作者:
Peter Godfrey-Smith 出版社: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 副标题: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness 出版年: 2016-12-6 页数: 272 定价: USD 27.00 装帧: Hardcover ISBN: 9780374227760
Although mammals and birds are widely regarded to be the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to keep tabs on individual human keepers, raid neighbori...
Although mammals and birds are widely regarded to be the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to keep tabs on individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once, but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey, and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journey.
But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate together, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia? And how does the cephalopod mind differ from the mammal mind, which took its own path—a path that eventually gave rise to an especially rich form of consciousness?
By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.
Peter Godfrey-Smith is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a professor of history and the philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of four books, including Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lak...
Peter Godfrey-Smith is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a professor of history and the philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of four books, including Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award for an outstanding work on the philosophy of science. His underwater videos of octopuses have been featured in National Geographic and New Scientist, and he has discussed them on National Public Radio and many cable TV channels.
The octopus is sometimes said to be a good illustration of the importance of a theoretical movement in psychology known as **embodied cognition**. [...] One central idea is that our body itself, rather than our brain, is responsible for some of the “smartness” with which we handle the world. Our body’s own structure encodes some information about the environment and how we must deal with it, so not all this information needs to be stored in the brain. The joints and angles of our limbs, for example, make motions such as walking naturally arise. Knowing how to walk is partly a matter of having the right body. As Hillel Chiel and Randall Beer put it, an animal’s body structure creates both constraints and opportunities, which guide its action. (查看原文)
Further, the relevant contrast in the octopus case is not “body rather than brain”—the contrast usually emphasized in discussions of embodied cognition. In an octopus, the nervous system as a whole is a more relevant object than the brain: it’s not clear where the brain itself begins and ends, and the nervous system runs all through the body. The octopus is suffused with nervousness; the body is not a separate thing that is controlled by the brain or nervous system. (查看原文)
作者彼得·戈弗雷-史密斯的主要研究领域是科学哲学(Philosophy of Science)、生物哲学(Philosophy of Biology)和心灵哲学(Philosophy of Mind)。“Philosophy of Mind”一般译作“心灵哲学”,也有人译作“心智哲学”。在翻译本书的过程中,我最摇摆不定的一点,就是应该...
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3 有用 Reader 2018-02-05 22:03:16
章魚的八支腕足(日本人譯作觸手,想是參考釋教,但弄巧成拙,恰如觸手請經)所分別/共同感知乃至意識到的世界什麼模樣,人類在正常情況下永難瞭解。但是我們總能推測它不會是什麼模樣----我猜它就不能是水形物語那副模樣:貌似豐贍的象喻一提溜起來全連成一氣指向一組簡單的概念,如心使臂,如臂使指,太呆板了,太中產了。
0 有用 榴莲妹 2022-10-25 17:11:52 新西兰
越看越乱😂 后来在Ausible把书听完了
0 有用 Pluto&Piaget 2021-11-05 14:01:47
身体就是哲学形式。这样说来,章鱼位于自我与他者之间,意识集成与弥散的边界,有佛陀意味了。看到地狱火影在身体上掠过的那一幕(水底马蒂斯)写得引人羡慕。但能用一篇文章写清楚的不是非得出书
3 有用 豆友1680017 2017-10-28 10:35:28
这时候我就想问,凭什么因为鱿鱼之间少有社交活动,就觉得它们的皮肤LED并非交流信号呢?不可以跟其它生物/微生物交流么?
0 有用 毛绒榕 2022-03-24 17:22:23
作者好会写变色场景和抒情段落……感觉efference copy到inner speech那里步子扯太大了
0 有用 黎安高 2023-12-21 12:34:06 湖南
想到哪写到哪,结构凌乱还喜欢碎碎念。 不过第七章从进化论的角度谈个体衰老对种群延续的优势作用那段还是有点意思。
0 有用 今🇺🇦口 2023-04-19 20:44:34 英国
每个话题都讲的很浅, 不过还是知道了一些以前不知道的知识,比如对衰老过程的新的理解。因为讲的浅,所以很多地方我听了都觉得还是有很大的疑问,或者觉得不满意作者的解释。比如关于章鱼为什么完成生殖过程以后就会死亡这个话题
0 有用 Viola 2023-04-09 23:02:27 上海
还行。作者自称是哲学家,反正就一开始还蛮科学后面就忍不住开始瞎扯了。
0 有用 榴莲妹 2022-10-25 17:11:52 新西兰
越看越乱😂 后来在Ausible把书听完了
0 有用 C 2022-06-30 10:48:51
贝贝的睡前读物