Peter Godfrey-Smith on Alien Intelligences in Our Midst

In the two-thousands, the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith began snorkelling off the coast of his native Sydney, where he became captivated by giant cuttlefish. The experience spurred him to explore the subjective experience of cephalopods, the marine invertebrates (including octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid) whose sentience developed on an evolutionary lineage that split off from ours about six hundred million years ago. In “Other Minds,” his best-selling book about these creatures, he writes, “the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all”—an otherness that he has continued to examine in his books, including “Metazoa” and, most recently, “Living on Earth.” Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a handful of novels that reflect on some of the mysteries posed by these astonishing animals. His comments have been edited and condensed.

The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

This is a very good dystopian sci-fi novel that’s set in the near future and centers on a marine biologist who’s investigating mysterious oceanic activity in Vietnam. The culprit turns out to be octopuses, who, in the book, are starting to develop more cultural and social capabilities. The story explores the idea that it’s one thing for an animal to be intelligent and have lots going on in their brain, but it’s another for that animal to have culture. What’s distinctive about human minds and human society is the way our behaviors interlock. We do things collaboratively. Each of us builds on the cultural inheritance that earlier generations have laid down. Octopuses, though they have big brains and complex nervous systems, are quite solitary. One wonders what would happen if their simple form of sociality and collective living evolved into something more cultural and technological. That, without giving too much away, is what happens in Nayler’s book. The species takes their first steps down this road, with consequences that are, for us, mysterious and somewhat violent.

The book’s exploration of human consciousness also encompasses comparisons with artificial minds. One of the main characters is an android. There’s an awful, but very memorable, depiction of an A.I.-controlled fishing fleet, where humans are essentially enslaved because there are lots of manipulative tasks that our bodies are good for.

Children of Ruin

Adrian Tchaikovsky

This book, which is a sequel to Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time,” is a more classic piece of sci-fi, focussing on a civilization of octopuses that’s descended from a genetically modified form of the animal that humans deposited on a habitable planet centuries earlier.

You can almost view the Nayler book as a prequel to this one, because the octopuses here have developed much more advanced technology, including space travel. What I really like about this book is the way that Tchaikovsky probes a feature of the octopus mind that is different from ours, which is the decentralized nature of their nervous systems. One of the things he really wants to explore is what it feels like to be an octopus. Roughly two-thirds of their neurons are spread throughout the body, especially in their arms, but nobody really knows what follows from that—whether or not there is a fragmentation of the experiencing self for the octopus.

Tchaikovsky addresses this question by depicting his octopuses as having three quasi-selves that exist alongside one another—a central guiding self, a physical-manipulation self, and a skin-color- and pattern-changing self. I suspect myself that octopuses do kind of switch between modes. If you watch them just sitting around, sometimes it looks like their arms are kind of roaming semi-independently, and it does appear that their minds don’t operate in a top-down way. But then sometimes the octopus can pull itself together to do something that’s really organized, like swimming with jet propulsion, and it suddenly seems to form itself into a much more unified agent.

Kraken

by China Miéville

This is my favorite. It’s a supernatural thriller that begins with the theft of a giant squid from a museum, which turns out to have something to do with a religious cult that is devoted to squids. The novel is hugely charming. I love Miéville’s depiction of London as a quasi-supernatural place, and it has a wonderful character in the form of a very profane, chain-smoking, drinking policewoman.

Here, the squids are a permanent locus of mystery. Squids are very well suited to the story because we know so little about them, unlike octopuses, who are relatively well studied, or cuttlefish, who’ve also drawn serious scientific attention. They’re such strange beings. They’re skittish, they’re difficult. Unlike many other cephalopods, who kind of like us, or at least tolerate us, squid hate us. They can be violent. There will never be a movie called “My Squid Teacher.” “My Squid Assassin,” perhaps, is more likely. The great exemplar of their mystery is the colossal squid, which live in dark, freezing water thousands of feet under the sea and are the size of buses. They’re hardly ever seen alive, and they embody, I think, the mysteriousness of deep-sea life—and nonhuman life.