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 visits an extraordinary site off the coast of Australia, Octopolis, where the animals have developed a kind of city under the sea. 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 fourth episode, he meditates on why the octopus, with such high intelligence, lives for such a short time.

“What is all the brainpower doing if an octopus is dead less than two years after hatching from an egg? Their situation reminds me of Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, in which a class of artificial but human-like “replicants” are programmed to die after only four years. Blade Runner’s replicants, unlike cephalopods, know their fate.”

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