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He is not overly concerned with defining what a mind is, nor with any of the other tendentious minutiae that have caused many a book on consciousness to sink under the weight of its own prose. A renowned philosopher, he takes the sparse scientific literature on octopus cognition, combines it with his own observations scuba-diving at “Octopolis” off the east coast of Australia, and then gracefully and unsparingly analyzes what these creatures can tell us about the mind, consciousness, and being human. Lines like this one make me grateful to have a mind like Godfrey-Smith’s at work on the topic at hand. As Godfrey-Smith puts it, the ocean at the time “was a garden of relatively self-contained and self-possessed beings. About 600 million years ago, one-celled blobs evolved into mobile little saucer-shaped animals from the Ediacaran period, but these seem less than satisfactory prototypes for intelligence. It’s a long history, without many satisfactory milestones. He is particularly interested in the moment in evolutionary time when organisms began to move around, enabling far more complex interactions with the environment than is afforded by a lifestyle glued to a rock in the ocean. Tracing the evolution of the cephalopod line from its earliest ancestors, Godrey-Smith wants to understand how it has arrived at a seemingly similar cognitive destination to our own. The famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau mused on the octopus’s “soft intelligence.” But unlike other animals that we see as intelligent, such as great apes, or crows and their kin, octopuses seem unsettlingly alien. They are capable of learning which food types are easier to acquire and remembering their discoveries for weeks at a time. YouTube videos show them unscrewing the lids of jars to clamber out of confinement, or confounding their keepers by circumventing the experiments in which they are placed. Scientists have known for decades that octopuses and their relatives can solve puzzles and navigate mazes, have camera-like eyes just as humans do, and seem more like vertebrates than the snails and jellyfish to which they are much more closely related. An octopus can gaze at you with what seems like a facial expression, changing color as if with a change in mood, even reaching out a tentacle to touch an inquisitive diver. But just as Sacks could see the human condition reflected in individuals with profoundly different ways of perceiving the world from the norm, Godfrey-Smith asks in Other Minds: Who is like us? What makes a person live in her own mind, and recognize it as separate from the mind of another? Sacks asked such questions of people with neurological dysfunction, whereas Godfrey-Smith in Other Minds asks them of a species that is uncannily personable without being at all human. The analogy isn’t perfect - he doesn’t attempt to diagnose or cure mental disorders in octopuses, and he lacks any long-standing relationships with them, though he certainly identifies individuals and their quirks. PETER GODFREY-SMITH is something of an Oliver Sacks of cephalopods.