Minds and Matter

Josh Landy
How did evolution first produce minds?

Ray Briggs
How can we tell which living things are conscious?

Josh Landy
I mean, what would it be like to be a shrimp?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that began at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about minds and matter.

Josh Landy
You know, minds are a really weird thing. I mean, here we are creatures of flesh and blood and atoms and stuff. But somehow we’re having a conscious experience of the world. How does that happen?

Ray Briggs
Well, I hope you’re not expecting me to solve the mind body problem right here and now. But I think whatever the relationship is between our minds and our bodies, whether it’s my mind or a shrimp’s min, or whatever, they’re both made of essentially the same stuff.

Josh Landy
So you disagree with Descartes, then? You don’t think minds and matter are two fundamentally different substances?

Ray Briggs
Right, I just can’t get behind Descartes. He thought minds are immaterial souls pure consciousness governed by reason. And he thought bodies are just physical stuff for matter, pushed and pulled around by natural forces.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, if minds and matters so fundamentally different from each other, how are they supposed to interact?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, this is exactly the problem with de cartes theory. And he never really came up with a satisfactory answer. He also had a really weird view of non human animals and claimed they have no minds.

Josh Landy
Oh rigtht yeah, what did he call them—”fleshy automata.” Quick, cover Blossom’s ears!

Ray Briggs
Oh, poor puppy. Oh, don’t worry Blossom, we’re not talking about you. And Descartes obviously never had any pets, or he would know that dogs and cats and birds and many other creatures really do have minds. They have lives that they experience. There’s something it’s like to be a dog and to live a dog’s life.

Josh Landy
Yeah, Descartes was definitely wrong about mammals, and maybe some birds and some cephalopods like octopuses. But I don’t know about fish or insects, let alone a whole host of simpler life forms. So don’t you think fleshy automaton is a pretty good description of say, I don’t know a fruit fly?

Ray Briggs
Wait, you don’t think that fruit flies have minds? I didn’t realize you were such an animal elitist. Was can navigate mazes and track a moving target that they’re actually quite smart.

Josh Landy
Well, yeah, and so is my phone. But that’s not the same as being conscious. I mean, all life forms exhibit some kind of intelligence, even plants. They they sense where the sun is, they grow toward the light.

Ray Briggs
Ah, but plants don’t have brains. And so fruit flies do. Maybe insects don’t have the same kind of rich mental lives that humans have. But who’s to say there’s not something it’s like to experience the world the way a fruit fly does?

Josh Landy
Ah, so you do have announced the mind body problem? You You said that plants don’t have brains and fruit flies do so. So clearly, what you’re saying is that what an animal needs for conscious experience is a brain?

Ray Briggs
Well, I don’t know, maybe a brain isn’t necessary. Maybe you just need a nervous system of some sort.

Josh Landy
So you think even creatures who don’t have brains might still be conscious? Do you think that’s too generous? I mean, doesn’t need to be a certain level of biological complexity for conscious experience to be possible.

Ray Briggs
Well yeah, complexity, sure. But why does it have to look like a brain? Maybe different minds evolved in different ways.

Josh Landy
What do you mean?

Ray Briggs
Well, it’s easy to see the animals like you like chimps or whatever, have minds and in our lives, they’re related to you. What are you trying to insinuate that look there, my relatives too. We all evolved from similar ancestors. But there are all kinds of creatures within our lives, including creatures that are completely different from us. Fruit flies, squids, tardigrades, just because they’re really distant cousins doesn’t mean they can’t have conscious experiences.

Josh Landy
Well, you know what, Ray? I’ll admit you’ve really piqued my curiosity. Now, I think that’s a genuinely exciting idea to learn more about the inner lives of animals who are distant from us on the evolutionary tree, though, to be honest, I’m still not entirely convinced about fruit flies.

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m glad you’ve opened your mind. Even if it’s just a little. You’ll be excited to hear that our guests this week is Peter Godfrey Smith, a philosopher who spends a lot of time underwater observing, and sometimes interacting with all sorts of weird and wonderful sea creatures.

Josh Landy
I can’t wait. But in the meantime, we humans love to rank which animals we think are the smartest and if you do a quick search, you’re probably going to find corvids, the family of birds that includes crows, ravens, and magpies up there in the top five.

Ray Briggs
So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shereen Adel, to find out more about their cognitive capabilities. She files this report.

Shereen Adel
So where are we right now?

Adrian Cotter
So we’re at 15th in Franklin.

Shereen Adel
Okay, and we’re looking west.

