My bookshelf·Index No. 0355

Metazoa

On My Shelf, Not Yet Read

If Other Minds was the octopus, this is everybody else. Godfrey-Smith works up the animal tree looking for where experience begins — sponges with no neurons at all, then corals, then a shrimp that stuns prey with a snap, crabs that seem to weigh a decision, fish that pass mirror tests. His question is what it takes for there to be something it’s like to be a given animal, and he refuses both easy answers. The diving passages carry it: A man underwater watching a crab watch him back and trying to work out what’s happening on the other side.

Metazoa
By Peter Godfrey-Smith. William Collins, 2020. 288 pages.