Peter Godfrey-Smith: Cuttlefish, Octopuses, and the Consciousness of Mysterious Minds

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He has also taught at Stanford University and Harvard University. Among other topics, he has researched the philosophy of biology and mind, and is very well-known for his book Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (FSG, 2016). In this episode, Peter and Robinson discuss that book, as well as his latest, Living on Earth (William Collins, 2024). More particularly, they discuss cuttlefish, octopuses, consciousness, metaethics, and animal welfare.

OUTLINE
00:00 Introduction
01:10 Scuba Diving with Cuttlefish and Octopuses
09:43 Why Did Creatures Evolve Nervous Systems?
16:18 Why Did Conscious Minds Evolve?
27:23 Why Do We Believe that Other Animals Have Minds?
36:49 Do Shrimp or Fish Feel Pain?
47:01 What’s It Like to Be an Octopus?
57:32 What Is Metaethics?
1:04:57 First-Order Ethics
1:08:12 Is It Morally Acceptable to Eat Animals?
1:16:04 What Does Peter Eat?
1:29:49 Future Work

[HipolitoHernanz]

Excellent interview, Robinson. You are always well prepared, which is a lot of hard work, and then you use that preparation to guide but not interfere with your guest's presentation. Very professional and a joy to watch. Thank you!

[paulmilligan]

I’m 40 mins in and need to rest my brain; so far it’s an amazing conversation. Thank you.

[TheKvin]

I hope you enjoyed your two weeks of guilt-free fish-eating before this! :D

[mikhailfranco]

Great discussion, I learned a lot. I have thought about these issues, my opinions have changed during my life, and I am open minded to change them again, as new facts and philosophies impinge on my lazy mind.
It would have been interesting to discuss the farming-adjacent topics of other controlled animal lives: working dogs (S&R, sheepdogs, blind guide dogs, ..etc), domestic pets, zoos and wildlife parks.

[dosesandmimoses]

Hallelujah. Death should not be the ONLY focus of animal wellbeing. Thank you for this conversation.. because it seems that people have misunderstood or completely missed this message. Now for those not familiar with ethics, substitute “animal” with the word “person.” They are one of the same should one have forgotten the category chart of mammals..

[puccaso]

4:26 Why would it be good for camouflage? Whatever blue looks like to them, is what air looks like to us.

[Pourang_Kay]

Perfect timing! I've been reading his books, almost done with Other Minds. 👍🙌

[jamesthelemonademaker]

If you've had an aquarium with fish it's difficult to maintain a position that they are not conscious

[christopherstanford]

🐙🦑🐚🐌 The Phylum Mollusca encompasses quite a variety of species, snail & octopus are at the extreme "intellectual" ends. I first encountered a baby octopus in a soup can on a beach in Mexico 56 years ago, will always cherish that memory. ❤

[PachyteneCheckpoint]

If you put salt on a banana slug while it is eating its favorite food--- raw potato--it not only writhes as if in agony, but it will NEVER eat potato again. How anthropocentric to say it does not experience pain.

[TheDudeKicker]

1:02:00 Thank you for dumbing it down for me. You are so smart.

[danishaffer]

Consciousness just means being awake, to say anything else is homo-centric, is to create a frame work where in humans can be elevated as superior.

[khrysos]

From a physicalist point of view qualia are a physical phenomena (they happen in a brain, not in the world outside the brain). We know that in the world outside the brain there is no "red" but only a collection of wavelengths that fall in a particular bandwidth. In the video it is argued that a form of proto-mind phenomenon could be the "felt experience". I don't think that "felt experiences" are a form of penumbra where a mind forms in its earlier stage because a "felt experience" involves already a "self" that is feeling. What if instead a qualia can happen as a mind event but without any observer who experiences it (the self). Think it as a movie projected in the cinema without spectators. It could be that qualia are evolved nervous system functions to collapse the information into a category in order to process the data more efficiently and that later a self evolved as a way to do efficient problem solving on data collected from the world in the form of qualias. I imagine that a self evolved after the formation of a cohesive and persistent auto-updating "world view" that could put together all the isolated perceived qualia that were previously appearing non persistent and not connected between them. Like flashes of redness or pain disconnected from a cohesive synthetized perception of reality that later became the movie projected in the cinema of the mind and that even later are shown to a spectator as a movie when he finally evolved into existence. Isn't it also how we as a self enter the stage in life ? we all know that we didn't have a conscious-self immediately after we were born but we developed it later.

[optinoptimist]

cuttleconsciousness and the magical mystery minds

[puccaso]

5:22 What does he mean? No one understands? I’ve been listening to him for five minutes and I’ve worked out so many things already.

[MattAngiono]

Sorry, but to talk about "humanely farmed beef" is just putting words together....
You have to ignore A LOT of what is happening to those cows to call it that.

It's easy for us to tell ourselves a story that these cows are getting to live lives they want to live, but we aren't actually getting their consent.

The HUMANE thing to do is to leave them alone or just not breed them into existence, plain and simple.

This is just a bunch of mental gymnastics to justify the particular form of animal abuse he is supporting.

There's a better way, clearly

[dosesandmimoses]

I’ve never interpreted Nietzsche or heard of his work being interpreted as an “exposure to overcome ethics.” Not have I ever met a philosophy professor who posited that interpretation..

[MattAngiono]

The problem with assuming that there's a "welfare farming" system where animals live lives they'd want to live but death comes at the end, is that we've already created a strawman.
Death doesn't come "AT THE END" but rather fairly early on, shortly after adolescence.

So in fact, there's the ethical implication that now you are taking a life of an animal that DOESN'T WANT TO DIE, and deciding it will die far sooner than it's natural death of old age, without consent.
One could even argue this kind of killing is MORE unethical, because at least in the other case, the animal could be imagined to want to be put out of its misery.

So, while welfare farming is more ethical in the treatment during life for these animals, it becomes far more unethical to then take that life.

Especially since there's alternatives that are better in every way.

This entire discussion revolves around the selfish desire to taste flesh, which even then can be imitated.

It's also terrible for the environment to farm animals, which resulted in negative effects on the rest of us.

Simply put, the natural world would be way more healthy if we stopped such practices altogether.

It takes FOUR TIMES the land to produce an average diet with animals in it (far worse for carnivores)!!

We are literally threatening our own future existence by continuing down this path.

It's so easy to just become VEGAN and then we have much better prospects for the future.

Not to mention what it SAYS ABOUT US AS A SPECIES, that we even do this at all, when we know it's unnecessary.

[Hubris]

Consciousness and subjective experience are one and the same thing. The consciousness of any living thing only exists because of the consciousness of its ancestors that lived before it.

[danishaffer]

Well did we have that debate or did we just imagine it? It’s kinda not the same thing? Before we reach question 2 let’s actually discuss question 1.