Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

The scuba diving philosopher has written a sequel to his last best seller “ Other Minds” developing similar themes about the evolution of animal sentience and consciousness. While observing the diverse marine fauna in their habitat and tracing their common evolutionary origins with their complex branching, he ponders the sentient changes graduating from the most basic organisms and culminating with the human mind. He shows remarkable skills for blending beautifully written zoological descriptions with astute personal observations combined with the latest findings of cognitive sciences, and with philosophical musings about the nature of subjectivity, selfhood and consciousness. By mastering this unique formula he grabs the reader’s constant attention, while guiding him through the realms of evolutionary genetics and morphology, animal behaviour experiments and the philosophical theories of Aristotle, Descartes, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Dennett and Nagel. His overarching thesis is that all living forms have a degree of sentience to engage with their environment. This sentience comes into being gradually and in different degrees with Evolution. It evolves with the development of increasingly sophisticated nervous systems progressing from border line states to a fuller sense of subjective selfhood and in the process imparting unity and purposeful action for the organism. There is no sudden jumping up over thresholds from basic sentience to a fuller selfhood, within this gradual seamless evolutionary process. Evolution has shaped animals through evolving nervous systems into centres of sentience and agency providing with various degrees a sense of the self. Engagement with the world through the senses leads to coordinated action within a unified organism controlled by a nervous system. Sentience comes into being gradually starting from the most basic multicellular animals to the Cephalopods, Arthropods , Birds and Mammals. Minimal sentience implies minimal cognition which leads to some kind of subjectivity. The author calls this subjective experience even in its most basic form, the animal “ experiential profile”, that is the totality of sensory experiences from moment to moment. In animals with rudimentary nervous systems , these sensory experiences are not necessarily accompanied by the “ evaluative” experiences such as pain, stress, fatigue etc. The add on “qualia “ are progressively manifest in animals with more sophisticated nervous systems.The Author rejects the notion that one’s conscious experience can only contain one thing at a time , that is the narrow pathway views of experience advocated by the “flat mind” psychologists. Our experiential profile is much broader, containing both foreground and background attention with their dynamic interactions. His critical evaluation of artificial minds is pertinent as he reminds us that computers are designed to create illusions of agency and subjectivity, that cannot replicate the physical and biological basis of embodied human cognition and sentience. Again he criticises the anthropomorphic model of consciousness founded on a tacit selfhood, with its various neuroanatomical locations and inter-synaptic connections/correlations. This model propounded by some cognitive scientists, reduces the great diversity of animals’ sentience and ignores the wide spectrum of idiosyncratic subjective experiences in the zoological realm. Sensing and minimal cognition exist in all the life around us. The “being there” or the “where and when” kinds of experience, even as we lack appropriate descriptive words, can be inferred by observing different organisms in their respective habitat, from the crab to the octopus, from the bird to the dog.He concludes that we must extend care and consideration to all sentient animals and protect their interests by giving up the traditional divide between humans and animals. This is an engrossing work that educates as well as enchants, while strengthening our emotional and cognitive bonds with the rest of life.

I came to "Metazoa: animal minds and the birth of consciousness" after reading Godfrey-Smith's earlier book on the mind of octopuses and cephalopods which I had enjoyed very much. I have read a number of books trying to pin down what consciousness is and how it came to be. G-Smith's approach is amongst the most successful. Other books I have read mostly approach the subject from the perspective of understanding human thought and brain structure, and then perhaps add a bit of evolution of other animals to the picture along the way, and the animals are mostly mammals.There is a common thread developing in the books I have been reading, where the writer's have been linking all sorts of attributes we think of as being particularly human ( for instance morality, empathy, emotion, traits of intelligence and altruism) back to very basic biology; the behaviour the single cell and intercellular activity, homeostasis, energy efficiency etc. In short there seems to be a consensus that our human traits evolved out of primal evolutionary forces on intercellular activity. This book really gets to grips with this idea from the point of view that all this stuff started in the sea, and we humans, with our intelligence and consciousness, are but one of many current outcomes.Godfrey Smith has come to thinking about consciousness through his love of diving and wondering about the sentience of cephalopods. This brings to the book a thread of poetry and discovery, out of which his inquiring mind sifts meaning. Through a combination of deep reading into science, imagination and observation whilst diving he has developed a philosophical approach that fairly unique and perhaps less anthropo-centric than any other account of consciousness I have read. He sees an octopus mind as being sentient and conscious, but in ways that we can only imagine through the the fussy optic of metaphor, and through which we obviously see their sentience/consciousness obscurely.He is very good at going through the old arguments and philosophical questions, such as in his account of account of qualia, and the Chalmer's/Dennett "hard question" debate which was beautifully succinct. He comes to the obvious conclusion that looking for "intrinsic qualities of experience (the redness of red)" a first person experience) cannot be explained a proposal built of "switches and signals" that is made and seen in the third person. He also suggests the elusive experiential quality of consciousness is as dependent on electromagnetic fields and waves, as it is on synaptic activity.He points out that sentience, consciousness and intelligence have developed many times, and is being driven and shaped by evolutionary forces that are similar, however the nature of the outcome is developed to fit into different bodies and evolutionary niches in different circumstances. So the outcomes, "the experiential profile" (experience - activity felt from the inside) is felt differently for each animal. The fact that an insect has no experience of pain does not in itself mean that the insect has no experience, all it means is that evolution has removed pain from the experiential profile that an insect experiences.There are many good chapters which deserved reading through twice. I particularly enjoyed the last chapter "Putting it all together". He concludes that we, and all animals, have "an experience profile" which changes as moment pass.The book stops short of examining the human mind, but he gives us a strong hint that this is the subject of his next book. I think this third book in what is becoming a trilogy about how consciousness evolvedt will put many of his ideas into a new framework, and it will be worth reading

