Peter Godfrey-Smith – författare

"Under läsningen av denna djupt fascinerande bok om bläckfiskar får man också intrycket av att de kommer från en helt annan värld. De har inte bara ett, utan tre hjärtan."Fokus

”Djupsinne är en både lärorik och fängslande bok om evolutionsbiologi, interfolierad med fridykning i kognitionsforskningens djupa vatten. Godfrey-Smith har gjort en grundlig research."SvD

Hur känns det att vara bläckfisk?

Djupsinne tar oss med under havsytan till den egensinniga och synnerligen smarta bläckfiskens boplatser. Här får vi möta dessa fascinerande djur som är det närmaste vi kan komma en intelligent utomjording. Genom att följa författaren på sina dykningar utanför Australiens kust får vi följa dessa märkliga djur och samtidigt ta del av sökandet efter livets och medvetandets uppkomst."De överraskande böckerna är bäst. De som återväcker den ursprungliga läslusten, nyfikenheten som slukar sidor och söker svaren. En bok som handlar bläckfiskars intelligens och omvärldsuppfattning hamnar just i den kategorien, osannolik och ytterst intelligent."Norrbottens-Kuriren

"En tänkvärd bok, utmärkt populärvetenskap."BTJ

”Hänförande och djupsinnig.” Financial Times

”En oerhört insiktsfull och njutbar bok.”Los Angeles Times

”Välskriven, tankeväckande och djärv.”The Atlantic

”Lysande … Skönheten i Godfrey-Smiths bok ligger i textens klarhet.”The Guardian

”En suverän, skimrande bok.”Literary Review

”Fascinerande och ofta förtjusande”The Times

"Under läsningen av denna djupt fascinerande bok om bläckfiskar får man också intrycket av att de kommer från en helt annan värld. De har inte bara ett, utan tre hjärtan."Fokus

”Djupsinne är en både lärorik och fängslande bok om evolutionsbiologi, interfolierad med fridykning i kognitionsforskningens djupa vatten. Godfrey-Smith har gjort en grundlig research."SvD

Hur känns det att vara bläckfisk?

Djupsinne tar oss med under havsytan till den egensinniga och synnerligen smarta bläckfiskens boplatser. Här får vi möta dessa fascinerande djur som är det närmaste vi kan komma en intelligent utomjording. Genom att följa författaren på sina dykningar utanför Australiens kust får vi följa dessa märkliga djur och samtidigt ta del av sökandet efter livets och medvetandets uppkomst."De överraskande böckerna är bäst. De som återväcker den ursprungliga läslusten, nyfikenheten som slukar sidor och söker svaren. En bok som handlar bläckfiskars intelligens och omvärldsuppfattning hamnar just i den kategorien, osannolik och ytterst intelligent."Norrbottens-Kuriren

"En tänkvärd bok, utmärkt populärvetenskap."BTJ

”Hänförande och djupsinnig.” Financial Times

”En oerhört insiktsfull och njutbar bok.”Los Angeles Times

”Välskriven, tankeväckande och djärv.”The Atlantic

”Lysande … Skönheten i Godfrey-Smiths bok ligger i textens klarhet.”The Guardian

”En suverän, skimrande bok.”Literary Review

”Fascinerande och ofta förtjusande”The Times

Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in Other MindsAlthough mammals and birds are widely regarded as 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 identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it 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 a 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 journeys. 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, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?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.

"Enthralling . . . breathtaking . . . Metazoa brings an extraordinary and astute look at our own mind’s essential link to the animal world." —The New York Times Book Review (Editors'' Choice)"A great book . . . [Godfrey-Smith is] brilliant at describing just what he sees, the patterns of behaviour of the animals he observes." —Nigel Warburton, Five BooksThe scuba-diving philosopher who wrote Other Minds explores the origins of animal consciousnessDip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom—the Metazoa—they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus—the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective experience with the assistance of far-flung species. As he delves into what it feels like to perceive and interact with the world as other life-forms do, Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the animal body well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path. In accessible, riveting prose, he charts the ways that subsequent evolutionary developments—eyes that track, for example, and bodies that move through and manipulate the environment—shaped the subjective lives of animals. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus, and fish, then moving onto land and the world of insects, birds, and primates like ourselves, Metazoa gathers their stories together in a way that bridges the gap between mind and matter, addressing one of the most vexing philosophical problems: that of consciousness.Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding our minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and active bodies. The story that results is as rich and vibrant as life itself.

One of the Washington Post''s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side—when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of other living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed. To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter’s first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.