Octopus Consciousness
Felt Experience in our Cephalopod Kin
Felt Experience (Subjectivity) in the Octopus
- Curiosity and exploratory engagement
- Approach divers, cameras, and unfamiliar objects voluntarily
- Manipulate items without immediate reward
- Suggests a felt attraction to novelty (curiosity)
- Problem-solving with persistence (and frustration)
- Open jars, navigate mazes, escape enclosures
- Try multiple strategies when initial attempts fail
- Show agitation or restlessness when blocked (frustration)
- Fear and defensive responsiveness
- Rapid color and texture changes when threatened
- Ink release, fleeing, or hiding behaviors
- Context-sensitive reactions indicating graded alarm or fear
- Pain experience and learned aversion
- Avoid locations associated with negative stimuli
- Protect or groom injured arms
- Form lasting aversions based on prior discomfort (pain with memory)
- Individual temperaments (“personalities”)
- Some individuals are bold and interactive; others shy or avoidant
- Consistent behavioral differences across time
- Suggest enduring affective styles or moods
- Distributed, embodied feeling
- Nervous system largely located in arms as well as central brain
- Arms explore and respond semi-independently
- Indicates a coordinated “society” of feelings rather than a single center
- Affective memory and recognition
- Distinguish between different human caretakers
- Respond differently based on prior interactions
- Indicates emotionally inflected memory (liking, disliking, trust, irritation)
Process Philosophy and
Octopus Consciousness
The purpose of this page is to offer readers an opportunity to reflect on the octopus mind, guided by the prominent scientist Peter Godfrey-Smith. He is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University od Sydney in Australia. Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science and an accomplished scuba diver whose underwater footage of interacting—and sometimes warring—octopuses has attracted wide attention. In his book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, he brings these vocations together to tell a bold story of how nature became aware of itself.
The idea that nature 'becomes aware of itself' in the lives of conscious being on earth is not new. Awareness is itself an incredible property of life, and it is possible that something new happens in the universe through its emergence, But the assumption is often that this happens through mammals and birds, who are often regarded as the most intelligent creatures on Earth. Godfrey-Smith's point is that a more oceanic branch of the tree of life has also evolved amazing forms of intelligence and feeling: the cephalopods—squid, cuttlefish, and, above all, octopuses. Emerging research shows that these remarkable beings display an array of cognitive, affective, and behavioral capacities that challenge familiar assumptions about mind and awareness.
The reflections on this page are prompted by interviews with Godfrey-Smith, and also by a lecture he delivered at Harvard University in 2023, titled “Boundaries of Consideration" - part of a Whitehead lecture series. In that lecture, he articulates what he calls the “Sentience Principle”: the view that sentient beings have feelings and “felt meanings” in their lives, and that these—and only these—beings possess interests worthy of moral consideration. The lecture can be accessed here. Godfrey-Smith's website can be found here.
A word about the word "consciousness." I am using the word “consciousness” as synonymous with felt experience — that is, with sentience. On this view, consciousness may or may not be clear and distinct. It may or may not take the form of conscious perception of visual objects or the clear and distinct entertainment of concepts. It may or may not include sophisticated forms of self-awareness, such as recognizing one’s own image in a mirror or one’s own voice or smell (as in dogs). I do not doubt that octopuses possess elements of “consciousness” more narrowly defined in these ways; they have a sense of self.
But by “consciousness” I mean what Whitehead calls prehension or feeling as it occurs in a process of subjective concrescence. Even when it is not conscious in this narrower sense, “consciousness” in this more general sense—a capacity for feeling or prehension—carries its own subjective immediacy, self-enjoyment, self-creativity, physical purposes, mental experience, and subjective aims. Octopuses, and all other living beings, are conscious in this sense. They have—or better, are—sentient minds, with lives of their own, evident in their remarkable behavior and, in many instances, attempts to communicate or 'signal' other creatures, as the work of Peter Godfry Smith well attests.
