Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Often these loops lead to a problem, as an animal attempts to work out what’s going on around it. Some fish, for example, send out electric pulses for communication with other fish, and also electrically sense other things going on around them. The self-produced pulses will affect their own senses, though, and it may be difficult for a fish to distinguish the pulses it has made from electrical disturbances that are due to external things. To deal with this problem, whenever a fish emits a pulse it also sends a copy of the command around to the sensing system, enabling that system to counteract the effect of the pulse it has produced. The fish is tracking and registering the distinction between “self” and “other,” between the effects on its senses of its own actions and the effects of events going on around it.