I will let Bob speak for himself in case he has any thoughts on this, but speaking for what went into the report, it’s true that we did not take much of an evolutionary psychology perspective, certainly not directly. I actually think it’s a live possibility that consciousness is a spandrel—see here and here—although nothing in the report hinged on this. (Note that consciousness having little to no utility is consistent with consciousness being causally efficacious in the production of behavior etc. So no epiphenomenalism here.)
With that said, one consideration that did come up related to your question is the idea that an organism has at most one independent cognitive system. (These are different from cognitive subsystems, of which an organism can have many.) The prevailing idea, as noted in this paper by Carls-Diamante—is that having more than one would be counter-productive in various ways due to, e.g., failures of complete information transfer across the systems. So perhaps this could be connected to your point: having more than one independent system per organism is maladaptive. But of course, Carls-Diamante goes on to suggest that the octopus may be an exception to what is otherwise a rule. As we argue though, even granting this, we are still away far from the core issue, which is whether the octopus houses more than one welfare subject.
Thanks so much for your comments, Geoffrey! Just to clarify, Joe really deserves all the credit for this great report; I only provided feedback on drafts. That aside, I’m very sympathetic to the functional perspective you outline, which I’ve borrowed in other (unpublished) work from Peter Godfrey-Smith. Seems exactly right to me.
Bob (and Joe) - thanks for the thoughtful replies. Will mull this over a bit more before writing a proper response.
Fun fact: I used to hang out with Peter Godfrey-Smith in grad school, and his philosophy of evolutionary biology/psychology influenced some of my thinking as well (and maybe vice-versa).
Hi Geoffrey -
I will let Bob speak for himself in case he has any thoughts on this, but speaking for what went into the report, it’s true that we did not take much of an evolutionary psychology perspective, certainly not directly. I actually think it’s a live possibility that consciousness is a spandrel—see here and here—although nothing in the report hinged on this. (Note that consciousness having little to no utility is consistent with consciousness being causally efficacious in the production of behavior etc. So no epiphenomenalism here.)
With that said, one consideration that did come up related to your question is the idea that an organism has at most one independent cognitive system. (These are different from cognitive subsystems, of which an organism can have many.) The prevailing idea, as noted in this paper by Carls-Diamante—is that having more than one would be counter-productive in various ways due to, e.g., failures of complete information transfer across the systems. So perhaps this could be connected to your point: having more than one independent system per organism is maladaptive. But of course, Carls-Diamante goes on to suggest that the octopus may be an exception to what is otherwise a rule. As we argue though, even granting this, we are still away far from the core issue, which is whether the octopus houses more than one welfare subject.
Thanks so much for your comments, Geoffrey! Just to clarify, Joe really deserves all the credit for this great report; I only provided feedback on drafts. That aside, I’m very sympathetic to the functional perspective you outline, which I’ve borrowed in other (unpublished) work from Peter Godfrey-Smith. Seems exactly right to me.
Bob (and Joe) - thanks for the thoughtful replies. Will mull this over a bit more before writing a proper response.
Fun fact: I used to hang out with Peter Godfrey-Smith in grad school, and his philosophy of evolutionary biology/psychology influenced some of my thinking as well (and maybe vice-versa).