Subtitled "Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness" this book, by the author of the brilliant Other Minds, asserts that consciousness is a characteristic of most animal thinking.
His evidence is his extensive and detailed studies of marine life from sponges and corals to shrimps, fishes and octopuses. All living things, he suggests, sense and use what they sense to modify their actions: “Sensing has its raison d’etre in the control of action.” (Ch 3). Thus bacteria can move towards preferred chemicals, plants sense gravity and grow their roots downwards, animals detect food and move towards it etc.
Most multicellular animals, he tells us can “modulate the interpretation of sensory information by the animal’s registration of what it is presently doing. ... If an animal does do this, it is now sensing the world in a way that tracks the divide between self and other.” (Ch 4) This is also the prime thesis of Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty; that our consciousness is created by a repeated ‘error correction’ between what we expect to happen and what we sense happening; that dreams are experienced as unreal because they are only our uncorrected expectations.
This has led to the concept of self: “Subjectivity involves feelings and seemings; agency is doing and initiating. All living things (or all living things composed of cells) exhibit something like subjectivity and agency, but these features take a different form in the animal case.” (Ch 5)
It can also be very funny, for example in this description of an octopus fight: “Females quite often throw at males who are pestering them. On one occasion, a video shows a female octopus throwing debris repeatedly at one particular male over a period of a few hours. About half of these throws hit him, and others missed only because the male ducked or was belowdecks. Toward the end, the male who had been on the receiving end seemed to be getting used to these assaults; he began to duck quite early as the thrower began loading up, and the final broadsides went (mostly) over his head.” (Ch 6)
Selected quotes
- “A puzzle in front of us seems to resist the usual methods. What we should do in response is build knowledge around it, expecting that as we do this, the puzzle will transform and disappear.” (Ch 1)
- “A human gut holds our food. In addition, our guts contain countless living bacteria, from which we benefit as long as things stay in balance. This kind of collaboration is extremely common in animals.” (Ch 2) This understanding of an individual human as some sort of ecosystem put me in mind of Turtles All the Way Down by John Green in which the heroine reflects, in chapter one: "Humans are approximately 50 per cent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not you at all. ... If half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate."
- “This is the arthropod way of evolving: when in doubt, add some legs.” (Ch 4)
- “As evolution proceeded, animals became a new kind of intersection point, or nexus, in the world’s networks of causal pathways. When an animal picks up information of various kinds through the sense, it becomes a point at which lines converge. When it is an initiator of action, it becomes a point from which casual lines diverge.” (Ch 5)
- “An ongoing feature of philosophy is its generation of wildly exaggerated theories. ... This is a pathology of the field.” (Ch 5)
- “A lot of octopus conflict looks like ... a giant pillow fight, between pillows.” (Ch 6)
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