@philosophyminis: You don't need to look to the stars to find an alien intelligence. You don't need to invent Jabba the Hutt or the Klingon, because according to Peter Godfrey-Smith, in his book Other Minds, you can find an alien intelligence here on Earth, in our oceans. You can find it in cephalopods. Humans are a highly centralised intelligence with a vertebrate nervous system. We have a brain connected to a spinal cord, with our nerves spanning out across our body. The brain does an enormous amount of processing and coordination. And so, we experience ourselves as this unified self in command of all of these moving parts. Cephalopods, though, arrived at their intelligence via a different evolutionary path. Their intelligence is distributed throughout their body, and an octopus's limbs can technically have a will of their own. They can think for themselves, and they can behave quite independently of any central governor. They can do their own thing, though, in practice, they tend to listen to the brain because it's better to coordinate most of the time. Looking at other minds is a great way to understand our own. For example, Godfrey-Smith argues that our consciousness might have arisen for the need of the brain to coordinate our internal and external environments. It's a kind of sensory loop. So, if you ever do meet an alien life form, it's almost certainly going to be different to the ones we imagine in science fiction, because we project our own intelligence onto what we create, and we are only one kind of intelligence. So, we should all watch the movie Arrival because. It's great.

Jonny Thomson

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Saturday 12 September 2026 14:15:00 GMT