Comments on: Book review – Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

By: Review of "Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World" by Peter Godfrey-Smith - 3 Quarks Daily

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:52:50 +0000

[…] 2016, scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith made a huge splash with his book Other Minds in which he explored the evolutionary origins of a mind quite unlike ours, that of the octopus. In […]

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By: Book review – Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:57:57 +0000

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By: Book review – A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 16:28:34 +0000

[…] volume. In my earlier reviews of Godfrey-Smith’s books, I described Metazoa as a step up from Other Minds. Given the agreement between Veit’s and Godfrey-Smith’s views, how appropriate to […]

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By: Book review – Sentient: What Animals Reveal About Our Senses | The Inquisitive Biologist

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 16:31:27 +0000

[…] Finally, several fascinating chapters deal with less obvious senses. Cheetahs are known for their speed, but it is their sense of balance that steals the show. Their vestibular organs in the inner ear are exceptionally well developed compared to other cats. Walking on two legs the way humans do is similarly “one of the most daring balancing acts in the animal kingdom” (p. 203), and we have similarly enlarged balance organs for a primate. Pioneering studies in which people retreated to caves, shut away from daylight, revealed an inner sense of time and established the field of chronobiology. A third type of photoreceptor diffusely present in mammalian retinas, neither rod nor cone, has been implicated in this. Finally, mechanosensory neurons give us a sense of body awareness or proprioception, telling us where our body is in space. A patient who suffered from a rare form of body-blindness has shown parallels with the octopus whose arms are only partially controlled by the central nervous system. […]

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By: Book review – Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness | The Inquisitive Biologist

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 13:59:43 +0000

[…] 2016, the scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote Other Minds where he explored the mind of the octopus – I reviewed it right before reading this book. Its […]

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By: Book review – Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods | The Inquisitive Biologist

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 15:47:58 +0000

[…] Disturbing Science of Squid to several works focusing on the octopus (Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, Montgomery’s touching The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration of One of the […]

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By: Book review – Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World | The Inquisitive Biologist

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 15:46:04 +0000

[…] to Water in Eight Million Years), the otherworldly intelligence of the octopus (see my review of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life), and, of course, the evolution of man – Wrangham’s argument in Catching Fire: How Cooking […]

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By: Book review – Superlative: The Biology of Extremes | The Inquisitive Biologist

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 15:44:25 +0000

[…] (admittedly a somewhat loaded topic) to then show how other animals are also very smart, including octopuses, elephants, ants, plants, and even slime moulds. Each of these is smart in their own unique […]

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By: Book review – Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind | The Inquisitive Biologist

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 15:41:52 +0000

[…] behavioural evidence of sophisticated perception and cognition in invertebrates, specifically in cephalopods and […]

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