Never eat an octopus

I came across Peter Godfrey Smith’s work about octopuses and the emergence of consciousness. His talk at Google gives a good idea of his research.

In short, given just how far back octopuses and primates split from an evolutionary perspective, a sort of self-aware meta-consciousness had to have evolved at least twice: once in mammals, another time in cephalapods. Is it just something about Earth that has multiple evolutionary lines with intelligent meta-consciousness (not mentioned in this lecture, but corvids also likely fit this definition), or is it something more fundamental to nature itself?

This is the sort of stuff I wonder about on a rainy day while I’m drinking tea and looking out the window. I’ve even written about it before, wondering if whales are a civilization.