What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?

In Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explores the startling evolutionary journey of the cephalopods. It all started for him when he began scuba diving near Sydney:

“I came across the octopuses by chance, by spending time in the water. I began following them around, and eventually started thinking about their lives. After all, the sea is the original home of the mind, at least in its first faint forms.”

Professor Godfrey-Smith explores what we know about the intelligence of cephalopods, including the tricks they play on the scientists who try to study them. He looks back 600 million years, to reveal the worm-like creature which was the last common ancestor connecting us with the octopus. He meditates on why the octopus, with such high intelligence, lives for such a short time. And he asks us to imagine what it feels like to be an octopus, raising big questions about the nature of animal consciousness.

In this third episode, he visits an extraordinary site off the coast of Australia, Octopolis, where the animals have developed a kind of city under the sea. He dives down to Octopolis and observes a site where generations of octopuses have learned to live close together, beginning to evolve new ways of communicating with each other.

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

Read by Tim McInnerny
Abridged and produced by Elizabeth Burke
Sound design by Chris Maclean
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4 Show less