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Some books have an urgency and necessity about them. This is not that kind of book. While there's nothing egregiously wrong about Godfrey-Smith's thinking, neither is there anything essential here that justifies the existence of the book. Godfrey-Smith is ostensibly building up a picture of how consciousness arose from the gradual accretion of components in animal minds, which he does primarily by haphazardly describing a few species he saw while futzing around in his hobby as a diver. You get descriptions of animals like corals, banded shrimp, cephalopods, and nudibranchs, and you can feel his desire to knit them into a story about the emergence of creatures as experiential beings.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Lack of organization, weird strawman intuitions, and inert follow-through result in a flabby and largely unsatisfying effort. Godfrey-Smith floats along like a jellyfish in the current, half-heartedly nibbling little bits of philosophy and neuroscience but never absorbing a full meal. There are some interesting implications of his gradualist view, including challenges to the essential unity of conscious experience, but he doesn't do enough to draw them out. Instead, I got the sense that he mostly likes writing natural history, but his publisher wouldn't accept a simple dive diary after his last book (more successfully) married philosophy of mind with his reef explorations. Without the singular focus on the octopus to hone his arguments, this one dissipates like an inky cloud, vague and frankly a little obfuscatory.

Further, his goals are pretty modest. The opening pages led me to expect a robust challenge to the framing of the hard problem of consciousness, but his answer is a pretty anemic "qualia are just what it is to be this kind of creature." The only distinction he puts forward with any assurance is that sentience is not a separate product of a brain's operations. Okay, sure, but that doesn't tell you a lot, does it?

He also lost me by repeatedly talking about how we all assume insects and other animals farther out on the tree of life are mere robots without interiority. I guess he's fighting an army of Descarteses. However, I was just scratching my head because that's certainly not my intuition. We may not credit their subjectivities are worthy of protection, but I don't assume that the flies I swat have none.

Despite the overall failure of the project, I didn't dislike the book. Godfrey-Smith is good at describing animal behaviors (usually through significant anthropomorphism), and his self-effacing manner holds some charm. His gentle chiding to recognize mindedness in a wider circle of other creatures has welcome ethical implications. The final chapter has the obligatory pious protestations that minds are not substrate-independent that seemingly all pop-sci books must have these days, thus shutting the door of consciousness behind us for various transhumanist utopias of strong AI and mind-uploading. If you go into this book with your expectations very low (no, lower than that), you won't have a terrible time. But don't expect anything as good as his previous book, flawed though it was, nor anything close to the heights reached by the best books on neuroscience out there. 2.5/5 stars, although I'll round up since its greatest crime is mere mediocrity.