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]: https://amazon.com/dp/0374227764?tag=toe08-20 - Peter's Website: https://petergodfreysmith.com/ - Reality+ [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0393635805?tag=toe08-20 - A Materialist Theory of the Mind [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0415100313?tag=toe08-20 - Rodolfo Llinas: https://med.nyu.edu/faculty/rodolfo-llinas - Bruno's Research: https://qbi.uq.edu.au/groups/vanswinderen - Dehaene's Commentary on Language Models [Paper]: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/cc4be2488d65e54a6ed06492f8968398ddc18ebe.pdf - A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness [Book]: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Baars_88.html - Oscillations in the Central Brain of Drosophila Are Phase Locked to Attended Visual Features [Paper]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010749117 - The ENCODE Project: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/genomics/encode-project.html - What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [Paper]: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

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