My recommendation for this book depends on whether you have bought its bestselling precursor or not. I have.Peter Godfrey-Smith's previous book, "Other Minds" was a thrilling page-turner about the intelligence of the octopus family ("cephalopods"), based very much on his own personal diving experience.If you haven't read that, first of all, you should, but then this book will disappoint. Reading this, I got the kind of feeling like when somebody makes a dish on Monday from the Sunday leftovers. The title of this book is "Metazoa", which is a fancy name for multicellular animals (from about sponges to us humans). The subtitle promises to deal with the birth of consciousness in this massive wide group.But the author seems to be salvaging and recycling his observations left over from his previous book about octopuses. Beyond the cephalopods, the higher he gets on the evolutionary tree, the less he says of much consequence. He very obviously concentrates on the relatively few creatures he encountered scuba-diving around a few Australian sites (octopuses, shrimps, sponges, some fish). The rest is apparently taken from relevant literature and pretty superficially. Beyond fish it gets extremely rarified.The book is bulked out by many pages of philosophizing about consciousness and sensing 'self'. This is via references to others and also some personal musings. The author is presented as a "philosopher", but in my opinion he is no more of a philosopher than me or my neighbour. He is a philosophizer rather. You can safely skip several pages before he gets to something interesting again.To be fair, there indeed are some interesting notions and facts, which make you think. For instance he talks about the role of elecrical fields in the brain and so-called "ephaptic coupling" (a communication system within the nervouse system outside the well-known "classical" system of electrical and chemical synapses - nerves seemingly communicating very fast without obvious physical or chemical connection).But if we are getting into the question of electrical fields in the brain and ephaptic coupling, if you are up to date with the development of ideas relating to the functioning of the brain, you would expect a mention of the thrilling new idea according to which quantum physics might have a role in the spectacular phenomena of the brain. There is no mention of that in the book.Anyway, this book still has given me some interesting new facts, made me think, but in places it could be safely edited without losing anything, and philosophizing, which we all do, is not the same as actual philosophy.I say buy one of his books - preferably "Other Minds". This one might disappoint, maybe even bore you after reading the superb previous one.

I was really hoping for somebody to build on Nagel's groundbreaking "Mind and Cosmos". Unfortunately, this is a misguided attempt to drag us backwards. It gets 2 stars for at least trying to engage with where this is going. At least it's better than Dennett.

Like probably everybody fascinated by cephalopods, I've read "Other minds" with great enthusiasm. So, as soon as I heard that Godfrey-Smith had another book out, I ordered it. And read it.Similarly to "Other minds", Godfrey-Smith combines his experience and observations from scuba diving with naturalist erudition and philosophical considerations. This combination makes "Metazoa", again, a beautiful book. Godfrey-Smith is a wonderful observer. The scenes he describes, and the empathy he shows for the observed animals, are captivating. His zoological and neurobiological knowledge, too, are flawless and profound. I'm of the trade myself and have been professionally interested in animal brains and minds for decades, so I can appreciate a fellow scholar.Where I thoroughly disagree is the philosophy. Godfrey-Smith is - and he makes that clear from the outset - a materialist monist. So, he takes part in the decades-long and increasingly desperate struggle to explain all aspects of "consciousness" (this word of a thousand meanings that should be abolished from philosophy) from neuronal processes. Since the problem of mental causation is logically unsolvable in a materialist framework, especially if narrowed down to the qualitative aspects of first-person experience (so called "qualia"), this endeavour has failed. (As dualism isn't an option either (refuted on empirical grounds), we are left with idealism or panpsychism. Make your choice, place your bets.) Knowing this, I approached the metaphysical parts of the book with a mixture of weariness, skepticism, and curiosity. Would he find a new approach?No. In my critical eye, Godfrey-Smith's philosophical dealings with the "hard problem of consciousness" amount to a mixture of schamanic invocation and mystical murmuration. Since "qualia" do not exist in the third-person-perspective, all attempts to write about them are words without a reference. His approach of gradualism, in turn, is completely unconvincing, since rather than rebutting the counterarguments that he presents, he merely re-iterates that he still thinks it's possible to have "more" or "less" subjectivity, and hopes for a different language of the future that may solve all problems.Much better are his considerations on what it might feel like to be an octopus, or a fish. As I said in the beginning: Godfrey-Smith has great skills of observation and wonderful empathy. I had the impression that he is a warm and poetic champion of animal feeling, trapped in the mind of a materialist.Read the book. Whether you agree or not: You will learn a lot.