Adrian Cotter
We’re looking west. We’re looking towards Civic Center, toward City Hall.

Shereen Adel
I’m here with Adrian Cotter. He started a project about five years ago, mapping out ravens nests in the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, we’re scouting them out in the heart of downtown Oakland.

Adrian Cotter
If you look up the white and brick building near the top, and in the in that corner, there’s a nest in there on that ledge.

Shereen Adel
Adrian started looking for ravens nests after he saw a pair of birds and their young on the federal building in San Francisco.

Adrian Cotter
It was totally something I wouldn’t have expected. I wouldn’t have expected ravens to be making nests on buildings.

Shereen Adel
When he did a little more exploring, he discovered that crows and ravens actually thrive in urban environments. So far, he’s found over a hundred ravens nests in San Francisco alone.

Adrian Cotter
I’ve been all over the city.

Shereen Adel
In the last 50 years corvid populations in cities have grown a ton. In the 70s the Golden Gate Audubon Society only counted a few dozen crows in the Bay Area, and ravens were a rare sight. Since 2010, though, they’ve counted over a thousand crows every year and hundreds of ravens. So why are these birds flocking to cities?

Adrian Cotter
Because we’ve created this wonderful habitat for them.

Shereen Adel
Not only do they make nests in our buildings, they also like to eat our garbage. But they’re not like other urban birds—they’re also really smart about it. They store their food and make it really hard for other animals to find.

Adrian Cotter
So they’ll often like fake putting things in places. There’s definitely, like, awareness of other how other things think about what they’re doing.

Shereen Adel
Crows and ravens also recognize human faces. If you piss them off, they’ll harass you. And if you give them food, they’ll find things to give you in return. Like this one story Adrian told me about a little girl who accidentally dropped crumbs for crows on her way in and out of her house.

Adrian Cotter
And like the next day she was there, the crow brought her gifts.

Shereen Adel
So she started to leave them more food and collected the gifts they brought her. Her name is Gabi Mann. And she was asked about it in a podcast called “The Bittersweet Life.”

The Bittersweet Life
What is this that we’re looking at? It’s kind of like a keychain. And this is a heart from them. It’s showing me how much they love me.

Shereen Adel
When crows interact with us and the world we live in, we study them and we see familiar behavior. They make tools they play with each other. Crows are social creatures, and it’s easy to think maybe they are self aware, just like us. But one thing is for sure. They have a unique ability to adapt their lives to our world.

Homer Simpson
That’s Russell Crowe. Cameron Crowe, Bo Diddley, Hume Cronin, Gregory Peck.

Shereen Adel
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shereen Adel.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for that fascinating report, Shereen. I’m Josh Landy, with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about minds and matter.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Peter Godfrey Smith, Professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, and author of “Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.” Peter, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Thanks very much. It’s a it’s a pleasure to be back. Last time I was on the show a long time ago. It was with Ken Taylor and John Perry. And it’s very sad that Ken has passed away and it’s great that you’re continuing the Philosophy Talk tradition.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for saying that we we miss Ken every day, you know, not just on the show, but in our daily lives. So I really appreciate you mentioning that, Peter. You know, Peter, I now I know from personal experience that you love to go deep sea diving. You even took me on a dive in Australia once in shark infested waters, which was fantastic. So was there a some particular encounter you had in the water one time that that first inspired you to do this research?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
The most important encounter was actually right near where you and I were Josh, the same, the same little bay. That was the first place where I came across. An Australian giant cuttlefish is amazing animal three feet long, changing colors continually. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen one. But it was the first time that I had this strong impression you can have with them that it’s not just that the diver, you know, that I was interested in the animal that the animal seemed to be interested in me, there was a kind of reciprocal engagement. And that really changed my thinking about animals of this kind.

Ray Briggs
Wow. So what would you say is one of the most interesting or surprising things you’ve discovered in your research about animal lives?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
The thing that for me is most surprising. I can’t really We call it a discovery because it’s just the the picture I now have the the view I’ve ended up with. And I think a lot of people will Various people have a related view. This is the idea that rather than subjective experience or consciousness in a broad sense, the ability to feel one’s life, rather than that, coming into being in a kind of single evolutionary invention, there were probably multiple paths, independent pathways that got animals to a situation like that. Now, how many pathways? I can’t answer that exactly a figure like three would not be a crazy figure to give maybe four or five, the picture we’re getting is one in which there’s a range of animals a pretty small range that became very behaviorally complex, and that acquired sensors that feed action and action that feed sensors in ways that I think, are sufficient for experience. And that kind of ability to animals arose not once but roughly something like three, four or five times where the three conspicuous versions were seen in animals like us, vertebrates, and birds, and so on. Also, in some arthropods, the animals that include insects and crustaceans, and this one strange group of cephalopods were one strange group of mollusks, the cephalopods, the group that includes the octopus and that giant cuttlefish.

Ray Briggs
So the insects in the cephalopods what are the major difference between differences between the way that they’re conscious and the way that we’re conscious?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Well, that’s asking a very hard question. In the book metazoa, I try to make a little headway on that question. But I think we’re kidding ourselves. If we think that questions like that have simple direct answers at this stage where we can just say, okay, these guys are conscious these guys aren’t. The awareness of this kind of animal is like this. And the awareness of that kind of animal is like that. I don’t, I don’t think we’re at that stage. I think we’re at a stage where a variety of different kinds of evidence are being pieced together to give a general picture of, roughly speaking, who’s got it, although I’d like to revisit the form of that question in a little while, perhaps, and some features and some aspects of, you know, who’s got what kind of experience in the case of insects and cephalopods or arthropods more generally, in cephalopods, you can say some some things about their bodies and lifestyles that I think give us some clues. cephalopods, or at least octopuses, some octopuses, and some others, like cuttlefish. They’re very exploratory, inquisitive sorts of animals, they attend to novelty in many cases. They have a kind of engagement with new things, I do that two kinds of engagement with new things, which is very distinctive, and their, their lives don’t have the kind of routine that you see in the lives of a lot of insects and other arthropods, where you’ve got a list of things to do in your life, a short life in which to get through these things. And everything has to be done in a very kind of organized routine eyes way, for the most part, not everything but many things. And you have a body built to serve the particular tasks that you face. There’s a kind of acute sensory motor ability and skill in arthropods, which is a little different in my favorite cephalopods, but a kind of openness of, you know, orientation to things, an interesting novelty, which I think is distinctive to octopuses in particular, and to some extent, some other cephalopods.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about minds and matter with Peter Godfrey Smith from the University of Sydney.

Ray Briggs
How can you tell if a creature you encounter has a mind our brains required for subjective experience? Can something be intelligent without being conscious?

Josh Landy
Minds, brains, and experience—along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tom Waits
Shiver me timbers, cause I’m a-sailin’ away.

Josh Landy
Sailing away in search of intelligent life in the oceans. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about mind and matter with Peter Godfrey Smith from the University of Sydney, author of “Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.”

Josh Landy
since mind over matter, unfortunately, it doesn’t work for pandemics. We’re still pre recording episodes from home. And we can’t take your phone calls at this present moment. But you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org Or you can come in on our website, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Peter, you’ve looked at a lot of unusual animals in the ocean, you studied a lot of early life forms. How do you know when you found a creature that has a mind?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
I don’t think we can yet just know when we’ve found it accepted in the obvious cases, or the relatively obvious cases, animals very close to us. When I’m looking at invertebrates, and trying to work out what might be going on inside them. It’s always a pretty provisional matter. I’m trying to sort of piece together the various lines of evidence and work out what’s what’s a reasonable picture. In the case of cephalopods, octopuses and their relatives, that kind of attentiveness, and engagement with novelty, I think there’s a rather good piece of evidence. Even people who think that a lot of what animals can do, can be done automatically, unconsciously, people like Stanislas de hain, the French neuro psychologist whose work I admire very much. He thinks that dealing with novelty, in producing novel behaviors in response to novel things, is something that in humans is never done, unconsciously. So when I see that in octopuses, I regard that as good evidence in their case.

Josh Landy
So it seems like there’s a lot of different features we might be thinking of, when we ask the question, Does this organism have a mind? Is it intelligent? Is it conscious? So there’s your talks about inquisitiveness, interest in, in novelty? Sometimes people talk about integration of sensory data. Or I know you and your book talk about the sense of a differentiation between oneself and the environment, right that if something changes the environment might be because you did it as opposed to just something happened out there. There’s like, behavioral flexibility, the ability to plan, like, which of these things are most central Do you think for, for marking the difference between like a rock and an organism that that is conscious?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Well, to some extent, they come together as a package, and the animal way of being the world, the kind of the the form of life that animals have, to a large part, not entirely, but in many, many cases, involves agency doing things, getting things done, moving through the world, dealing with sensory information in a way that enables you to respond to it in a way that makes sense. And integration of sensory streams is part of what makes that possible. responding to events with a kind of test, that sense of self versus other is another thing that makes that possible, a number of the things you were talking about, I think do come together as a package. Now, if you try to pull them apart, and ask which ones are essential, this is the point or one of the points at which I think we should move to asking the whole question in a slightly different way. So I don’t think the presence of experience or consciousness felt consciousness is a kind of yes or no on off thing. I think evolutionarily, it just can’t be that way. Evolution doesn’t build complicated things in a way that has that kind of light switch, like on versus off character. So in the past, there must have been lots of partial cases, marginal cases, gray area type cases. And it’s then also natural to think that when we look around us, especially at invertebrates, various kinds of mollusks and arthropods, we’re also looking at creatures that have partial or gray area type cases, and partial cases of many different forms. So I think that our language, when we talk about experience being just present or absent, begins to let us down, it begins to be insufficient, when we start to look at the diversity of ways that animals live.

Ray Briggs
So question about the partial cases. Do you think that there are instances where humans, maybe humans that are like usually what we think of is like fully conscious and their lives? Experience delights, kind of being partly on and partly off, and having trouble imagining what it could be like?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s not I mean, some kinds of waking from sleep, have a bit of that character. And whatever I will often when I say that, in discussions with other philosophers, they just don’t buy it. They think that when you’re waking with sleep, there has to be a moment at which In a kind of faint but real way the lights are on. And a moment before that where there’s just no experience at all, to me, maybe I just a sort of dozy sort of person, that it doesn’t feel like that at all. So in a very, very rough, imperfect way, waking from sleep provides, I think, a little bit of an analogy to thinking about these cases. I mean, only a very partial one.

Josh Landy
I totally agree. I think your friends clearly haven’t read Proust. Yeah, I think you just read there was three drivers. Right? Right. There you have it. Right. Right. Yeah, there’s lots of gradation. So you know, there’s that joke about, you know, you can’t be a little bit pregnant. But I think you I think you make a convincing case, you can be a little bit conscious, and human beings can be too. But But where does it? Where do you draw that line? Like, what about plant life? I mean, is there something it’s like to be a Petunia to do to plants have inner worlds in this way? Are they conscious? Even a little bit? Is the light a little bit on for plants? Or is it all the way off?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
The shape of a view that I think we might end up with? is one in which there are yes, cases, US, there are no cases, rocks, for example. And there are cases where it’s not that the light is on but a little bit, it’s that there’s something in there that’s partially akin to the light being on you know, the internal processes are partly experiential, and partly not, I really think the lights on lights off thing is is, is trouble. And then in the case of plants, the question might be, are they squarely in the nose side with the rocks? Or are their internal processes that have a kind of very faint, partially experiential nature? Now, I don’t know the answer to that until pretty recently, I would have said, Oh, yes, they’re just going to be knows, they don’t have a nervous system. And also, they don’t have the kind of integration as a, as a kind of whole agent like being that animals have. And that I think, is very important. With plants, surprises keep coming in. And I’ve become a little bit more cautious about them than I used to be, but especially kind of surprises in what they can sense and in the electrical activity within them. But roughly speaking, I still have plants on the no side.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about minds and matter with Peter Godfrey Smith, author of metazoa, animal life, the birth of the mind. And Peter, we’ve got some email for you. I think the first two emails pair really well together. So I’ll read you one and Josh can read you the other and then you can have a chance to respond to them. So the first email is from Dr. Caffeine, who’s a biomedical scientist and writes, it is increasingly clear that the mind is a function of the matter we and other animals are made of the philosophical error of ramification leaves us with the strong impression that this function or process is a kind of ghost, Spark or spirit that is somehow running our thinking and acting. Dressing up this vitalist idea remains a categorical error. How we function the processes of life are amazing enough, there’s no need no requirement for an extra entity to account for our life and process associated with it. Matter is all that matters.

Josh Landy
But the countervailing email from Kane says no minds are not brains as though replying to Dr. Caffeine. It’s so lovely. No minds, not brains. liveness is law of identity states that two things are the same if they have the same properties. Since mental content and neurotransmitter electrical pulses are not made of the same material, we cannot say they’re the same thing. So who’s right, Peter?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Well, I sighed, mostly with the first, the only the only point at which I’d sort of hesitate his concerns, whether it really just is a kind of error of reification, whether we’re turning something that’s not really a thing into a thing, and being misled, and messing up our picture of the world as a consequence. To say that that’s the problem is to say that we could get over this and everything would be fine, not very puzzling, if we just spoke a little bit differently about things. And I think there are some distortions in the way that we think about the problem. But I don’t think we can get over it just by, you know, avoiding errors of reification and the like. I think it is genuinely surprising and puzzling in some ways. That the activity of material things our brains essentially does is sufficient for experience. I think it is genuinely surprising. And we have to learn some new things. alter our picture of what the physical is like, to some extent, for everything to sort of fall into place. I do think we’ll learn those things. So I side with the first email rather than the second, perhaps is a bit more of a sense of a difficult problem, then the the writer of the first email?

