Octopus Consciousness

When I first started reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of consciousness, I had high expectations. It was to be my first in-depth interaction with academic philosophy in a while and I was excited to see what octopuses could reveal about the nature of consciousness. More specifically, I was curious about one question: are octopuses conscious in the same way that you and I are?

It quickly becomes clear that this is not the right question to ask, and even if it were, the answer is no. Peter Godfrey-Smith (PGS) is making a different sort of point. He is looking at consciousness from a mostly evolutionary and biological perspective. In the branching of the tree of life, evolution created Mollusks and Mammals. We know much about Mammals and the idea that  humans, primates, and other organisms have varying levels of subjective experience is relatively well-accepted. PGS argues, however, that cephalopods, of which octopus, squid, and cuttlefish are a part, represent a different path in the evolutionary tree that also led to subjective experience. Indeed, as PGS puts it, nature ran two separate experiments in creating minds, and cephalopods represent the closest we might ever come to encountering an alien species. That is, they are an organism that seems to be conscious, but that arrived at that conscious state through a means entirely different from our own. 

Thus, octopus are certainly not conscious in the same way you and I are (it would be naive to think that a Martian must think and feel in the same way we do). Rather, PGS is more concerned with laying out the evidence for why we should consider cephalopods as having a much richer sort of subjective experience than we might think, and highlight the drastically different evolutionary path cephalopods took to get there. He is asking us to “Consider the Octopus” so to speak (more so than the lobster). 

PGS does a good job of not overwhelming the reader with either too much philosophical or biological jargon. The book itself is rather short. But PGS does ensure that he both considers and dismisses potential counter arguments and alternative viewpoints, as well as indicate where further research needs to be done (what are the intellectual capacities of cuttlefish? Are some species of octopus more social? What sort of mechanisms do octopuses have for recognizing the color of their environment and changing their skin color accordingly?). 

The thrust of the argument for octopus intelligence comes from embodiment. The idea of “embodied cognition” has been gaining ground, and is something that everyone generally seems to understand (think: giving a public speech without hand gestures). Embodied cognition is about viewing intelligence and thinking through the lens of the body. PGS states that since the beginning of life, unicellular organisms have  developed methods for sensing their environment and reacting accordingly. Single-celled bacteria knew to run towards food and away from danger. As these unicellular organisms evolved into multicellular ones, the same mechanisms that were used to perform external sensing, became mechanisms for internal sensing. And the best way to manage these newfound capabilities was through a nervous system. 

One of the major themes throughout the book is positive feedback; a change leads to a loop that exacerbates more change and so on. When it comes to consciousness, the positive feedback loop that we are most interested in is that of sensing. As PGS puts it, “What you’ll do next is affected by what you’re now sensing; and also, what you’ll sense next is affected by what you now do”. (p.80). As this feedback loop between external and internal continued, organisms developed more robust models of themselves, and eventually, integrated models of themselves as agents in an environment; the birth of “self”, and knowledge of self. We have started on the path towards thinking things.

Octopus (and other cephalopods) in their evolutionary journey have shed away their shells, leaving open exposed, complex body shapes. Their body has no definitive form, and octopus can squeeze through a hole the size of their beak (which can be as small as a quarter!). This peculiar body design, coupled with a plethora of experiments that indicate their ability to learn and their inherent curiosity with novel objects, begins to paint a picture of a more complex inner life than we might imagine. 

But what sort of consciousness do they have? In my opinion, this is where things start to get more interesting. First, PGS wants us to abandon the idea that the only sort of consciousness that can exist is the type of consciousness that you and I have. He thinks that this is clearly not the case, and wants to use a different term: subjective experience. Subjective experience in this context is not referring to the rich complexity of human emotion, thought, and language, but rather simple emotions. PGS takes this as obvious: “Do you think that those things (pain, shortness of breath, etc.) only feel like something because of sophisticated processing in mammals that has arisen late in evolution? I doubt it.” (p. 93)

He cites some interesting work by Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, who liken the very first forms of subjective experience to something like “white noise”. An organism with minimal subjective experience will be conscious of a hazy background, and the details are unclear, but the organism is certainly feeling something. PGS is seeking to take a gradualist perspective in an effort to see how minds could have slowly “creeped in”. But this idea of an ultra simple organism, feeling “white noise” and then moving on to feel slightly more complicated emotions such as pain and pleasure needs to be flushed out. What exactly would it be like to only be able to feel pain and pleasure? I agree that something like pain, and shortness of breath, need not any sophisticated neuro machinery. At the same time, however, it cannot be the case that when you and I feel sort of shortness of breath, it is the exact same sort of subjective feeling that some other mammal might feel, or even similar. 

Early organisms may have had some form of subjectivity, but what I found lacking was a more concrete explanation of what that would look like. It is not enough to simply claim that simple base emotions must have been felt, and more complex ones slowly richened the picture. We need a better understanding of awareness. Awareness is different from subjectivity; one is aware of subjective states. The key question that is left to answer is whether animals have this awareness, alongside their subjective states, and if subjective states must necessarily be accompanied with awareness of them. It is an easier claim to state that subjective states are existing in animals, and intuitively that makes sense. But we, at the moment, lack the tools to understand what that state really looks like for other organisms. 

This is a slightly different criticism of primitive subjective experience than one that is commonly laid out, which is that of language. Many philosophers claim that only with language, and the ability to speak and think about our subjective experience does it then become possible for organisms to be conscious. However, PGS addresses this adeptly; he acknowledges that inner speech, which dominates so much of human subjective experience, certainly enriches our conscious experience, but is not necessary for subjectivity. Humans with reduced language certainly have complex conscious states, and this opens the possibility that octopuses, which lack language, may also. 

He argues that inner speech can be seen as a form of the “global workspace” theory. Traditionally, the global workspace theory posits that our conscious experience consists of mental states, objects, and knowledge that is later made accessible. However, this is difficult to understand since it is not clear who is doing the accessing (we have created another subjective being). Instead, PGS argues that inner speech can be seen as a form of “broadcasting” where information is all of a sudden made available to various parts of a distributed network. Octopuses lack this sort of broadcasting of inner speech, but I see PGS as saying this is a potential added feature of consciousness (that we have) and that cephalopods are capable of evolving at some point.

 In just a short period of time, PGS is able to walk us through the evolutionary tree of life and paint (in perhaps broad strokes) the phenomenon of cephalopod experience. A key point that I will be interested in pursuing further is this idea of distributed consciousness; PGS makes the point early on that the size of one’s brain is not necessarily an indicator of cognition. Cephalopods are interesting in that they have billions of neurons that are located all throughout the body, especially in their legs. This suggests a way in which computers, and indeed computational modelling, could use distributed networks to build thinking things, rather than centralized brain models. It also speaks to the power of genetic algorithms, and the possibility of running simulations of cephalopod consciousness and development to see where it could end up going in the future. Finally, the deep relation between cognition and embodiment remains an open question to explore - how could a computer, with a highly distributed system of computation, give rise to an understanding of self? This poses tough questions for AGI, and PGS has done an excellent job in introducing these concepts to a wide audience for use in both research and discussion.