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This made me want to name the two theories on the emergence of consciousness that Godfrey-Smith outlines more explicitly: the Latecomer View and the Transformation View. At least in principle, this mirrors the sudden vs gradual Enlightenment discussion we see in Buddhism. I'm not sure these ideas map cleanly into each other though, since the consciousness Godfrey-Smith is discussing is different from Buddhist Enlightenment ("forms of subjective experience that are unified and coherent in various ways" vs the highest level of understanding and insight into the nature of existence). Both of them describe a state of consciousness, but not the same one. My instinct is to say that while it is likely that some animals possess the consciousness Godfrey-Smith describes, they'll attain Enlightenment (because of the limits of language and cross-species understanding). In general, though, I tend to defer to Nagel's view of consciousness. I think even knowing whether an animal is conscious or not is a monumental task.

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I would argue that the octopus probably has a decentralized body of neurons. I think it makes more sense to separate the mind and body of an animal independent of human social influence than it does to do that with a person. However, I also understand how the octopus and their brain are more/less one (thinking of the octopus as a loop where senses and actions keep reinforcing each other). I think I think this because I'm thinking mostly of quadrupedal land mammals who do not have the same body, but to me may as well have.

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Godfrey-Smith asserts on p. 83 that "Plants, in contrast [to animals], have quite rich senses but don't move," suggesting this immobility hinders the development of their consciousness, for they lack the need to "disentangle" themselves from their own outward (therefore also inward) actions. Yet plants too display a remarkable capacity for "action," perhaps not in the animal sense of movement, but in expansion. A plant reaches something by literally extending itself. It reacts continuously to its environment. If I may (mis)use Heidegger's conception of all communication as "responding," that behavior is not so much action as animal movement is also re-action (i.e. feedback loops). An octopus' tentacles and a tree's branches may just manifest the same desire by nature to bring life closer to what it seeks.

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A lot of my questions and thoughts that stemmed from this reading were related to the idea of gradual change. In Buddhism, this is a theory that is juxtaposed with sudden realization of awareness, Enlightenment, which makes me very curious about how this is in conversation with consciousness raising etc. A lot of Gofrey's discourse centers around the idea of gradual change in the case of the evolution of consciousness. He gives the example of a human in a half asleep state, as a semi-conscious state. I wonder though, if this is really an accurate description of in between consciousness that could relate to an octopus or not. I wonder this because, as humans, we are able to go to a higher state of consciousness at any point, half-asleep we can awaken. In the idea of sudden enlightenment which is posed directly against gradualism in Buddhism, this is thought about any state of human consciousness. The possibility to reach ultimate awareness is always available, and this is what makes humans distinct in the animal kingdom. Could other species reach a certain level of consciousness that then could spur into sudden awareness at any point?

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I believe the cycle of sensory begetting action which then informs future senses (restarting the cycle) is one that humans get trapped and lost in very often. I'd even argue that it somewhat explains why we tend to center our own human experiences even in conversations of inter-species cognition and feeling. Outside of the human experience being the only one that we can pull from earnestly, senses, or more particularly the experience we have when coming into contact with a stimuli, informs our next action. Action which in the human case has immense impact on not just the individuals nexts senses and future actions, but also on the world. Man isn't an octopus, a single action can change how many if not all other people view or sense the world; shifting the actions of just as many. This is when action beings to shape our sensitivity to certain truths, acceptability and so on.

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Can an octopus reflect -- however "dimly" -- on what it feels like to be ______ (itself)?

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Cuddle up with a cuttlefish?

Godfrey-Smith is no big fan of fully-embodied understanding, preserving a special place for the central nervous system (CNS - in human and other creatures). BUT consider the importance that even Godfrey-Smith attributes to the octopus' environment, tools, etc. While "consciousness" is "distributed" in the octopus, it is also Extended (into tools), Enactive (realized in moving, hunting, searching, etc.), and Embedded (in situations that "activate" curiosity, for example).

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"From White Noise to Consciousness" made me think about to what extent a pain response is something that you "think" about, compared to something that you just physically do. Is it "thought" when we realise something hurts to touch, and then avoid it? Is that being "conscious?" There are people who cannot experience pain—they could be bleeding, and not notice until they physically see the blood. Likewise, shock can inhibit the brains response to pain. Is this an inhibition of consciousness?

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One of the things I found interesting about octopuses in the reading was that their tentacles work as if they each have a brain, illustrating a remarkable degree of autonomy. They can perform complex tasks independent of direct commands from the central brain.

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I was also thinking a lot about the concept of unity, specifically between mind, body and brain, and where the line can be drawn to determine what constitutes a singular being rather than a piece of a larger collective. I do think that unity is something that can be both a subjective experience, as well as an objective observation, and I believe the jazz band is the perfect example to use in this context. The band may appear to be working individually, lacking unity and reason at times, but when the group is working as it should, the individual players execute individual tasks which aid in creating the unified experience of the song. When discussing the limbs of the octopus, I believe it may be worth thinking about how a being so different from us may experience unity as, rather than an individual player in the band, the band in its entirety, with its limbs acting as the instrumentalists. Although the limbs of an octopus may react to stimuli when separated from the body, they exist not as experiencing the stimuli as an octopus would, but instead how the limb of an octopus would. The very nature of trying to understand what it the experience of being an octopus requires that one accept the unity of that experience as one thing, even if it is composed of multiple parts. When thinking about the experience of being an octopus, I think about how they interact with and perceive their environment, specifically through their limbs and skin. Although colorblind, they have one of the most advanced camouflage systems in the entire animal kingdom, seemingly due to the independence of their limbs. From this one can infer that octopi do 'see' in some manner that reflects an objective reality into their subjective experience, but is seeing the right word to describe the experience of the octopus?

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I feel a bit ashamed to have let the animal cruelty of the experienments discussed slip my notice but appreciate you bringing them up. I think it's something important to keep in mind when attempting to study animal consciousness, as if we have already confirmed that most all organisms feel some kind of pain, there's no need to further prove it. Instead, what if we explored what invokes joy in them, if that is even a word that can properly be attributed to animals, or if they can experience nostalgia or jealousy.

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I was also curious what Godfrey-Smith meant when stating that "There is no experience here because the machinery of vision in frogs is not doing the sorts of things it does in us that give rise to subjective experience" (pg. 90). How does the machinery of vision in frogs not give rise to the sorts of things it does in us that give rise to subjective experience? Do frogs not experience affordances? Are they not solicited by what they see around to act? To claim that seems antithetical to the works argument.

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the concept of animals having sides of the brain that process different things and don't communicate with one another is also quite interesting to me and recalled to my mind the show "Severance," where there is a new medical procedure in which you could split your brain/being, not recalling your life outside of work when at work and not recalling work when at home/not in the office

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A portion of the excerpted text that stuck out to me was on page 84; here Godfrey-Smith is discussing how it might "seem inevitable [that our experience is usually of a unified scene]... but it is not. It's one way of being wired up." This recalled to me a video I saw of a brain scan of a dog, which showed that the parts of our brains that react to/process smell and sight are overlapping in a dogs brain, while ours is not, implying that smell may be at least a partially visual phenomenon for dogs, or if not be related to/implicated with their sight

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In our groups just before class ended last Monday, we began talking about potential connections between Godfrey-Smith and Ortega. Godfrey-Smith starts to talk about the formation of life as a living agent in the first section of the chapter (p. 87), saying that unity within an organism is likely, but also optional and not necessary for life to form and have experiences of some kind. But in thinking about Mariana Ortega's thinking about multiplicitous selves as having within one being multiple selves that make sense of and experience different backgrounds, and are also constantly negotiating selves and identities within different worlds, I thought that Godfrey-Smith's assertion that unity is optional as a little confusing. On one hand, I understand his point that the human understanding of having one body that behaves in a specific way. But also, I think unity is something that is felt, not necessarily something that can be seen from outside the thing that is experiencing it. For example, with an octopus, how are we to determine whether they experience unity? One could argue that the brain and nervous system functioning of their tentacles shows a lack of unity, with limbs that act as a "jazz band," doing different things with different reasonings perhaps, but what if the unity we define them as is a specifically human unity? I think about trees as well, and how they are connected to other surrounding trees and communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to humans, but perhaps the unity they feel or do not feel would extend far past what we would consider the limits of their physical being. And I think we should consider Mariana Oretga's thinking in this context too, thinking of the united person (or being or body or life) being part of multiple worlds, behaving differently in each according to complex negotiations between the self and world, being at once whole and separate, the same and different and still have a unified sense of self.