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, there is that famously hard problem, right? There’s that lovely line from, from John Locke, it’s impossible to conceive that everbearing cognitive Mater should produce a thinking intelligent being. And I take it your thought as well. That doesn’t mean we have to go Descartes and and posit some kind of bodyless mind out there. But what is the answer? I mean, some people talk about the mind as an emergent property. Right? So it’s sort of, it’s constrained by the properties of the brain, but it’s not reducible completely to the brain. So what is it for you, Peter, how, if there isn’t this magical mind substance, what is the right way of thinking about the relationship?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
I don’t much like the concept of emergence a lot of people do. And I can, I can see the temptation. For sort of general philosophical reasons, I think of it as as a bit unhelpful. There’s also a tendency, one can have two wards talking about the mind as a kind of product of what the brain does is something made experienced as something made by the brain. And it just can’t be that way. I think it has to be that once you have activity of a certain kind, within a brain within an animal of a certain kind, that activity is a mind that is experience. And experiences just that kind of activity, as experience, you know, well, as felt from the first person point of view, a mind is the first person point of view on a certain kind of neural activity. So part of what we have to sort of make progress, I think on is thinking and talking clearly about these relationships between first person and third person points of view, the point of view, where we describe what’s present or see what’s present in a brain. And a point of view we have when we are a brain of that kind, part of it is that I think part of it is rethinking to some extent, our view of what kind of thing a brain is and what kind of activity goes on inside them. I do think there are some, some shifts necessary there. And the other part is the side of the issue pursued in a book like metazoa, the kind of evolutionary approach, where we talk about the way that being an agent is a characteristic of animal life. And putting it roughly, subjectivity comes along with agency of a certain kind, explaining subjective experiences, partly explaining what it is to be an agent and how agents came to exist in evolution.

Ray Briggs
Here, I’m wondering, I have a little bit of a puzzle for you, and a proposal about maybe how to fix it. So you say that the mind is nothing over and above the brain. But you also say that an octopus, an insect, and I, all three of us have mine. And I’m wondering how to reconcile these these things. Because my brain is like my brain and not like an octopus brain. An octopus doesn’t have a brain like mine. But an octopus is like me insofar as it has a mind. And that’s a little strange, because how can my mind be the same as my brain? If my brain is not like with an octopus, in my mind is like, what’s an octopus? And so I thought, maybe a useful metaphor for this is that it’s like the relationship between the mind and the brain is a little like the relationship between boiling water and the placement of individual molecules in a pot of boiling water. So in some sense, the boiling of the water is nothing over and above what happens to the individual molecules. But in another sense, there are different because you could boil the water with all the molecules being in different places and some different boiling configuration and still have boiling water. Do you think that’s a good metaphor?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Yeah, I think it’s fine, I think it’s quite helpful. Actually, you’ve got the boiling, which looks like you know, it’s got a name, which is different from the name you give to the sort of the object which is doing the boiling, the boiling is its own thing. And it’s an activity that has some apparent independence from the molecular details of the pot of water. But once you’ve got the molecules doing their thing, you’ve got the boiling, there’s nothing extra, there’s no need to add anything to our picture of what the world contains. So I think that analogy is a rather good one for handling these questions.

Ray Briggs
So this, this makes me wonder about just a cool organism that I wanted to hear your thoughts on, which is the tunicate, which are a kind of invertebrate that spends the beginning of their life able to move and swim around and then later in life, attaches themselves to a rock and sort of digest their own brain and stops moving Do you have any thoughts on on what’s going on with the mind of a tunicate? Like, does it have in mind that it slowly loses? Or maybe we can’t know?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Right, I don’t know enough about tunicate biology to say anything very, very definite. On that point, I will happily however, I set the record straight on one thing. So philosophers especially like the story, in which when a tunicate, settles and stopped swimming around and attaches to a rock, it digests its own brain or, you know, eats its own nervous system. There’s a paper by George Mackey, and a collaborator about tunicate neuroscience, where they react with some indignation towards this, this anecdote, and say, it’s not true that a tunicate retains a perfectly good nervous system, just one more suited to sort of quiet life, then the the form it had when it was swimming, and it’s a decent sized nervous system. Mackey emphasizes so whereas philosophers have have long relish the story of the animal that settles down and eats its brain. Unfortunately, it’s not it’s not as true as I and others thought it was.

