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Naturebang: Octopuses and the Mind-Body Problem

Octopuses and the Mind-Body Problem

BBC Radio 4 - Naturebang, Octopuses and the Mind-Body Problem

What can an octopus teach us about our relationship between the mind and the body?

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight explore the neural network of an octopus to question the divide that we feel between the mind and the body.

What is this thing we call "consciousness"? It feels like a non-physical thing that somehow exists as a separate entity to our physical body. We might think of it as being located up in our brain where our internal chatter is generated, but the 'mind' still somehow feels separate to the 'brain'. 

Then along comes an octopus to complicate the matter. Octopuses clearly have consciousness and high intelligence. But the last common ancestor between us and them is a flatworm that trawled the sea floor about 750 million years ago, so it's not surprising that their brains have evolved to be very different to ours. In fact, some people say they have nine brains. This is due to a complex neural network that runs throughout their body, meaning they have the ability to make different decisions from all eight arms without having to send messages back up to the central brain. 

So how can the mind of an octopus be seperate to its body? And does this mean that our mind and body are also one and the same? 

Featuring writer Sy Montgomery, author of 'The Soul of an Octopus', and philosopher Julian Baggini, author of 'How the World Thinks'.

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Making sense of what it means to be human by looking to the natural world.

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