of animals. His pioneering work on octopus cognition has helped to frame the discussion about how we might think about intelligences other than our own.
His recent books, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, explore the evolution of animal sentience, felt experience, and intelligence. His new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Consciousness, and the Making of the World, completes this trilogy. It explores not just how minds evolved on Earth, but how minds have shaped the evolution of life on Earth. His bold thesis envisions organisms as causes, rather than as simply a result of millions of years of natural selection and evolution. I recently caught up with Godfrey-Smith, who is a professor at the University of Sydney, over video. Our conversations ranged over the origins of life, how movement might have led to consciousness, and how language is just “kind of a weird thing that happened in our minds.”
More here.
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