Josh Landy
We like it because we think it applies to us. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about minds and matter with Peter Godfrey Smith from the University of Sydney, author of “Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.”

Ray Briggs
Do fish feel pain? Can lobsters have bad moods? What does that mean about how we should treat them?

Josh Landy
The moral status of animals, plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Secon Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Simon & Garfunkel
Zebras are reactionaries, antelopes are missionaries, pigeons plot in secrecy, and hamsters turn on frequently—what a gas, you gotta come and see at the zoo.

Josh Landy
You gotta come and see what’s happening with conscious minds at the zoo. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Peter Godfrey Smith from the University of Sydney. And we’re thinking about minds and matter.

Josh Landy
So Peter, you’ve been talking in very interesting ways about ways in which you’ve changed your mind or at least become less certain about this in that has your thinking changed at all about how we should treat non human animals, as you’ve learned more about their lives and experiences?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Yeah, it has changed. The the immediate change is I have a sense of there being a lot more experience around in the world than I thought that was before. And a lot more experience that has at least the beginnings of some moral relevance. To pick a really dramatic case, a case, it’s hard to think about for a long while, I thought that insects, ordinary land insects, in particular, probably had a form of subjective experience that’s quite rich on the sensory side. But they probably I thought, did not feel pain or anything like pain, and didn’t have the particular kinds of experience that trigger interest from a moral philosophy point of view. I think the evidence is growing, that insects may well feel a form of pain, or if they don’t feel a form of pain, they may feel emotion like or mood like states that can be positive or negative, that can have that kind of that that kind of relevance from that makes welfare questions take a certain form. And what to think in response to that is quite hard. I mean, it was, I think, initially hard for some people to get used to the idea, to the extent that people have gotten used to it, that there’s very good evidence that fish feel pain, I think there’s not a whole lot of doubt about that. Now. Octopus has also and a growing list of invertebrates. Once you include insects, you know, we’re surrounded by this endless carnage of these short lives of vast numbers of insects. Trying to work out exactly how to make a just an adjustment in the way that we behave is quite difficult. These ideas have confirmed me in my thinking that practices like factory farming of animals really abhorrent and we just need to move away from many modern forms of farming, have become far more skeptical about the appropriateness of using animals, like especially animals like monkeys and cats in invasive biological experiments. So I think there’s cases like that where there’s real immediate pressure, and then there’s a kind of an enormous class of cases where it’s hard to know exactly how to think about the situation. Where invertebrates fall, many invertebrates fall into that second category.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so one thing that occurs to me about invertebrates is that we don’t farm them. Mostly, I guess, I guess we sometimes find farm oysters, but even shrimp, I think a lot of them are just wild caught. And that leads me to wonder about like, is it? Is it good for them that they exist. So one kind of very nihilist view you could have is like, it’s bad for the insects that they have to go through so much pain, and so we should try to prevent their existence. I don’t like I don’t buy that with people, I don’t know why I would buy it with insects, but—

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Shrimp farming is quite a good case to think about. And shrimp farm is now a big thing. Lots of I think, I don’t have the figures in front of me. But I think roughly something like half of the shrimp that gets eaten now are farmed rather than wild caught, especially farmed in Asia. And that’s a good case to think about, because I think there’s reasonable evidence that Trump can feel pain and other aversive states. I think they probably have a mean I would rather be a wild shrimp who was caught than a farm shrimp. I think Marine, I mean, agriculture of animals like that. There tends to be very dense packing, there tends to be lots of disease problems and things like that. fish farming, I think is looking like it’s in many cases not not a good thing. Jennifer Jacquet from NYU has written a number of interesting pieces on this topic, arguing that we should be farming shellfish a whole lot more not be farming, octopus, not be farming, fish, or at least not in anything like the ways that we’re beginning to do now. And I think I think those are good arguments, I think I think shellfish, bivalves, clams, oysters, mussels, and things are a really good candidate. Although some of them are in that, that gray area that I spent a lot of time thinking about.