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I think that philosophers can be quite fascinated with the fact that there are other beings on earth that have a higher intelligence. It gives us the understanding that we are not the only occupants of earth and in fact that we are not alone with our consciousness. In the same way, we care for dogs and cats because all though they cannot directly communicate with us through language they communicate through the act of doing, which in a way could be more important. If octopuses are intelligent and emotional animals, could octopuses have the same relationship to humans as share with a pet animal. (Malaya)

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After reading these texts, I wonder why we as humans are so set on understanding this act of consciousness and how it plays into the ideas of mind & body and comprehension and being in the world. How much information can we gain on humans from understanding how an octopus maneuvers these situations, and vice versa? If we only have our own experiences to view what is happening, doesn't that significantly shifts out understanding??

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I have also been struggling with understanding why Godfrey-Smith chose to write this piece, especially because we never truly will understand the subjective experience of an octopus, but recently as I continued to think about his work, I realized two new dimensions of the piece.

One dimension that I noticed stemmed from giving the octopuses subjective experience, which even if incomprehensible to humans, offers them a reason to emotionally resonate with the octopuses, which in turn could promote less animal cruelty. I believe this because I think humans typically treat animals differently if they feel a certain emotional resonance with them. However, this does not distract me from the bad ethics of his experiments, and also provides a contradiction to this "dimension" of his work. I agree that the tests run on the octopuses were unethical and I believe it would be important to further research and understand ways we could come to the same conclusions about octopuses without inflicting harm on them. I found it actually a bit comical how while discussing the octopuses who's arms had been crushed, he wrote, "The study found that Octopuses who'd had their arms crushed (not too crushed)..." (102) because he even acknowledges the cruelty of the experiments in this piece. I still think that though maybe not intentionally, Godfrey-Smith offered a compelling and emotional resonate argument that contributes to the animal rights movement.

The other dimension I saw came from Jordan's comment, as I appreciated how they touched on how Godfrey-Smith was able to to make them think about the human subjective experience through the subjective experience of an octopus. I believe this is likely the most probable reason he wrote the essay, and I am interested to learn more so that I can better understand what Godfrey-Smith is trying to point to about human subjective experience in this piece.

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Reading this texts makes me ask the question on how one can tell within another human the difference between being and feeling?

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I think that Godfrey-Smith gives us a different perspective on our understanding of the world as not solely abstract, but also shaped by our physical interactions and our experience with the world around us. As we discussed in class, I don't think that even if we were able to hear a different kind of animal's thoughts for a day, we would be able to understand that specific animal's entire impact on its environment and what it means to be that specific animal. Godfrey-Smith discusses how creatures like octopuses have behaviors that show that they have a form of embodied cognition, in which they can understand the environment through their interactions with it, through their bodies and sensory systems.

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This made me think of the mind-body problem as a whole, and where consciousness plays into it as well. I wonder to what extent our comprehension is embodied, is this even possible? Or can we only understand the world of an octopus, for example, depicted by a series of observations?

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This makes me wonder- as we discussed in class- why exactly it is that we're so intent on understanding and quantifying the experience of an octopus when it is, in fact, so unique and different from our own. I'm interested in the ethicality of conceptualizing the distinct experience of being an octopus through the human framework. Does Godfrey-Smith's work have a tendency to do so? Why is it that he's so interested in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the subjective experience of an octopus; what is his goal in doing so; what makes him so sure that he could ever truly grasp what that experience is truly like?

