SPONSORS:- Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better — or your money back. For a limited time our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at https://cheershealth.com/TOE- I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOEPeter 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.FOLLOW:- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e- Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt- Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs- Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE- PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4TIMESTAMPS:- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 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- The Explanatory Gap [Paper]: https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVMAQ- Inferring Consciousness in Phylogenetically Distant Organisms [Paper]: https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article/36/8/1660/120485/Inferring-Consciousness-in-Phylogenetically- Remarkably Bright Creatures [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0063204150?tag=toe08-20- Giant Cuttlefish: https://australian.museum/learn/animals/fishes/giant-cuttlefish-sepia-apama-gray-1849/- Cuttlefish Exert Self-Control in a Delay of Gratification Task [Paper]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/288/1946/20203161/86132/Cuttlefish-exert-self-control-in-a-delay-of- Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment- How We Found the Giant Squid: https://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_how_we_found_the_giant_squidMore links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.comGuests do not pay to appear. #scienceLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices