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A fascinating exploration of what the limits of the mind could be. The section I found most interesting took a look at the consequences of modified brains in people who had their corpus callosum severed (surgically, to mitigate seizures), and how in some cases their brains wanted them to do two different things at the same time. Godfrey-Smith speculates that consciousness may not be a unified "thing" but rather a collection of experiences we perceive as a unified occurrence. I'm inclined to agree.

Everything we experience is manufactured by our brains reinterpreting what is perceived by our senses and hence, technically, entirely fictional. The concept of time? Made up! Our memory of what we had for breakfast? Also made up. Free will? I hate to tell you, but an illusion. Just like human languages, in all their complexity, are only very specialised abstract pattern recognition, I find it hard to entertain the idea that other animals don't have much more complex inner lives that we are able to recognise for what they are because our perception is so biased towards our own. The little section at the end dedicated to AI was thought-provoking too.

I appreciate that Godfrey-Smith brings ethical concerns into experimentation and that he doesn't seem to be motivated by proving humans are at the top of the consciousness hierarchy. I'm a lot more lax when it comes to giving other animals the benefit of the doubt because our experiences are severely limited by our senses, but I don't think you can, as an actual philosophy professor, make unsupported statements about the nature of consciousness based on an absence of evidence.