METAZOA: Where Does Human Consciousness Overlap With an Octopus’?
The book Metazoa tries to answer questions about what connects us to animals by exploring the nature of life, the history of animals, and the different ways of being an animal.
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL: Animals are classified as either protozoan (one-celled organisms like amoebas) or metazoans. In colloquial terms, humans are technically considered metazoans because their body is made of multiple cells that form various tissues and organs, but most scientists use this word to refer to animals that aren’t human: fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and other mammals….
What makes… Peter Godfrey-Smith’s newest book, “Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind”… shimmer and shine is his exploration of marine life (drawing on his vast and extensive diving knowledge and field experience) to illuminate the ways in which the animal mind works — and the thoughts and experiences that give it shape…
Godfrey-Smith, who is also the author of “Other Minds,” tries to answer some thoroughly fascinating questions about what connects us to animals. He does this in vivid and scenic prose that, as he puts it, “approaches the puzzles of mind and body by exploring the nature of life, the history of animals, and the different ways of being an animal that surround us now”…
Take, for example, the author’s pause over finding a one-armed shrimp during one of his dives. As Godfrey-Smith describes it: “Eighteen limbs and protrusions … a body like a Swiss Army knife.” In spite of missing a claw and being surrounded by bigger, mightier animals such as mollusks and sharks — “in the land of the limbless, the one-armed shrimp is king.” And yet, when compared with the octopus, which “can grasp and manipulate just about anything — as well as doubling the length of its arms or flattening itself like a pancake,” the limits of the arthropod become quite clear.
Then there’s the… knowledge that the dolphins we know were once land mammals returned to the sea, distantly related to the hippopotamus. And it’s hard not to be amused by the mind-boggling learning ability of archerfish, which acquire — simply by watching other archerfish — the ability to knock out flying insects by blasting them with a squirt of water until their prey plummets into the water in time for dinner…
Godfrey-Smith has an elegant and exacting way of urging along our curiosity by sharing his own questions about animal cognizance and the ability of some animals, like rats and cuttlefish, to “meander, drift off and dream.” But perhaps the most enthralling part of this book is the author’s experiences diving at famous sites now affectionately called Octopolis and Octlantis, just off the coast of eastern Australia where several octopuses live, hunt, fight and make more octopuses.
It’s an experience that demands we consider the very real possibility that an octopus, an animal already regarded as one of the most complex in the animal kingdom, is a being with multiple selves. A breathtaking explanation follows, and it’s one that makes even a cephalopod fan like me swoon over the myriad possibilities for rethinking the mind as a sort of hidden realm for sentience. SOURCE…
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