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)
The octopus, indeed, has a “different embodiment,” but one so unusual that it does not fit any of the standard views in this area. [...] Its embodiment prevents it from doing the sorts of things that are usually emphasized in the embodied cognition theories. The octopus, in a sense, is disembodied. That word makes it sound immaterial, which is not, of course, what I have in mind. It has a body, and is a material object. But the body itself is protean, all possibility; it has none of the costs and gains of a constraining and action-guiding body. The octopus lives outside the usual body/brain divide. (查看原文)
What is it like to be a bat? It’s probably like something, but very different from what it’s like to be a human. The term “like” is misleading here, as it suggests that the problem hinges on issues of comparison and similarity —this feeling is like that feeling. Similarity is not the issue. Rather, there is a feel to much of what goes on in human life. Waking up, watching the sky, eating—these things all have a feel to them. That’s what has to be understood. But when we take an evolutionary and gradualist perspective, this takes us to strange places. How can the fact of life feeling like something slowly creep into being? How can an animal be halfway to having it feel like something to be that animal? (查看原文)
Subjective experience is the most basic phenomenon that needs explaining, the fact that life feels like something to us. People sometimes now refer to this as explaining consciousness; they take subjective experience and consciousness to be the same thing. Instead, I see consciousness as one form of subjective experience, not the only form. (查看原文)
In the Ediacaran, other animals might be there around you, without being especially relevant. In the Cambrian, each animal becomes an important part of the environment of others. This entanglement of one life in another, and its evolutionary consequences, is due to behavior and the mechanisms controlling it. From this point on, the mind evolved in response to other minds.
在埃迪卡拉纪，动物身边也许围绕着其他动物，这些动物之间没有特殊关联。但是在寒武纪，每只动物都成了其他动物所处环境中很重要的一部分。这些生命之间的纠葛和它们的演化结果，都源于动物的行为活动和控制行为的机制。从这一刻起，心灵的演化便是为了回应其他的心灵。 (查看原文)
Other similarities are more abstract, such as an involvement with individuals, including the ability to recognize particular humans. [...] This ability makes sense if an animal is social or monogamous, but octopuses are not monogamous, have haphazard sex lives, and seem not very social. There’s a lesson here about the ways that smart animals handle the stuff of their world. They carve it up into objects that can be re-identified despite ongoing changes in how those objects present themselves. I find this a striking feature of the octopus mind—striking in its familiarity, its similarity to our own. (查看原文)
The octopus lives outside both the usual pictures. Its embodiment prevents it from doing the sorts of things that are usually emphasized in the embodied cognition theories.The octopus, in a sense, is disembodied. That word makes it sound immaterial,which is not, of course, what I have in mind. It has a body, and is a material object. But the body itself is protean, all possibility; it has none of the costs and gains of a constraining and action-guiding body. The octopus lives outside the usual body/brain divide. (查看原文)
The senses can do their basic work, and actions can be produced, with all this happening “in silence” as far as the organism’s experience is concerned. Then, at some stage in evolution, extra capacities appear that do give rise to subjective experience: the sensory streams are brought together, an “internal model” of the world arises, and there’s a recognition of time and self. (查看原文)
This profound indifference is seen in some cuttlefish as they go on looping excursions around their reefs. On these trips a cuttlefish might poke around under rocks or just wander about. Much of the time they are probably looking for food or mates, but they often do not seem to be looking very hard. Touring cuttlefish can sometimes be friendly or at least curious, stopping to peer at you before swimming on. But some are able to ignore you no matter how close you swim—even if you are right alongside their eye. Once I was being ignored so perfectly that I planted myself directly in the animal’s path, just to see what he would do. What followed felt like an existentialist game of “chicken.” He came closer and closer, refusing to acknowledge my presence, until he was just a foot or so away. Th... (查看原文)
作者: Peter Godfrey-Smith 副标题: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness isbn: 0374227764 书名: Other Minds 页数: 272 定价: USD 27.00 出版社: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 出版年: 2016-12-6 装帧: Hardcover