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The strangeness of octopus' sensory systems reminds me of alien nature of their physical systems as well. It's impossible to comprehend what it must be like to have limbs that are partially autonomous- how much are the tentacles included under the central 'whole' of the mind? But given that we can only try to comprehend other creatures through our own embodied systems of thinking about the world, we can never understand what kind of a world the octopus lives in.

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This reminds me of a part that drew me in on page 80 that discussed TVSS in which sensors and cameras are transformed into energy like vibrations. Perception that would otherwise be visual, therefore, becomes accesible for blind people. This pulled me in because it was interesting for me to try and consider other forms of perception that I am not accustomed to. - Kathy

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Animal experiments seemed kind of fascinating but also off-putting. A bit cruel? Also interesting to interact with a text that sees animals experiencing pain as a given.

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The examples worked really well, especially with the idea of "subjective experience" introduced on page 78. Life feels like something to us, and using examples helps tie in that experience to the philosophy of it, helping us bring new philosophical concepts under the umbrella of our understanding. - l. mayo

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It is interesting to think about why time, sequences, and novelty figure so prominently in the consciousness. What is it about these things in particular? In a more abstract way, how do organisms tell the difference (because, to some extent, this passage on 91 makes essential some sorting) between concepts, senses, incitations?

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"white noise" as a metaphor for what came before consciousness. Could use some more elaboration.

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The concept of "integration" was a new thought for me-- as humans we consider all of our senses as part of a larger whole of perception, but to other creatures this often isn't the case, and their different senses aren't quite as connected to each other as humans-- it's just hard to comprehend.

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"processing of visual information can take place without the subject experiencing any of this as seeing." (88) - seeing as a multi-layered experience

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The case of the octopus applies the earlier sections to a singular concrete case. e.g. The questioning of single-parted-ness of mind connects to the section on split-brain patients and eye-testing on pigeons.
(Henning)

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Group 1 talked a lot about the page 81 paragraph starting "In everyday experience ..." We thought of it as a clearer way of approaching affordances, describing the mechanics of how we respond to affordances in the world without getting bogged down in philosophical terminology.

l. mayo

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Godfrey-Smith talks about the metaphor of white noise in section two as a means of understanding the "first form of subjective experience." I wondered how this metaphor works in correlation with parts of the Alva Noe reading that we read, wherein he talks about how when you receive new sensory information, you have to engage with it and interact with it in order to develop meaning. -Liv

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A section that drew me in was on page 100, where Smith discusses the octopus' navigation and recognition skills. In this way they are similar to humans because they re-identify objects that they see in the world. They are then able to complete tasks through this re-identification. I question how well they are able to complete tasks if their arms have different a different sensory output. Something we discussed in our group, however, was caution with comparing the octopus' arm functions to they way that humans readjust because the octopus' arms have their own nervous organization. -Brianna

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I thought the idea of consciousness as an absence of noise was interesting. It makes sense (at least on a very general level) that consciousness would be a sort of performative sorting of information—information comes to exist for the organism as it can be responded to.

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I found the explorations of the physical, sensory experience of the octopus in the third section very intriguing and also more accessible as opposed to the theoretical ideas. The experiential examples helped to illustrate and ground the reflective, theoretical discussion.

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The use of the word "mind" makes it seem like the mind is a unified thing but at the same time the mind is made of a huge decentralized arrangement of neurons.

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Section 1 Response - "Evolution of Experience"

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Section 1 Response - "Evolution of Experience"

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Although we agreed that the sense-action loop on page 82 may have been a bit redundant given that the author had already described a human response to stimuli and then goes on to give several examples of how animals react to stimuli in a non-linear way, I think that the loop and the language used of "senses" and "action" is a good way of thinking about affordances in a more accesible way. - Kathy

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pick a tentacle, and join in. OR add your own comment, but try to connect it to someone else's too.

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"From White Noise to Consciousness"

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Click the three dots in the box above this space when you're done. You should see the option "Connect to Post." Choose this option and point the arrow(s) to another box that's related.