Other Minds summary

Most of us have never been up close and personal with an octopus, but an initial interaction might look like this: you reach out a hand and the octopus grabs hold of it, using its suckers, which provide a disturbingly tight grip. As it pulls you closer, you might realize that it’s actually tasting you, thanks to the millions of nerve cells that are contained in the arm that is being wrapped around your hand.

While the octopus is a fearsome predator today, millions of years ago it was a rather harmless, limpet-like mollusk, with a hard shell that protected it from predators. Like today’s mussels and oysters, it likely had one meaty foot that it used as an anchor and to crawl along the seabed.

Imagine that you’re scuba diving and you come to a coral reef, where you notice something hiding under a ledge, its color perfectly matching its surroundings. As you approach, you see that it’s a giant cuttlefish, a close relative of the octopus, who emerges and begins to put on a spectacular light show. Suddenly, brilliant stripes of red, green, silver and blue begin to ripple down from its head to its arms, the colors changing from moment to moment.

Sure, other animals such as chameleons can also change color, but none can do it as fast and fantastically as cuttlefish and octopuses. Their range of color is wider, not to mention more wondrous.

If you’re like the author, you might have seen cuttlefish on a scuba-diving adventure and assumed that the animals could live for dozens of years. After all, it’s not uncommon to look into their eyes and sense some sort of aged wisdom. The animals can also appear to be familiar with human behavior, as if they’d spent time with many different divers.

But the truth is, any cuttlefish you run into is likely not more than one or two years old because, sadly, the lives of both cuttlefish and octopuses are incredibly short, lasting no more than a year or two.

So what do you imagine an octopus thinks about the amazing color show that plays across their skin?

This has been a long-standing question that many philosophers and scientists have debated, and, so far, the prevailing attitude is that animals like the octopus are not conscious, or capable of self-reflection. But the matter is far from settled.

Another subject of frequent debate among scientists, biologists and zoologists, is how an animal like an octopus communicates. This also pertains to the question of consciousness, since many believe that a species must have some sort of language in order to be capable of complex thought.

Charles Darwin was one of the first to champion the argument that language is a prerequisite for thought.