Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind

The successor to Other Minds — here Godfrey-Smith pushes further back in the evolutionary tree, asking when and how subjective experience first emerged in animal life. He examines sponges, jellyfish, arthropods, and fish alongside cephalopods, building a gradualist picture of mind arising from the simplest forms of sensory feedback. The philosophical argument is that consciousness is not a binary switch but a spectrum, and that its origins lie in the basic problem of coordinating a multicellular body. Written with the same blend of fieldwork narrative and analytic philosophy that made Other Minds compelling. The book is essential for anyone thinking about what minds are, whether biological or artificial, because it grounds the question in evolutionary depth rather than engineering analogy.