Citation

Author Website

https://eeb.utk.edu/people/gordon-burghardt/

Thread

Jennifer Mather, Consciousness of octopuses—on their own terms

Abstract

Jennifer Mather has provided a comprehensive and fascinating overview of the various cognitive accomplishments of cephalopods and their sensory, behavioral, and neurophysiological attributes. The advances in our understanding of a clade that has been separated from vertebrate evolution by well over half a billion years is a testament to advances in both methodology and the questions we now feel free to address. Mather embeds her review in the issue of consciousness, which is certainly a perennial issue in mental evolution, going back to Romanes and earlier. I argue that the term “consciousness” has such a checkered history and is used in such diverse ways even today that, despite current popular enthusiasm, it is scientifically misleading.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Gordon M. Burghardt is an emeritus professor in the departments of Psychology & Neuroscience and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee. In an over 60-year career he has studied numerous topics in communication, play, chemoreception, behavioral development, sociality, and ethological history focussing mainly on nonavian reptiles. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1903