Josh Landy
Peter, I have to say, you know, since that wonderful day when we went out together and saw an octopus, I haven’t come anywhere near such a thing on a plate. And I, I’m convinced by you that we should extend this to other beings and and, you know, stopping experimenting on a number of organisms that we’re currently experimenting on. I have a slightly different version of this question. You were thinking about non human animals as victims of our predation or other practices? What about non human animals as moral agents? Okay, there was a lovely experiment, whose headline was rats forsake chocolate to save a drowning companion, which makes me think I don’t know what I would forsake chocolate for but so it seems like maybe there are some cases in the nonhuman world of, of animals acting morally, is that the right way to talk about that?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
I think probably not the right way to talk about it. But I haven’t thought about this problem. This this this question very much I’ve not, I’ve not seen that. That rat study. In the case of some animals, you do seem to have a tacit sense of behavioral norms, where, if an animal transgressors, or breaks a behavioral norm, there’s a response, there’s retaliation, where there’s need not be a purely just a sort of purely self interested response by the animal who is who is responding. I hesitate at the export of the idea of moral agency and its associated notions of moral responsibility into the non human realm, I guess I do think of this as a, this is a human thing, you know, moral agency is a human thing. But that doesn’t mean that we should regard non human animals is just sort of outside of the realm of moral concern.

Ray Briggs
So I also wonder, sort of, so there’s the low hanging fruit of like we shouldn’t factory farm animals if we have other sources of food, which we do. But how, how much else to be Oh, animals. So I’m thinking, in particular sort of zoo animals and companion animals, we could give them a life that’s not full of miserable suffering. That seems like it might not be enough if we don’t give them rich and beautiful lives. What do you think our responsibilities are for these kinds of animals?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Right, I’m not against companion animals at all. I think I think having having companion animals, it’s fine if you give them a good life. And I think we can give them wonderful lives. We could also give them terrible lives in some cases. So it’s not that it’s always okay. And neither is it enough. So but again, and neither is it enough, just as you indicated, to merely give them a sort of barely tolerable life. We should be doing better than that. But the idea that there’s something intrinsically wrong with having pets with having cats and dogs and things like that, even when they’re treated very well, I think is good. So going too far, I think of that as a mistake. Zoos I am uneasy about if it wasn’t for the importance, which is becoming a very great importance in enabling endangered species to stay alive in breeding programs that zoos engage in to, to help species continue through the risks, which I hope are temporary of habitat destruction. The work they’re doing is often very important, and I would hesitate to be sort of very anti zoo for that reason. They do make me uneasy, though, I have to admit.

Josh Landy
Peter, we’re getting towards the end of our time here. And I don’t want to let you go about asking you a question about how just how beautiful and enchanting your research is, you know, people think of science as being disenchanting ever since Keats and others and you know, there’s something to that but but all these are incredible illuminations and mysteries that you’re uncovering here. I guess my question is something like okay, maybe we don’t want to be total Cartesians and believe in this sort of mysterious sole substance. But it couldn’t there be something a bit sort of weird going on weird and wonderful, right? Yeah. Science already has room for quantum physics, which is you know, a part of physical reality that’s blisteringly weird. Why couldn’t another part of physical reality also be blisteringly weird? I mean, the, you know, this, this gradual light coming in, it’s not an on off switch, but gradual illumination of organisms as they move through evolution. It’s not outside of the physical. But isn’t it something a bit special?

Peter Godfrey-Smith
I’m with you on the embrace of weirdness here. I think that part of what has made the mind body problem look so hard to philosophers, recently, over the last few decades, is they’ve had a very kind of dry picture of the physical, they’ve had a picture of the physical, the physical world as being sort of bare bones, in a sense, that sort of dry structural relationships. And even though they philosophers know, officially, that there’s much in the world that’s not mechanical push pull, impact base, they still have a very kind of mechanical conception of matter. When I think about the mind body problem. I think that the physical world is much weirder than that. I think that brains are weird. One of the things that was a sort of major will little discovery for me when writing metazoa was realizing the oddity in the importance of these large scale electrical rhythms and oscillations in our brains, not just our brains in the sense of human brains, but the brains and nervous systems of a great many animals. That’s weird. And the guy who originally discovered these, these oscillations in these sort of these electrical rhythms Hunsberger, he thought it showed ESP. I mean, he had a truly spooky view of what he was investigating, and he was looking into it because he was very interested in in very unorthodox views of that kind. Now, I don’t think we’ve worked out that brain to the kinds of things that will, in virtue of these electrical properties enable ESP, but they’re pretty weird. They’re a long way from a kind of a kind of inert or sort of nearly responsive signaling network, in the way that people sometimes imagine in this context.

Josh Landy
Hooray for rational spookiness. Peter, that has been a lot of wonderful amount of for our minds. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Peter Godfrey-Smith
It’s been a pleasure.

