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Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness QUOTES

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness QUOTES

1 " When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all. "

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

2 " Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. "

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

3 " Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be characteristics of this creature. —Claudius Aelianus, third century A.D., writing about the octopus "

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

4 " The chemistry of life is an aquatic chemistry. We can get by on land only by carrying a huge amount of salt water around with us. "

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

5 " octopuses, far more than rats and pigeons, have their own ideas: "

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

6 " If we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all. "

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

7 " The mind evolved in the sea. "

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

8 " Cephalopods are evolution’s only experiment in big brains outside of the vertebrates. "

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

9 " What does it feel like to be an octopus? To be a jellyfish? Does it feel like anything at all? Which were the first animals whose lives felt like something to them? "

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

10 " They are curious, embracing novelty, protean in behavior as well as in body "

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

11 " What is the point of building a large nervous system if your life is over in a year or two? The machinery of intelligence is expensive, both to build and to run. "

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

12 " For an octopus, its arms are partly self "

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

13 " All living things affect their environment by making and transforming chemicals, and "

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

14 " This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. "

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

15 " Octopuses in at least two aquariums have learned to turn off the lights "

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

16 " Consciousness surely did not, James said, suddenly irrupt into the universe fully formed. The history of life is a history of intermediates, shadings-off, and gray areas. Much about the mind lends itself to a treatment in those terms. Perception, action, memory—all those things creep into existence from precursors and partial cases. Suppose someone asks: Do bacteria really perceive their environment? Do bees really remember what has happened? These are not questions that have good yes-or-no answers. There’s a smooth transition from minimal kinds of sensitivity to the world to more elaborate kinds, and no reason to think in terms of sharp divides. "

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

17 " Cambridge, through a long series of studies, have shown that birds can store food of different kinds in hundreds of distinct places to retrieve later, and can remember not only where they have put food but what was put in each place, so the more perishable items can be retrieved before the longer-lasting ones. "

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

18 " if you focus on the large fossils, you miss most of the life that is present "

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

19 " Why don’t we all live for a longer time? On mountainsides in California and Nevada there are pine trees that were alive when Julius Caesar was wandering around Rome. Why do some organisms live for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of years while others, in the natural course of events, do not see even a single year pass? Death from accident or infectious disease is no puzzle; the puzzle is death from “old age.” Why, after living for a time, do we fall apart? This question is always lurking as the birthdays pass, but the short lives of the cephalopods make it vivid. Why do we age? "

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

20 " mammals and birds can live longer, if they don’t get eaten "

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