Other Minds

The line that’s stuck with me longest from this book isn’t even really about octopuses directly, it’s the observation that meeting one is probably the closest most of us will ever get to meeting an actual alien intelligence, because the branch of the evolutionary tree that produced cephalopod nervous systems split from ours so far back that whatever’s going on behind those eyes evolved almost entirely independently of anything that produced human thought.

Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science who also dives, and that combination is what makes this work when a lot of pop-science books about animal cognition don’t. He’s not doing the thing where you anthropomorphize an octopus into an adorable underwater dog, he’s actually asking, carefully and with real philosophical rigor, what subjective experience might even mean for a creature whose neurons are distributed mostly in its arms rather than centralized in a brain the way ours are. The dives to Octopolis off the Australian coast are the emotional center of the book, and his descriptions of watching individual octopuses over repeat visits, recognizing behavior, noticing personality, carry real affection without ever tipping into the sentimentality that a lot of octopus books can’t resist.

Where it loses some momentum, and a few reviewers have said this more bluntly than I will, is once the book moves past the direct field observation and into a longer philosophical detour on the evolution of consciousness generally. That section is well argued but it’s a different kind of reading than the octopus material, denser, more abstract, and I found myself wanting to get back to the actual animals rather than the theory built around them. The chapters on cuttlefish skin and color-changing camouflage are genuinely some of the best popular science writing on a specific animal behavior I’ve read in a while, vivid enough that I went looking for video afterward, and that’s not something I usually bother doing after finishing a book.

Not a life-changer cover to cover, but the sections where it’s actually watching an octopus think are worth the price of admission on their own, and I haven’t looked at a tide pool the same way since.