Let us begin with a thought experiment.
What is it like to be an octopus? Can
you imagine how it feels to swim swiftly
underwater trailing your eight long ten-
tacle arms behind you, using your many
suction pads to explore a coral reef?
Can you imagine having no skeleton to
prevent you squeezing into tiny gaps
between rocks, and being able to spray
thick dark ink in a big cloud around you
to confuse your predators? Maybe you
can. But, as Nagel (1974) pointed out in
‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (Chapter 2),
you are probably imagining what it
would be like for you to be the octopus,
and that is not the point. The point is
what it is like for the octopus – that is, if
it is like anything at all for the octopus.
How can we ever know? We cannot ask
the octopus to tell us. And even if we could, we might not believe, or understand,
what it said. This is essentially the problem of other minds. Just as you can never be
sure whether your best friend is really conscious, so you can never know whether
your cat, or the birds in your garden, or the ant you just stood on, are (or were)
conscious. Humans and other animals show similar expressions of emotion, and
similar reactions to pleasure, pain, and fear, as Darwin (1872) long ago showed.
From these similarities, we can guess what another animal is trying to do or how
it is feeling. Even so, we must avoid assuming that just because it appears to be in
pain, or to be feeling guilty, or happy or sad, it really has the feelings we attribute
to it. Our impressions could be completely wrong.
There are two extreme positions to consider. One is that only humans are con-
scious. Descartes believed that because they do not have language, all other ani-
mals are unfeeling automata, without souls or consciousness. A modern version
is Macphail’s argument that ‘animals are indeed Cartesian machines, and it is the
availability of language that confers on us, first, the ability to be self-conscious,
and second, the ability to feel’ (Macphail, 1998, p. 233). In his view, there is no
convincing evidence for consciousness in other species. They are not just devoid
of speech and self-awareness, but devoid of feeling (by which he means sensory
experiences), too. Dennett (1991) provides a different reason: that other animals
lack the language with which to create the particular kind of fiction that is con-
scious experience. Similarly, HOT theories deny consciousness to any animal inca-
pable of having higher-order thoughts.
At the other extreme lies the view that all other species are conscious. Panpsy-
chism is the obvious example here: even an amoeba, and beyond that even the
inorganic world, has something ‘which is of the same nature with our own con-
sciousness’, although that something may be inconceivably simple in comparison
(Clifford, 1874/1886, p. 266). Between these extremes lie theories that, for various
reasons, attribute different kinds of consciousness to different species (Griffin
and Speck, 2004; D. Edelman and Seth, 2009). For example, Baars (2005b) argues
‘It has a body – but
one that is protean,
all possibility [. . .]. The
octopus lives outside the
usual body/brain divide’(Godfrey-Smith, 2017)‘animals are indeed
Cartesian machines’(Macphail, 1998, p. 233)FIGURE 10.5 • Octopus vulgaris is a marine
cephalopod that uses its arms
with two rows of suckers on each
to move across and grasp objects.
It hunts at dusk, using nerve
poison in its saliva to paralyse
its prey, and grasping prey with
its powerful arms. It is intelligent
enough to unscrew jars and raid
lobster traps, it can squeeze
through small gaps and can
change colour to blend in with its
surroundings, and uses its light-
sensitive skin to detect changes
in brightness without using its
eyes. Males use the tip of their
third right arm to insert sperm
into the oviducts of females.