Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds
About this episode
Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses his theories on consciousness and the unique cognitive abilities of octopuses.
SPONSORS: - Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better — or your money back. For a limited time our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at https://cheershealth.com/TOE - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor at the University of Sydney and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, joins to explain why he thinks meeting an octopus is the closest we'll get to meeting an alien. He's now developing a new, speculative theory of consciousness centered on rhythm. The conversation explores why he thinks "having a mind" is a graded property rather than a yes-or-no one — and what that implies for earthworms, bacteria, and plants. We discuss how many selves may exist inside a single octopus. Godfrey-Smith explains why he suspects rhythmic, large-scale electrical activity in the brain — not just point-to-point neural firing — is essential to consciousness. He also addresses what Anthropic's discovery of a "workspace" inside Claude does and doesn't…
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