It was good, but make sure you know that it does not contain that much information about octopuses. The book is really heavy on how consciousness came to develop along parallel but separate evolutionary tracks (for example, the cephalapods and the vertebrates). Also heavy on what defines consciousness.

I was hoping to find out some crazy facts about octopuses and how smart they are and ways that they display / showcase this intelligence. The part where octopuses can recognize certain people and only shoot water out of their tank at those certain people? Or the part where they can shoot water at a light above their tank? I thought those things would be expanded upon and the awesomeness would be explained in more detail. These were things that nature shows have already revealed.

I would say that the book is more of a philosophical text than a "nature of octopuses" book. There will be many many pages where these underwater creatures are not even mentioned. And a lot of the time dedicated to actual underwater creatures is dedicated to cuttlefish.

Takeaways I got:

• Octopuses don't live very long. The ones we are able to study closely live about 4 years

• We don't know a whole lot about any of the life deep down beyond where a human can comfortably scuba dive for an extended period of time.

• Brains, and thinking, are incredibly complex and there is no definitive line between "thinking creature" and "not a thinking creature".

• The complex color displays on the skin of cuttlefish may be extremely expressive, but we (humans) aren't sure if other cuttlefish have the means for taking the displayed information in and processing it. A one way street, albeit a really cool one.

Anyway, I have a few books on awesome animals on my list, but I don't want another philosophy-heavy one. I want to read about dolphins and walk away with a different outlook on the world and what intelligence means, how it came to be, and how organisms use it. Maybe "Other Minds" was attempting to do just that, but I wan't that interested in the way it was presented