The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

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Tom Stoppard [A] moving account of how reconnecting with nature helped [Goldsmith] rebuild a capacity for joy.

The octopus was lifting the lid on its own tank, slithering over to the fish, claiming its prize, then crawling back, covering itself again as if nothing had happened. For octopuses and cuttlefish both, their intelligence has developed not through social behavior like ours, but in solitude.

I am not sure it entirely succeeds in this, there is plenty sentimentality, especially towards the end. Catherine has a passion for inspiring children's imaginations and curiosity about the world through heartfelt stories. He is also the author of four other books, including Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award for an outstanding work on the philosophy of science.

Few people have ever seen a Jellycat product on the shelf and resisted picking it up – or at the very least letting out an “aww”!Its ancestors evolved defensive shells and became the first predators: the frills of these snail-like creatures, which crawled on the ocean floor, became tentacles and they began to swim. He has therefore put together a more freely composed sequence, emulating Moore’s approach by overlaying images created in differing ways and instilling a bold formal dialogue that encourages a new appreciation of mountain landscapes. It tells the tale of Olive the octopus and her quest to discover who is eating too much of her precious seaweed forest.

He doesn’t skip over steps, but describes the best theories of how consciousness has developed starting with the simplest of life forms, and he’s also able to engage with the philosophical questions that consciousness raises.It’s got science writing and stuff, but it’s almost more of a memoir about her relationships with different Pacific octopuses at the New England Aquarium. Even though real-life octopuses can’t bake pies with their arms, this book introduces the very real idea that octopus arms are AMAZING.

It makes you realise that just because not all creatures look like human beings it does not mean that they do not possess a soul or feel pain or have feelings, it is a case that us mere humans no nothing at all about the creatures we share the earth with, only that we can kill them and eat them. The fossil record for this extraordinary, important, and long-surviving class (which includes ammonoids and nautiloids as well as the shell-free squids and octopuses) goes back 500 million years. It shows how, over the millennia some cultures have regarded octopuses as erotic totems, while others have considered them symbols of the darkest evil, or nothing more than a tasty meal. In 2021 she won the Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition, came 2nd in the Bangor Poetry Competition and was highly commended in the Liverpool Poetry Prize.Each of its eight arms has an array of sensors, and a nervous system so complex it is like a secondary brain. Since becoming a scientist, I have explored their strange perceptual worlds as well as their intelligence, and most recently the question of their consciousness. Rebecca Hardy * The Daily Mail * Goldsmith has written an extraordinary book, God is an Octopus, about his journey through grief and his exploration of the afterlife.