Peter Godfrey-Smith
University of Sydney
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney whose book Other Minds, The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016) became the public reference for evolutionary thinking about experience. His framework is gradualist. Subjective experience did not arrive as a single event but accumulated through stages, and the octopus, whose lineage split from ours roughly six hundred million years ago and built its large nervous system independently, is the natural experiment for how different experience can look when it evolves twice. His academic work on the philosophy of biology supplies the scaffolding, from the individuality of organisms to the function of consciousness in controlling behavior.
For the site’s substrate independence debate, Godfrey-Smith contributes the evolutionary middle position this site’s animal consciousness analyses track. Minds are products of lineage-specific evolution, so alien minds, biological or artificial, need not resemble ours in structure to be minds. His portrait of octopus experience, intelligence distributed across arms with no single self at the center, doubles as a thought experiment for distributed artificial systems.
His position neither confirms nor denies machine consciousness. It removes the assumption that only one shape of mind is possible, which is the assumption the debate most needs removed. portrait: file: /public/images/researchers/peter-godfrey-smith.jpg alt: “Peter Godfrey-Smith reading in front of a light background” subject: “Peter Godfrey-Smith” credit: “Danimations” license: “CC BY-SA 4.0” license_url: “https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0” source_url: “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P1160335_peter_godfrey-smith_reading.jpg” width: 593 height: 800
Known for. Other Minds and the octopus, gradualist evolution of subjective experience, philosophy of biology, the Darwinian individual as the unit of experience
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Peter Godfrey-Smith is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.