PERSON
Peter Godfrey-Smith
The philosopher-diver who traced the evolution of consciousness through the octopus and gave us the most precise instruments available for asking what the new minds are—and what, in every confirmed case of mind, they are missing.
Peter Godfrey-Smith is the philosopher who asked how feeling crept into being. Born in Australia in 1965 and trained at the University of California, San Diego, he has held positions at Stanford, Harvard, the Australian National University, and the City University of New York Graduate Center before settling at the University of Sydney as Professor of History and Philosophy of Science. His work spans the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of mind, united by a single animating question: how did subjective experience—the felt quality of being—emerge from matter that, at some earlier point, had none? The answer he has developed across Other Minds (2016), Metazoa (2020), and Living on Earth (2024) is simultaneously hopeful and unsettling. Mind, the evidence shows, evolved more than once: the vertebrate and the cephalopod arrived at intelligence by entirely separate evolutionary roads six hundred million years apart. If nature found two paths to consciousness, why not a third, in silicon? Godfrey-Smith's