Other Minds

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The octopus is the closest thing to an intelligent alien we’re ever likely to meet, and it grew its mind almost entirely apart from ours. Six hundred million years ago the lineage that leads to us and the lineage that leads to cephalopods split off from a shared ancestor barely more sophisticated than a worm. From that near-nothing, two utterly different body plans arrived at genuine cognition — proof, Peter Godfrey-Smith argues, that a mind is not a one-time invention. Awareness evolved more than once, and it did so along a gradient rather than switching on at some magic threshold.

Peter Godfrey-Smith on SummaryShelf

Other Minds