is consciousness just neural activity?
As far as I understand it, you're a physicalist about consciousness
Key Insights
Octopus brains are decentralized, offering a unique model of cognition.
"Octopuses end up with half their brains in their tentacles and behind their eyes."
Early nervous systems existed in a non-predatory, low-activity environment.
"There was a kind of ships that pass in the night vibe... a time before aggression, a time before animal sin."
Octopus nervous system shows partial autonomy from the central brain.
"There's a curious divorce between the central brain and the rest of the nervous system."
Octopus arms exhibit semi-autonomous behavior.
"The arms will wander off and sort of feel around and they might find something interesting."
Octopus cognition challenges centralized brain models.
"The octopus, with half its neurons distributed throughout its arms rather than centralized in a brain-like ours, represents a radical experiment in cognition."
Octopuses can direct arms using visual cues.
"Can an octopus visually control a single arm? Can it send the arm down a somewhat unobvious road with its eyes to get food?"
Octopus consciousness challenges centralized brain models.
"The thing that's really impossible to imagine is what it's like to be an octopus because our brains are centralized."
Octopuses exhibit pain responses similar to humans.
"The octopuses who'd had an acetic acid injection would protect and groom that area."
Octopus behavior reflects human-like consciousness traits.
"It's a very humanlike network of effects."
Conscious experience may not be reducible to neural activity.
"The experience of redness or the three-sided triangle that I imagine in my head is just the same thing as some neurons firing."
Operator-provided highlight
"As far as I understand it, you're a physicalist about consciousness"
The Synthesis
The Strange World of Animal Consciousness: Where Octopus Minds Challenge Human Exceptionalism
Consciousness didn't evolve just once—it exploded across evolutionary history in a dazzling array of forms that fundamentally challenge our human-centric view of sentience. At a moment when AI ethics dominate headlines, Peter Godfrey-Smith's exploration of cephalopod intelligence with Alex O'Connor forces us to confront an older, weirder form of "alien" intelligence that's been evolving alongside us for 600 million years. The octopus, with half its neurons distributed throughout its arms rather than centralized in a brain-like ours, represents a radical experiment in cognition that evolved entirely independently from our vertebrate lineage.
The conversation dismantles our neat categories of consciousness through evolutionary deep time, revealing that nervous systems likely evolved just once (possibly twice if comb jellies developed theirs independently), while brains evolved separately between three and twelve times. Godfrey-Smith's most provocative insight comes when discussing the Ediacaran period—what he calls "a time before animal sin"—when early creatures with nervous systems merely existed as "ships that pass in the night" before the Cambrian explosion unleashed predatory relationships requiring targeted behaviors and centralized control. This evolutionary arms race created the conditions for consciousness as we know it.
"There's a huge collection of animals that includes us and insects and octopuses and earthworms...that comes from a single invention of that thing probably sometime around 600 million years ago," explains Godfrey-Smith, highlighting how understanding animal consciousness forces us to reconsider not just animal ethics, but the very nature of experience itself.