Octopuses become fond of certain people, yet at others they squirt disdainful jets of water. They recognize human faces one study confirmed that giant Pacific octopuses could even distinguish people wearing identical uniforms. Octopuses have personality (cephonality?), some shy, some confident or “particularly feisty.” Some - not all - play, blowing and batting bottles around. Matt followed, as if he were being led across the sea floor by a very small eight-legged child.” Ten minutes later they arrived at the octopus’s den. Godfrey-Smith watched his dive partner as “an octopus grabbed his hand and. tasting your finger as it draws it in. . . “You reach forward a hand and stretch out one finger, and one octopus arm slowly uncoils. Thus most amazing: recognition, their “sense of mutual engagement,” their disarming friendliness.

“This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” When seeking other minds, we find that “the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.”

because evolution built minds twice over,” Godfrey-Smith writes. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is. Cephalopods are therefore an independent voyage into complexity. Our last common ancestor, 600 million years ago, was a wormlike creature. Octopuses and cuttlefish - cephalopods - make surprisingly good foils here. Watching octopuses watching him, our author considers minds and meanings. He is an academic philosopher but also a diver. If we met an alien whose intelligence derived through an entirely separate provenance from ours, would we recognize the sparkle in each other’s eyes? In “Other Minds,” Peter Godfrey-Smith hunts the commonalities and origins of sentience. OTHER MINDS The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness By Peter Godfrey-Smith Illustrated.

The soul of an octopus book review