Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds

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Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor at the University of Sydney and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, joins to explain why he thinks meeting an octopus is the closest we'll get to meeting an alien. He's now developing a new, speculative theory of consciousness centered on rhythm. The conversation explores why he thinks "having a mind" is a graded property rather than a yes-or-no one — and what that implies for earthworms, bacteria, and plants. We discuss how many selves may exist inside a single octopus. Godfrey-Smith explains why he suspects rhythmic, large-scale electrical activity in the brain — not just point-to-point neural firing — is essential to consciousness. He also addresses what Anthropic's discovery of a "workspace" inside Claude does and doesn't show, and why he assigns computers a very low probability of being conscious. Finally, he makes the case for why a silicon neuron could never do "exactly" what a biological one does. This is an in-depth conversation with Peter Godfrey-Smith.

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TIMESTAMPS:

- 00:00:00 - Cephalopods: The Closest Aliens

- 00:05:30 - Defining the Unconscious Mind

- 00:10:40 - Selfhood vs. Information Processing

- 00:16:10 - The Graded Nature of Mind

- 00:22:15 - Deflating the Concept of Life

- 00:29:00 - Convergent Evolution of Intelligence

- 00:35:40 - Distributed Neural Control Systems

- 00:42:50 - Multiple Subjects in One Body?

- 00:48:40 - Global Workspace Theory Critique

- 00:56:10 - AI and the Conscious Workspace

- 01:01:28 - Simulation Hypothesis Probabilities

- 01:08:40 - Biological Hardware Constraints

- 01:16:10 - Rhythmic Consciousness Theory

- 01:22:30 - Mind Uploading and Silicon Neurons

- 01:31:00 - Neural Dynamics of Subjectivity

- 01:37:00 - Deep Ocean Intelligence

LINKS MENTIONED:

- Other Minds [Book]: amazon.com/dp/0374227764?tag=toe08-20

- Peter's Website: petergodfreysmith.com

- Reality+ [Book]: amazon.com/dp/0393635805?tag=toe08-20

- A Materialist Theory of the Mind [Book]: amazon.com/dp/0415100313?tag=toe08-20

- Rodolfo Llinas: med.nyu.edu/faculty/rodolfo-llinas

- Bruno's Research: qbi.uq.edu.au/groups/vanswinderen

- Dehaene's Commentary on Language Models [Paper]: www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/c…

- A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness [Book]: cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Baars_88.html

- Oscillations in the Central Brain of Drosophila Are Phase Locked to Attended Visual Features [Paper]: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010749117

- The ENCODE Project: plato.stanford.edu/entries/genomics/encode-pro…

- What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [Paper]: sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

More links at curtjaimungal.substack.com

Guests do not pay to appear. #science

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