Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science who apparently just really likes diving with octopuses, and Other Minds reads like the pleasure project it clearly was for him. The pitch is simple, an octopus is about as close as we get on this planet to meeting a genuinely alien intelligence, since the last common ancestor we share with them is some flatworm-adjacent thing from six hundred million years ago, and yet here they are, solving puzzles, recognizing individual divers, running distributed nervous systems through their arms like each one is half thinking for itself.
The chapters on skin coloration and cuttlefish are the ones I dog-eared, there’s something about an animal that can’t hear color but can display it across its whole body that made me put the book down and just sit with it for a minute. He does get philosophical in the middle stretch, which is his actual job, and I won’t pretend I followed every turn, but I never resented it the way I resent that kind of detour in worse books. My one real complaint, echoed by basically everyone I’ve talked to about this, is that I wanted more cephalopod and less consciousness theory. He clearly could have gone further down the speculative road on qualia and chose not to, which I think is the responsible choice and also, selfishly, the less fun one.
I’ll admit my octopus-at-the-restaurant calculus changed after this. Four stars, docked one for restraint I respect more than I enjoy, and a permanent mental note that cuttlefish deserve better than they get.