249 | Peter Godfrey-Smith on Sentience and Octopus Minds

<p>The study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien beings, who presumably developed independently of life here on Earth. But we do have more than one data point to consider: certain vertebrates (including humans) are quite intelligent, but so are certain cephalopods (including octopuses), even though the last common ancestor of the two groups was a simple organism hundreds of millions of years ago that didn't have much of a nervous system at all. Peter Godfrey-Smith has put a great amount of effort into trying to figure out what we can learn about the nature of thinking by studying how it is done in these animals with very different brains and nervous systems.</p> <p>Blog post with transcript: <a href="https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-peter-godfrey-smith-on-sentience-and-octopus-minds/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-peter-godfrey-smith-on-sentience-and-octopus-minds/</a></p> <p><em>Support Mindscape on </em><a href="https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Patreon</em></a><em>.</em></p> <p>Peter Godfrey-Smith received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. He is currently professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. Among his books are <a href="https://bookshop.org/book/9780374537197" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness</em></a> and <a href="https://bookshop.org/book/9781250800268" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind</em></a><em>.</em></p> <ul> <li><a href="https://petergodfreysmith.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Web site</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/science/about/our-people/academic-staff/peter-godfrey-smith.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Sydney web page</a></li> <li><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Lu_qQp0AAAAJ&amp;hl=en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Scholar publications</a></li> <li><a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/peter-godfrey-smith" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PhilPeople profile</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Godfrey-Smith" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/Peter-Godfrey-Smith/author/B001ILMC7O" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amazon author page</a></li> </ul> <p>Here are some of the papers mentioned in this episode:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)00197-8#%20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Crook (2021), Octopus pain</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205821119" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gibbons et al. (2022), Bee pain</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211001084" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gutnick et al. (2011), Octopus arm behavior</a></li> </ul>