Josh Landy
I guess it’s been Peter Godfrey Smith, Professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, and author of “Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’ve really enjoyed thinking about all the different kinds of minds that are actual and possible. And another place I like to go to explore different kinds of possible minds is science fiction, where you have authors like Ann Leckie in the Ancillary Sword trilogy, imagining what it would be like to have a group mind or Octavia Butler in the Xena Genesis trilogy, imagining the minds of aliens who operate very different from differently from us and maybe commune with plants and have also a group mind or the explorations of Greg Egan, who imagines what a really advanced machine mind would look like. So, I think that all of those imagining this can help us think about what’s possible in addition to animals.

Josh Landy
Those are brilliant suggestions. I’m gonna add the LeGuinn’s short stories, Watership Down. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a conundrum that’s bedeviling you—a personal dilemma in your life that might benefit from philosophical insight—send it to us at conundrums@philosophytalk.org, and maybe we can think through it together on the air.

Josh Landy
Now, the fastest mind on two legs—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Consciousness is not a thing, like an appendix or extra thumb, more like a living ghost in the flesh, that gathers information from our senses, and blunders on. Some theories say that consciousness evolved from instinct, kind of. Don’t touch. You can cut yourself on that thing. That thing tastes bad. Intelligence began with avoidance of pain, consciousness came from gauging differences. Is that hot enough to touch? Is it too hot to eat? Can I have sex with that? If I put that on my head will I look good, or silly? Our days are filled with these decisions, which we often make with assured confidence, even though we don’t know where these decisions originate. What IS the mind? Is consciousness merely a symptom of neurology? And even if it’s all just in our mind is it any less real? Personally, I have no doubt that it will be found to have some kind of physical reality, like light, noise, and nameless dread. I know that I am conscious but as David Chalmers showed in his thought experiment- everybody else could be zombies! Programmed to act like they are conscious. They could be psychopaths who have learned to mimic human behavior but really have no human qualities other than appetite and charm. We pride ourselves on our thinking ability but we’re insecure about it. We have Turing tests to make sure computers aren’t really us. We make movies and books about robots getting smarter and more human than we are. Also there’s the downside to consciousness. Obsessions. Nightmares. Why do we have them? What do they mean? We invented the wheel, central heating, ovens, light bulbs, cars, and theories about how the mind works. On the other hand, we have dreams, poetry, drunk driving. We have superstitions, religions, weird personal habits, foibles, fanatical beliefs. We have strange conspiracy theories. The Kennedy Assassination cluster was the big one for ages, but may soon be eclipsed, I believe by the Trump years. Trump did not seem to engender conspiracy theories about himself, because he’s pretty transparent. He is what he is, as the kids say. Conspiracies against him were another story though. He said he had the largest crowd ever, to take one example. Clearly that wasn’t true. But if you pointed that out you became part of the dark forces aligned against Trump from the beginning. So facts, data, evidence became suspect. The Internet helped! When newspapers went away, social media jumped in to give everything equal weight, from atrocities to kittens. People who used to self publish their theories, or leave single-spaced essays on the laundromat bulletin board, now found their tribe in chat groups, in Facebook, on the Twitter. Suddenly Q Anonsense was just common sense to millions. Any attempt to call it disinformation was itself disinformation. The dragons warned of by the ancient sea maps turn out to be not real exactly, but real enough to put all our faith in Donald Trump to steer us through those waters. So we thought of him as a straight shooter who also lies every time he opens his mouth. White color crime entered a new golden age- suckers, corruption, bribery, confidence games, fraud, trickledown economics. The old saying “if it’s too good to be true it probably isn’t” — which was invented whole cloth by our thinking brain — is no longer listened to, and we’re marching maskless through infectious air, as the world catches fire, and we yammer about it all being a hoax by a “deep state” pedophile ring with links to Hollywood, the media and the Democratic Party. Actual children by the way, over five hundred still, separated at the southern border from their parents by the actual US government, remain separated, their actual missing parents still at large. Where is Q Anon on this? I’m wondering if evolution might not work in reverse? We’re losing our ability to think, and instinct soon will also leave us. Go back from avoiding fire and just walk confidently right into the flames, asbestos be damned, causes cancer you know, no mask, we want our freedom, back to our natural state, kind of like entropy, which in humanity’s case is on fire and screaming. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to world Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too, can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Young Sheldon
What if an octopus Adam and Eve brought sin to their world—would they be saved by a human Jesus or an octopus Jesus?