The Origins of Felt Experience
Process Philosophy and
Octopus Consciousness
- Common Ancestry, Divergent Paths
Octopuses and human beings share a distant evolutionary origin in a flatworm-like marine ancestor some 600 million years ago, from which two radically different lines of development emerged. - Kindred Subjects in a Process Sense
From a Whiteheadian perspective, both are concrescing subjects: centers of experience that, moment by moment, prehend their worlds and integrate many influences into a unified immediacy. - Prehension and Feeling as Fundamental
Each engages its environment not as a passive object but as an active subject, feeling its surroundings and responding through embodied awareness. - Subjective Aim and Responsive Imagination
Both humans and octopuses entertain possibilities for responding to what they feel, guided by aims—physical and psychological—toward satisfying intensity in experience. - Capacity for Novelty and Improvisation
Both display responsiveness to novel situations, improvising behavior in ways that reveal flexibility, curiosity, and intelligence. - Shared Traits of Curiosity and Exploration
Octopuses exhibit inquisitiveness, playfulness, and problem-solving capacities that resonate with human cognitive and affective life. - Dreaming as a Cross-Species Phenomenon
Evidence suggests that octopuses, like humans, enter sleep states associated with dream-like activity. Similar patterns appear in other animals indicating that internally generated experiential worlds may be widespread in the animal kingdom. - Unique Octopus Capacities
At the same time, octopuses have abilities very different from our own. Much of their “thinking” happens not just in their brain but throughout their bodies, especially in their arms, which can act and explore somewhat on their own. Their skin can instantly change color and texture, almost like a living display. Their arms can both feel and “taste” what they touch. Altogether, they seem to experience and respond to the world in a way that is more spread out, fluid, and body-centered than our own. - Distributed Subjectivity
Unlike humans, whose experience is strongly centralized in the brain, octopus subjectivity is distributed across the body, with neural networks in each arm enabling semi-autonomous sensing and action. - Unity-in-Multiplicity of Experience
This distributed embodiment suggests a form of subjectivity that is both unified and multiple—a coordinated society of experiential centers rather than a strictly centralized self. - Historical Fear of the Alien
Their unfamiliar bodily form and behavior led earlier cultures to fear and mythologize them as strange or monstrous beings. - Fear as Misrecognized Otherness
Such fear reflects not their actual nature but a human response to radical difference—an inability to recognize subjectivity in unfamiliar forms. - Expanded Sense of Kinship: A Universe of Many Kinds of Subjects
Process philosophy suggests that reality is populated by diverse concrescing subjects—human, octopus, and beyond—each part of a creative advance into novelty - A Universe Gathered into a Living Whole
All of these many forms of experience can be understood as contributing to a larger, ongoing unity—a kind of ever-growing whole in which each moment of life is received and held. In theological terms, this can be imagined as a divine Consciousness that gathers the experiences of the world, absorbs them, and is enriched by them, weaving them into an ever-deepening unity. - Ethical Implication: Enlarged Empathy
Recognizing octopuses as subjects calls for an expansion of moral concern, grounded in an appreciation of both kinship and difference.
God, the Octopus, and
Distributed Subjectivity
The challenge of octopus subjectivity is that it is so immensely gifted, with capacities humans lack (changing colors in a split second) yet not centralized in a single brain alone. It is distributed across the body, with large portions of the nervous system located in the arms, each capable of semi-autonomous sensing and action. It is fluid and spread out over the whole body. This decentralized subjectivity suggests a form of experience that is at once unified and multiple—a coordinated society of feeling rather than a strictly centralized subject—thereby expanding our sense of what a concrescing subject can be.
It invites comparison not only with the diffuse sensitivities of plant life and perhaps plasma, but also, in a more speculative way, with the divine Consciousness in whose life the universe unfolds. The divine Consciousness, too, is spread out and without a brain. Its body, if we can speak that way at all, is the universe itself, and its various limbs - all the actual entities - have autonomy of their own. In this respect, octopuses may mirror—more vividly than we typically do—the idea of a unity that gathers many centers of experience into a living whole, even as other living beings, including humans, mirror other dimensions of the divine life. In some ways, at least, God is made in the image of an octopus.
It invites comparison not only with the diffuse sensitivities of plant life and perhaps plasma, but also, in a more speculative way, with the divine Consciousness in whose life the universe unfolds. The divine Consciousness, too, is spread out and without a brain. Its body, if we can speak that way at all, is the universe itself, and its various limbs - all the actual entities - have autonomy of their own. In this respect, octopuses may mirror—more vividly than we typically do—the idea of a unity that gathers many centers of experience into a living whole, even as other living beings, including humans, mirror other dimensions of the divine life. In some ways, at least, God is made in the image of an octopus.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea,
and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch--spoke with him back in October 2021 about his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the world, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.
Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here (after Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?") might be What is it Like to be an Octopus?
Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here (after Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?") might be What is it Like to be an Octopus?
Interview with the Author
Bonus: The Dreamlife of other Animals
When Animals Dream
A spellbinding look at the philosophical and moral implications of animal dreaming
Are humans the only dreamers on Earth? What goes on in the minds of animals when they sleep? When Animals Dream brings together behavioral and neuroscientific research on animal sleep with philosophical theories of dreaming. It shows that dreams provide an invaluable window into the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals, giving us access to a seemingly inaccessible realm of animal experience.
David Peña-Guzmán uncovers evidence of animal dreaming throughout the scientific literature, suggesting that many animals run “reality simulations” while asleep, with a dream-ego moving through a dynamic and coherent dreamscape. He builds a convincing case for animals as conscious beings and examines the thorny scientific, philosophical, and ethical questions it raises. Once we accept that animals dream, we incur a host of moral obligations and have no choice but to rethink our views about who animals are and the interior lives they lead.
A mesmerizing journey into the otherworldly domain of nonhuman consciousness, When Animals Dream carries profound implications for contemporary debates about animal cognition, animal ethics, and animal rights, challenging us to regard animals as beings who matter, and for whom things matter.