The Unique Approach of Octopuses and Their Behavioral Complexity

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Octopuses are not necessarily smart in the same way as crows and parrots. While they are behaviorally and sensually complex, they have a different approach to problem-solving. Octopuses rely on their body and manipulate their environment to figure things out. They are adept learners and can navigate their surroundings, remember individuals, and even plan their escape when not being watched. However, they lack the reflective and cognitive problem-solving abilities seen in crows and parrots. So, while octopuses possess a unique kind of smartness, it is not comparable to that of birds.

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.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-peter-godfrey-smith-on-sentience-and-octopus-minds/

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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 Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.

Here are some of the papers mentioned in this episode:

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