Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds

**Peter Godfrey-Smith** (0:00)
I think no one really expected that. There's a need for new theory.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:03)
You've said, This is probably the closest that we'll get to meeting an alien.

**Peter Godfrey-Smith** (0:07)
It's contact across a huge evolutionary divide.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:11)
This is Peter Godfrey-Smith, Professor at the University of Sydney and the author of Other Minds, The Octopus and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. The professor has a new speculative theory of rhythmic consciousness.

**Peter Godfrey-Smith** (0:23)
What we thought of as noise is not just noise, it's integral to consciousness.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:27)
My name is Curt Jaimungal, this is Theories of Everything, a channel where I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Today, we explore what makes the conscious self.
Are you, for instance, multiple selves? We also talk about the simulation hypothesis and why the octopus is one of the most bizarre creatures we found on this planet, at least so far.

**Peter Godfrey-Smith** (0:51)
And there is an explanatory gap.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:53)
I'm going to read a quote of yours, Professor.
This is probably the closest that we'll get to meeting an alien. Explain what you mean by that.

**Peter Godfrey-Smith** (1:01)
Well, that is a claim about octopuses and other cephalopods. So you've got octopuses, cuttlefish and squid, who are a fairly closely related collection of animals that have, I think, a special status when you look over the whole of the animal kingdom because on the one hand, they have large nervous systems, very complex behavior. They are intelligent animals and I think we have good reason to believe that they have experiences. I think, well, we know less about squid, but just going on the similarities between them and octopuses, I think we certainly have good reason to think that octopuses are probably conscious animals. They are so far from us on the evolutionary tree, on the phylogenetic tree, the tree of common ancestry that links all animals on Earth.
Everyone, all living things, you and an octopus, you and a fly, you and a leopard, but not just animals, you and an oak tree, you and a bacterium are linked by connections of common ancestry. If we go back far enough in time, we get to an organism who's an ancestor of both you and that octopus, and leopard, and fly, and oak tree, and so on. It's just a question of how far we have to go back. In the case of animals, most of the animals that we think of as intelligent, and sensitive, and probably conscious, and so on, are reasonably close to us in evolutionary terms. But cephalopods, including the octopuses, are miles away. To get to a common ancestor of you and an octopus, we have to go back to quite early, not in the history of life, but in the history of animal life. We have to go back, no one really knows exactly how much. In the book Other Minds, they said about 600 million years. Something like 570 might be a figure that would be given now. It's not very different.
That's very old, that's very early in the history of animals. When you meet an octopus or a cuttlefish, you're meeting an animal that has a really enormous evolutionary separation from yourself. But there is this encounter, this sense of contact. One has the sense that there's a lot going on inside. They're sometimes interested in us, in something like it seems the same way that we're interested in them. It's contact across a huge evolutionary divide.
That's the idea.

**Curt Jaimungal** (3:53)
Can you please disentangle these terms that ordinarily get bundled together? So mind, a conscious mind, brain, and even intelligence. Can you have one without the other? How does that go? What does that nesting look like or that partial overlap?

**Peter Godfrey-Smith** (4:08)
Right. I think the first thing to say is that everybody who talks about this is doing a little bit of stipulation and they're guessing on certain things. They're making empirical guesses.
There's different ways to set this up terminologically. But here's the way that I would set it up. I think that mind is a very, very broad category. It's a broad concept that encompasses some intelligence related properties and some consciousness related or experience related properties. Those two are somewhat distinct. I think that you can have genuinely intelligent systems that probably have no feeling, that are probably non-conscious. And I think it's, well, the flip side is tricky. But there can certainly be evidence for a form of experience in organisms in animals that don't have a ton of intelligence. I mean, to some extent, these really are separable. So mind, I think of as a kind of broad category. And there's a cluster of intelligence related features and a cluster of experience related features.