CxD 📚'23 #11: ⭐️⭐️⭐️🌓 Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
I am changed by a book like this; and left wondering why we’re busy looking for aliens when they live among us. I am tempted to put aliens in quotation marks, but refrain, despite the philosophical urge to do so; I somehow want my consciousness to err on the side of the traceless.
Most fascinating to me was the section about the evolutionary purpose of what are known as efference copies: whenever an animal moves, it unconsciously creates a mirror version of its own will, which it uses to predict the sensory consequences of its actions in order to tell apart what it did versus what its outside environment did. This is why we have inner language and thoughts and dialogue! And those of us who can discern the difference between our inner dialogue and “reality” gain a further extra sense of perception, the capacity to look at oneself with scientific wonder.
The book in a sentence: “The sea is the origin of mind.”
Winning metaphor: The central brain of an octopus is like a conductor and the arms are “jazz players, inclined to improvisation, who will accept only so much direction.”
Pairs exceptionally well with My Octopus Teacher about a man learning to re-connect to the wider world with an octopus as his spiritual teacher and guide. Exquisite, despite cases of anthropomorphism, which in the spirit of the religious, I easily forgive and overlook.