This creature - perhaps small and worm-shaped - likely lacked eyes and certainly did not have complex nervous systems.
To this end, Godfrey-Smith returns to an ancient branching on the evolutionary tree over 600 million years old, roughly when genetic evidence suggests that the last common ancestor of humans and octopuses lived. But his ambitions are larger: He wants to make progress on the fundamental question of how "consciousness arose from the raw materials found in living beings."
These sorts of details are sufficiently weird and interesting that after adding some stories of his own observations on dives off the coast of Australia, Godfrey-Smith might have easily written a book that was just an extended marshaling of evidence for the claim that octopuses are strange and beautiful creatures. The arms of an octopus are not only appendages controlled by a central command center they are also semi-autonomous units that can explore, move, perceive and remember. This distributed neural intelligence is highly unusual, and it blurs the standard boundaries between mind and body. The bulk of their neurons actually cluster in their arms, which possess a form of short-term memory and can clutch and grasp even after being surgically removed. But to speak of an octopus brain as a single discrete organ is somewhat misleading.
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